Mitigating Fukushima's Dangers, 42 Days In

DrKnark writes "Tepco has released more information about their plan to stabilize the Fukushima reactors. They are basically facing 4 problems: ensure long term cooling of the cores; ensure cooling of the spent fuel pools; prevent release of radioactive material; and mitigate the consequences of the releases that will continue for a while."

Comments

It's cooling down.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we're going to be ok.

Re:It's cooling down.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think japan is kindof fucked. The money involved, the land mass that they can't afford to loose, the housing homeless problem, food production loss, and everything else that is chained with those problems.

Re:It's cooling down.

[neokushan]

Without sounding too Inconsiderate, quite a lot of their land was recently flattened by the tsunami, so should they lose 50 square miles due to Fukushima, they'll be able to cope by building more efficient housing.

Re:It's cooling down.

[beckett]

I'll wait until some unknown blogger says its ok, thank you very much!

Re:It's cooling down.

[DrKnark]

They never say "it's okay". They have even stated that depending on how this turns out they may have to rethink their stance on nuclear power. They simply try to inform the public of what is actually happening.

Re:It's cooling down.

[Anonymous Coward]

An apologist apologist, how cute.

Re:It's cooling down.

[drinkypoo]

Without sounding like an idiot, quite a lot of their land was recently irradiated by exposed nuclear fuel burning, and they should really be evacuating about half of the fucking country. Of course, where do you send all those people?

A tiny island nation in one of the most seismically active regions in the world and dotted with obsolete nuclear reactors is a fucking deathtrap.

Re:It's cooling down.

[CrimsonAvenger]

Without sounding like an idiot,

Too late...

quite a lot of their land was recently irradiated by exposed nuclear fuel burning,

I"ll bite. How much land was irradiated? And what's your evidence for your guess?

and they should really be evacuating about half of the fucking country.

Even assuming that the nuclear fuel was burning and freely releasing fission products, prevailing weather patterns mean that most of Japan was completely unaffected by this problem. Well, other than losing the 6 GW of electricity generation that they lost when the earthquake and tsunami screwed things up.

Re:It's cooling down.

[Anonymous Coward]

"quite a lot" isn't very much. If you are going to be a scaremonger, at least pick harder to spot lies, dumbass. Save that shit for DU where the retards will believe it.

Re:It's cooling down.

[dbIII]

so should they lose 50 square miles

50? You've either missed just about everything in the media and are unaware that the amounts considered are a hell of a lot larger or are deliberately setting out to mislead people. There is a lot of the latter going on whenever nuclear is mentioned here. True, it's a annoying pimple on a nation in comparison the the tsunami but crippling to anyone that lived in the same area as the power plant. So yes, you do actually sound too Inconsiderate in a Glen Beck "I'm not saying that .." weasel sort of way even if manipulation was not your intention.

Re:It's cooling down.

[Mindcontrolled]

I guess the evacuated the exclusion zone then because of anti-nuclear fearmongering? Seriously, get some fresh talking points. Yours are getting stale.

Re:It's cooling down.

[neokushan]

You're absolutely right, I made a major cockup. What I had in my head was the 50mile exclusion zone around the plant, which is obviously quite a lot larger than 50 square miles. I stand both corrected and ashamed.

Re:It's cooling down.

[TheRaven64]

They evacuated the exclusion zone because it would have been a PR disaster if some of the worst-case scenarios had happened and the press had said that all of those people could have been saved if they'd been evacuated early. Once it's completely under control, those people can return.

This is simple disaster management. You don't wait until something bad has happened before you start evacuating people, you evacuate them when the danger is only a potential. That way, if something does go wrong, you have a load of inconvenienced people, not a load of dead people.

Some of that zone has been exposed to radioactive materials, but they all appear to be things with short half lives, so they'll quickly decay back to normal background radiation levels.

Re:It's cooling down.

[Mindcontrolled]

And the cesium levels in the soil have nothing to do with it, right? The 30-year half life is "quickly decaying back", yes? God almighty, you guys are pathetic.

Re:It's cooling down.

[CptPicard]

How awesome that Swedish civilization is finally reaching Slashdot too. Here in Finland we've been at the receiving and of you for a long time and it's just getting "better" all the time. Nowadays the required dogma is that we're a bunch of barbarians if we don't take it in deep when as young as possible while we're still soft and malleable so that we don't develop "attitude problems" by getting this idea that we might actually have a "right" not to suck it and love it.

But anyway, glad to see you're bringing the gift of your awesomeness to here as well. Too bad I'm sure you'll be oppressed by being modded down, but don't be discouraged; by finding other minority-rights minded people, I am sure you will be able to demand a change in Slashdot's policies so that everyone will have to actually read you, and perhaps in the future, also have the right to produce exactly the same kind of material, so that they will not be oppressed by the future equal-rights rules of actually having to post exactly like you!

Re:It's cooling down.

[rubycodez]

The land area that is contaminated with cesium levels of any possible concern is quite small. Get some perspective, it's minuscule compared to land area of Japan.

Re:It's cooling down.

[tchdab1]

Japan currently has an evacuation zone of 20km radius from the Fukushima area. That's about 225 square miles (it's on the coast). They would not evacuate such an area based only on unsubstantiated fear. The US is recommending 30 Km radius to military employees, 500 square miles.
Area flattened by the tsunami can be rebuilt right away (I hope they consider the possibility of another tsunami and build accordingly); area irradiated can't be resettled for awhile, years or possibly decades or more. They will need to evaluate it.
I think there's a reason we're not getting lots of info from that area - it's not good news. Nuclear apologists, those here who believe that we can responsibly use highly and persistently toxic substances for profit with no possibility of harm, seem like brainwashed cultists to me right now, and I don't expect them to change their minds.

Re:It's cooling down.

[Jerry]

As a Chernobyl class disaster with an exclusion zone with 18 mile radius that should be 30 miles, and counting only the land side of the circle of contamination, they stand to lose 1,400 sq miles of land for several centuries. The coastal land destroyed by the Tsunami, can be restored, and the Japanese people are very industrious and will get it done.

Currently, wind patterns have favored blowing the contamination out to sea, but as the seasons change, and they don't get a handle on the leaking radiation, an entire swath of Northern Japan and North Korea could be contaminated for decades, if not centuries. It all depends on where the Plutonium part of the MOX fuel lands.

Re:It's cooling down.

[HiThere]

Evacuated doesn't mean exposed, it means in danger of being exposed. If it weren't for that persistent "white smoke" I'd think you were being totally unreasonable. But "white smoke" should have been better identified by now. Steam? Something burning? Metal burning? Books burning? It makes a lot of difference, and hasn't been explained, but just left as "white smoke". (Could be a translation problem? Does it mean something specific rather than descriptive in Japanese? I doubt it.)

OTOH, Tokyo Electric has a long history of cover-ups for even minor problems, so you can't assume that the problem is major just because they're covering it up. They get embarrassed about talking about admitting making mistakes, even reasonable ones. For all we can tell, they might be blanking out descriptions because they mentioned something stupid rather than something dangerous. Their historical pattern would cause them to act the same in either case.

Still, if I lived near there, I'd be assuming the worst just because I had to be prepared for it, and couldn't find out that it wasn't true. But not because it was, objectively, the most likely. (OTOH, they've also got a history of deferred or neglected maintenance, so I wouldn't call a worst case scenario exactly unlikely. But guess what? US plants frequently have exactly the same history WRT maintenance.)

When something is widespread then you need to suspect a systematic cause. There is something about the design of how the plants are managed that is both widespread and dangerous. It has deferred and neglected maintenance as one of it's symptoms. It also has attempting to keep plants running beyond their designed lifespan as a symptom. I suspect that it has to do with minimization of current costs, and lowering the value attributed to future costs. A probable answer is that nuclear plants should not be run by corporations, but that doesn't say who could effectively run them. It would need to be an organization that gave high priority to expected future costs. I'm just having trouble coming up with such an organization.

Re:It's cooling down.

[michelcolman]

Several centuries? Like Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which were originally expected to remain uninhabitable for centuries as well? I was in Nagasaki a few years ago, and if the place wasn't littered with monuments, you would never guess anything special ever happened there. That was an atomic bomb, not just some smoke from a reactor. Radioactivity doesn't remain as long as you think. For the rather small amounts that fell around Fukushima, you'll probably be close to normal background radiation in a year or so (as soon as the fallout from the plant stops, of course).

Re:It's cooling down.

[HiThere]

I *think* the current exclusion zone is reasonable. It's a compromise, of course.

However, just becasue that's what's reasonable today doesn't at all mean that it will be reasonable in 5-10 years. When the situation stabilized, unless there is some new problem, then the exclusion zone will probably be resized to 5 miles, or perhaps just isolated "hot spots". It may, however, be a "no agriculture" zone for considerably longer. (The cesium is only a problem if it gets in your body. It's heavy, so it tends to settle out of the air and seep down into the soil where it either forms compounds that tie it up or keeps sinking. Eventually it gets tied up. But plants that are grown there can absorb it, and animals that eat those plants can absorb it and ... But it's not dangerous to breathe the air, as long as you stay away from dust-storms. Not at the reported levels.)

Personally I'd take a 10-mile (radius) circle and make it a wild-life preserve. (The reported cesium levels aren't *that* dangerous, and animals with shorter lives would have less to fear.) And I'd make it a circle, not a half-circle. Wild-life preserve in the ocean as well as on land. Then I'd probably build a new set of plants on the same site. With better safety designs. And much more stringent inspections, with no advance notifications, and inspectors reporting to a management that was totally separate from the management of the reactor. And inspectors having the right to appear at any time. I'd also want a bunch of real-time monitoring cameras that would be continually observing and recording to an off-site location. With the inspectors also doing inspection via the remote monitors, so people working there wouldn't know when they were being observed as well as recorded.

It's a pity this kind of thing appears necessary, but nuclear plant management (US as well as Japan) appears to have a strong bias for deferring needed maintenance, so that the expenses won't show up in the current quarter. Perhaps it should even be illegal for anyone involved in plant management to have any contacts with any of the inspectorate (management as well as staff) that is not officially recorded.

Re:It's cooling down.

[ckedge]

> Some of that zone has been exposed to radioactive materials, but they all appear to be things with short half lives, so they'll quickly decay back to normal background radiation levels

Oooh - can you throw a reference or two my way? I was just discussing that with friends the other day, but none of us had heard of or knew if they'd even properly measured yet what the actual distribution of radionuclides is in the evacuation zone.

ie: if they've measured it, and assuming that there is no further significant release (gotta start somewhere), given what the distribution of radionuclides is, what is the expected radiation level vs time curve going forward at various points in the zone? How much of the zone could be repopulated permanently as soon as the plant is in a totally contained state? In 2 years? In 10?

Re:It's cooling down.

[squizzar]

I thought that the radiation levels measured were pretty damn low almost everywhere except Litate village. 4 micro sievert an hour is approx 35 milli sieverts a year. That's quite high, but significanty less than places like Ramsart in IRan which read up to 260 milli sieverts a year without noticeable effects. That's just over 4 years living in Cornwall. Once the plant is stable and there is no risk of significant further releases then there will be no need for an evacuation zone. Maybe people will have to be a bit careful about eating a lot of dirt - perhaps farming will have to be restricted, it will definitely be monitored. The scenarios in which there remains an evacuation zone in more than a couple of years are either due to a further significant problem at the Daiichi plant, or because of irrationaly hysteria about trace amounts of radiation that are statistically insignificant.

Re:It's cooling down.

[HiThere]

That's important if you go for the "isolated hot spots" approach. I'd, personally, prefer a small wildlife sanctuary. That way if there's a future problem, you don't have as many people in the "most threatened" area. (And I think that we can count on these reactors being a continual problem into the foreseeable future. It's going to be awhile before we can sheathe them in cement and pave them over. And as for decontaminating them...I think you can just forget that.)

Re:It's cooling down.

[ajlisows]

Ask yourself this, would you personally be willing to live in a place where it may not be safe to eat plants grown from the soil? I sure the hell wouldn't.

Re:It's cooling down.

[squizzar]

Yes. I ride a motorcycle, I used to smoke, I go rock climbing and snowboarding. I drink too much, eat too much red meat, don't get enough exercise and many other things that mean the risk to me from a trace amount of radioactive material in my food is negligible. I don't particularly like bananas though, so I've probably got some slack in my radioactive intake compared to the average (just a guess). They do actually test the plants before letting people eat them, and out of all the things they've tested they've found the vast majority to be safe. I worked over the summer in a grain store once, part of the job was making sure we had the right numbers - things like protein, moisture etc. in the grain for sale. You also had things like ergot. Some loads would come in outside the accepted level for these various things, so you'd juggle a few tens of thousands of grain around and dilute the bad stuff amongst the good. You mix that spinach that's at twice the 'safe' limit (numbers pulled out of the air) with two parts spinach well below the safe limit and you no longer have 'unsafe' spinach. People get annoyed about the dilution idea, but the reality is that there is already radioactive material in so many things, that you can't avoid it. You and me both contain radioactive isotopes - how does carbon dating work? So long as you aren't exposing yourself to a dangerous level then what's the problem?

No, thanks

[MichaelSmith]

Funny reading a post about people hacking up reactor cooling solutions with radioactive water pooling all over the place on a site called nuclearpoweryesplease.org

Re:No, thanks

[rrohbeck]

I just checked that site and you were right. No news there, just pages and pages on how reactors work. Wonders of technology. True, when they work and don't burn or explode.

Re:No, thanks

[bertok]

Your sarcasm is ill deserved.

Those reactors are 45 year old technology, took a direct tsunami hit right after an earthquake that was in the top 3 worst ever recorded, exploded, caught fire, and resulted in a grand total of... zero deaths.

Meanwhile, all other forms of cost-effective power generation are much more dangerous, killing far more people than nuclear technology, even including nuclear bombs! For example, the worst dam failure of all time, the Banqiao Dam killed 171K people, about the same number that were killed by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

The worst nuclear disaster of all time, Chernobyl, killed only 31 people. For comparison, that's about 0.5% of the deaths attributed to coal mining per year. The United States coal mining industry alone has about the same number of deaths per year as the total deaths due to nuclear power, ever. That number by the way is 40 people. That's like... 3 per decade.

Also, people generally forget that accidents aren't the only source of deaths related to power generation. The United States has gone to war multiple times to protect their interests in oil, leading to several hundred thousand more deaths.

For some reason, people are terrified of the safest form of power generation that is in common use, but have no problem with the US military using Uranium bullets to shoot Iraqi citizens by their thousands.

Re:No, thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the number of cancer cases attributed to the Chernobyl accident.
WHO estimated this to about 4000 cases. Still nowhere near what hydro power kills but if you don't include those numbers in you arguments they will be shot down.

Re:No, thanks

[MichaelSmith]

The subtext behind this issue of what source of energy does the most damage is control. Nuclear power plants are big, long term projects which require lots of investment from large Governments. Because of this they increase the reliance which people have for those Governments. You are locked in to both the technology and the political environment which brought it in to being. So people who want political independence on a smaller scale (state, local or individual) oppose nuclear power. They want technology they can control. They want it to be within their own reach.

Re:No, thanks

[mpe]

Those reactors are 45 year old technology, took a direct tsunami hit right after an earthquake that was in the top 3 worst ever recorded, exploded, caught fire, and resulted in a grand total of... zero deaths.

IIRC two people were killed at the plant by the earthquake. Both the earthquake and tsunami were of much greater magnitude than anything considered by the designers.
It's interesting that no attempt has been made to compare damage at this plant with that at other industrial plants in Japan. The press has also been silent on toxic chemical spills resulting from the earthquake and tsunami.

Re:No, thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

How fucking dare you dismiss the Chernobyl disaster like that, and the people who risked their lives KNOWINGLY to save their country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidator_%28Chernobyl%29
How about learning something before just dismissing the lives of these people, just so you can justify nuclear power?

I am all in favour of nuclear power and I realise the reasons that Chernobyl happened. But to dismiss the lives of these incredibly brave people is despicable.

Re:No, thanks

[HungryHobo]

even if you count when things go wrong it still looks better than most of the alternatives.

For a parallel.
Many people are afraid of flying.
Why? it doesn't make a great deal of sense, you're more likely to die driving to the airport than while on the plane unless you live really close to the airport or you're going on a really long flight.
It's irrational.

But here's the thing.
When there's a plane crash hundreds of people die all at once.
When there's a plane crash it makes the news worldwide.
When you're on a plane it's someone else in control(the pilot).
Even when the plane doesn't crash if something goes wrong everyone hears about it.

Getting to your destination is still safer by plane by a wide margin if you're going long distance.
but people are still afraid of it.

Because you don't hear about all the road deaths.
They barely make the local news.
people don't die in their hundreds in car crashes.
they die less than half a dozen at a time.
In total vastly more people die on the roads but you only hear about the ones in your local area.
And people can convince themselves that they are in total control on the road, they ignore the chance of someone else doing something stupid and driving into them or something unexpected happening.

Nuclear is kind of like that.
It kills far less people per terawatt than most other sources even counting Chernobyl.
But when anything goes wrong it makes the world news.
It can kill lots of people when it goes wrong all at once but in normal operation it's vastly safer.
Other sources of power kill in ones or twos and only make the local news.
But they kill a lot of people per year.
a coal miner here a gas worker there and every now and then someone dies installing panels on their roof.

Plus there's the sexy aspect: radiation is scary and invisible, coal smog is boooring.

If I'm sitting watching the news beside someone who's terrified of flying as a story breaks about a plane crash am I wrong if I simply say
"It's still safer than the other options"
even if the person who thinks flying is more dangerous is pointing at it and saying
"look! look! I told you it isn't safe! Driving everywhere is the far safer way to travel! how can you say that after seeing that disaster!!!"

I'm in favour of nuclear because it's still safer than most of it's competitors.

It would be nice to be in control of your power generation but that's a pipe dream. If you don't live decently close to the equator solar panels on your roof are nothing but an expensive status symbol.

"Distributed" is a nice sounding word but in reality it doesn't make the problems with a flaky little grid based on dirty little community generators go away.

Re:No, thanks

[MichaelSmith]

dirty little community

Thats the issue, isn't it? Why have a dirty little community when you can have a big, fancy, bureaucracy?

Re:No, thanks

[Kyusaku Natsume]

Well, nobody has followed up the story of the burning refinery of Cosmo Oil at Chiba, very close to Tokyo that burned for a week, or the other 2 refineries washed away by the tsunami in Miyagi prefecture, what stand was left to burn.

Re:No, thanks

[PopeRatzo]

The worst nuclear disaster of all time, Chernobyl, killed only 31 people.

Oh, come on.

I remember a little over a month ago, when we were hearing about how this Japanese disaster was no problem and how the reactors all handled the tsunami well and there was no reason for concern.

"Clean, Safe, and Too Cheap to Meter" was the slogan of the nuclear energy industry. It's turned out to be none of those things, and just because more people die from one of the other toxic sources of energy that rely on scarce, dangerous substances that happen to be under the control of a small group of transnational corporations doesn't mean that we should not discuss the very serious drawbacks to nuclear energy, only one of which is the possibility of disasters like this Fukushima one, now at "level 7" (at least for the time being).

I know nuclear energy is all high-tech-ey and stuff and cool but one thing for sure: as long as private industry is going to run the plants for profit there are going to be safety shortcuts and "unforeseen" accidents that are "unprecedented" and lots of people are going to die, either directly or indirectly 20 years later when they've got scores of tumors like so many of the workers from the "successful" plant at McMurdo, Antarctica (Raytheon).

Re:No, thanks

[Mindcontrolled]

And that is what puts me off nuclear anything. The fanclub is just disgusting.

Re:No, thanks

[Mindcontrolled]

The german poet Christian Morgenstern brilliantly commented on that kind of denial nearly 100 years ago - "weil, so schlieÃYt er messerscharf // nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf". It should not be, therefor it cannot be. That's pretty much the hymn of the apologist.

Re:No, thanks

[dbIII]

You again? Well let's just hit your first point out of the park. Consider the reactor near you and when it was designed. Now give up on the bullshit and argue on some point that is relevant instead of the "X year old technology" line can apply to just about any nuclear reactor anywhere.

Re:No, thanks

[Mindcontrolled]

The "40-year old" thing is basically a pure "no true scotsman". Tells you a lot about the apologists if they have to resort to that.

Re:No, thanks

[Bing Tsher E]

And why tolerate a bureaucracy when you can have a fancy status symbol on your roof?

Oh, right! Because that bureaucracy pays for the solar panel in artificial subsidies!

Re:No, thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

When you think about how stupid bombing two cities 3 days apart was, and wonder: "Is there something more stupid than this?"

Then come the Japs and build not one, but four nuclear reactors on the same place. What, was Fukushima expendable? Is it to be spelled Fuk-u-shima?

This, after knowing first hand how nuclear can be a bad thing.
This, after knowing they have a lot -- as in a REAL BIG INCIDENCE -- of earthquakes.
This, after knowing earthquakes might be followed by tsunamis on coastal areas.

Of course, some dumb people will keep on saying nuclear is a "cheap" (as in abandoning a city is cheap) and "clean" (as in the place is not cleaner without people) solution. And some idiots will fall for it... again! Now, who's more stupid? Those who say it's safe or those who believe PR stuff?

Re:No, thanks

[Bing Tsher E]

Just march in a little circle chanting 'No Nukes'

A fan club indeed.

Re:No, thanks

[camperdave]

Why should that be surprising? I presume with a name like NuclearPowerYesPlease that they would be pro-nuclear. Nothing would aid the pro-nuclear camp more than a speedy cleanup of the Fukushima site. Step one of that process would be cooling the fuel to the point where it can be handled. So, really... is it all that surprising that there would be people suggesting solutions as to how to hack together cooling solutions?

Re:No, thanks

[Mindcontrolled]

Thanks for making my point.

Re:No, thanks

[SanityInAnarchy]

If you don't live decently close to the equator solar panels on your roof are nothing but an expensive status symbol.

Actually, small amounts of wind and solar can and do pay for themselves. It doesn't make you independent -- you still need the grid to compensate for a cloudy, calm day -- but when you generate an excess of power, your meter runs backwards and the power company pays you. Even if this doesn't happen, it's still reducing your power bill significantly.

Also, while I agree with your overall point,

a coal miner here a gas worker there and every now and then someone dies installing panels on their roof.

If we weren't dependent on coal and gas, maybe these could be avoided, but if people weren't installing those panels on your roof, surely they'd be doing something very similar. Maybe installing a satellite dish on someone else's roof.

It also makes your argument sound very, very weak when you complain that people react irrationally to one big, scary anecdote, but you haven't actually provided any statistics for how many coal, gas, or solar workers die every year, nor do you seem to be considering wind -- or even sources like hydro, which would make your point much stronger.

Re:No, thanks

[thebigmacd]

Just a FYI, but very very few nuclear power plants have only a single reactor...single reactors aren't very efficient from a cost perspective.

Re:No, thanks

[HungryHobo]

"surely they'd be doing something very similar"

And if they weren't digging coal out of the ground those miners might be doing something equally dangerous, if they weren't drilling for oil those oil workers would probably be doing something else.
If you take that approach then nothing is dangerous since the people dying might be doing something else similar anyway.

If there's less demand for coal then there would be less people working down the mines, if there were less demand for rooftop installations then there would be less people working up on roofs.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

Rooftop solar leads to more death per terawatt than nuclear though between serious (non status symbol big installations) solar plants out in the desert, wind and nuclear it's close enough that it doesn't really matter.

Hydro is damn good as long as you exclude Banqiao.

and everything else is orders of magnitude safer than coal.

Re:No, thanks

[rubycodez]

In my country, the USA, all the reactors are 40+ year old technology (true in many other countries). And the core reason for the failure was backup power failure, which can happen by other means than Tsunami (considering most U.S. plants have exactly two backup generators per reactor)

Now I'm pro-nuclear, but the way in which we derive most nuclear power in the world is quite stupid and dangerous, with very, very long term risks.

Re:No, thanks

[rubycodez]

I would dare do so, because that toll is *tiny* compared to people killed by rescuing those in burning buidings or floods earthquakes in a single year. get some perspective. how dare you compare that puny toll to the brave police, firemen, coast guard deaths *each and every year*. Not to mention, Chernobyl was due to moron engineers who designed it, and moron electrical engineers ignorant of nuclear reactors who defeated all safety systems for a pointless test. Death by moronism, that's all that's about.

Re:No, thanks

[rmstar]

The worst nuclear disaster of all time, Chernobyl, killed only 31 people.

Who did put this ridiculous lie between your ears? Yourself?

The problem with nuclear energy fanbois is that they produce this kind of lies, i don't know if out of stupidity, greed, or plain old evil. The main reason why I am against nuclear energy is because every person that is in favor of it automatically seems to become a blind and brainwashed apologist instead of at least taking the thing seriously. Dangerous technology run by the "can't happen, won't be bad if it does" kind of moronic fanbois is just way too risky.

The truth is that at least a third of the "liquidators" (a few hundred thousand people) died of radiation related illnesses. And without them, the catastrophe would have been much worse. The truth is that a vast areal is unsafe to live in, and will stay so for at least another century. If you move there, it is much more likely than not that you will die of some horrible cancer.

Re:No, thanks

[HiThere]

I think that you are seriously unfair to both the engineers who designed it and the operators. Yes, it should have been done differently, but at the time it was build the mistakes which are obvious in hindsight were not so obvious. There were, indeed, serious mistakes made during the safety test, but are you claiming that you have never made a stupid mistake? Or just that you have never been caught?

That said, every old nuclear plant is full of known design mistakes. The operators don't have the option to say "We know how to do this better now, so this plant should be retired and a different one built." Sometimes the problems can be retrofitted. Sometimes the problem is management. And, admittedly, sometimes it's the operators.

But it can often be quite difficult to handle a design problem. Consider just one: How do you limit the number of alarms that go off at once, so that one need only consider the most urgent problems? (And note that urgent is not the same as serious, but if it doesn't have the potential to become serious you don't want to even consider it in an emergency.) One of the design problems at many plants is (was?) the number of alarms and alerts that go off in a disaster. At three-mile island the operators were nearly paralyzed by the number of different alerts and problems that were screaming for their attention. (Both audibly and visibly.) I think that by one count over 50 alarms went off at the same time. (Presumably this has been addressed by now, but I couldn't say for certain, and I've no idea how successfully.)

Re:No, thanks

[michelcolman]

So you agree that the aging reactors should be replaced with more modern ones? Because paradoxically, nuclear fear has kept that from happening.

Re:No, thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

He said "Dirty Little community Generators" as in the things that make electricity. He was not commenting on little communities.

Re:No, thanks

[rubycodez]

sure I make mistakes, that's why engineers work in teams, have reviews, safety tests, regression tests, outside independent testing, etc.

Number of alarms irrelevant if a reactor by design has positive feedback loop causing disaster faster than a human can react. Positive void coefficient, horizontal cooling channels, dead space at end of control rods that displace coolant, no containment.....dumb-ass design.

Re:No, thanks

[squizzar]

Is that including the thyroid cases, that whilst terrible for those affected, are cured with a very high success rate? Didn't that same organisation state that the psychological impact of the disaster (caused by thinks like forcing people out of their homes and letting ignorant hysteria lead them to believe that their lives were blighted by radiation) was far more significant than any radiation related health effects?

Re:No, thanks

[AK Marc]

The reactor design was in a very active earthquake and tsunami zone. And it had one and only one backup system such that if mains power failed and the diesel generator failed (and both would fail in a large tsunami, as people talk about "two" problems and it only took one), then 24 hours later the plant would be in meltdown. There was no question. There was no other possibility.

A single backup for a sustained power outage is the only thing keeping most nuclear plants from melting down. In places with few natural disasters, that might be enough. But for a tsunami zone to have a nuclear plant that's essentially guaranteed to meltdown 24 hours after an unusually large tsunami seems like it was absurd planning. It demonstrates an inherent weakness in nuclear design. They fail into meltdown. Even the "meltdown proof" pebble ones and such do have failure modes that result in meltdown. I can think of plenty of ways to address this problem. But the issue is the pro-nuke crowd won't plan on anything like that because doing so indicates there's some risk with nuclear power. And the anti-nuke crowd don't want proper safety because a nothing gets the people against nuclear power than a good meltdown. Sure, there are some reasonable people out there that want safe, reasonable nuclear power. Unfortunately, they are in such the minority that their opinions don't matter...

Re:No, thanks

[AK Marc]

There are still more than 10x more subsidies for oil than solar.

Re:No, thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention, Chernobyl was due to moron engineers who designed it

Like Fukushima Daiichi?

Re:No, thanks

[rubycodez]

nope, only the dolts who put the generators at low elevation, definitely not the reactor designers. At similar plants in the US the generators are very high off the ground in rooms with waterproof doors.

Re:No, thanks

[ilsaloving]

I see where the 31 comes from. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

Can you give me a link explaining your few hundred thousand people? I'd like to see some documentation in that regard before I'll believe a number 5 orders of magnitude different from the information I've found.

Re:The supreme scrumpyolyness of delish!

[davester666]

WTF? Methinks you may have posted to the wrong story.

Unless Apple is secretly tracking the radioactive material release from the Fukushima reactors...

FTFA

[delta98]

*mitigate the consequences of the releases that will continue for a while.* Well, all bullshit aside- things are pretty much a forgone conclusion as far as the "It got away from us" dept. You really cant put the toothpaste back in the tube at this point. I think BP has been trying to 'mitigate' a bit of an oil spill. I'm not saying its the end of the world but lets be a little honest here. This is a fuck up and we all eat at the same table.I understand the quake and unfourtunate functions thereafter but this is everybodys deal. To say one entitiy will take charge of cleanup is just plain silly. Not yelling at /. this is going to need some serious out of the bar thinking.

Re:FTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Not many people are willing to pitch in when they can easily point the finger.

Re:FTFA

[delta98]

I agree with you. Keep fucking around and there wont be a finger to point. Like I said, We can all screw around but at some point we eat at the same table. Just cant seem to get that through some heads.

Re:FTFA

[Hazel Bergeron]

Yeah, BP's spill hasn't got the whole world demanding that we review use of oil.

More accurately, there's no-one paying politicians to use it as an excuse to change national policy.

Re:FTFA

[delta98]

While I dont know weather you're being sarcastic or not BP in the grand scheme of things just got a repreive.For the moment. My comment is, and as typed is that it isn't good practice to shit in the bowl you will eat out of.Period.

Re:FTFA

[Mindcontrolled]

Reasonable people are demanding that we review our use of oil for years. What's your point?

Re:FTFA

[mpe]

Yeah, BP's spill hasn't got the whole world demanding that we review use of oil.

Nor did Piper Alpha have any such effect...

Re:FTFA

[Mindcontrolled]

Well, might that be because Piper Alpha didn't have any significant non-local effects?

Re:FTFA

[Bing Tsher E]

Well, Mindcontrolled people are, anyway.

When you italicize Reasonable it's to signify non-standard usage, correct?

Re:FTFA

[Mindcontrolled]

So, just to get this out of the way - oil supplies are infinite and CO2 is plant food?

Re:FTFA

[Rising Ape]

167 deaths are just an irrelevance, I'm sure. After all, it didn't cost anyone else any money, so who cares, right?

Re:FTFA

[Mindcontrolled]

Nope, it's not an irrelevance - but it is localized. That is the main difference. Nothing to do with money at all.

Re:FTFA

[Rising Ape]

The widespread consequences of the BP spill were economic damage rather than injuries. Is that worse than a large number of deaths in a small local area?

The Fukushima situation is less clear though, as we don't have a good idea of the effects of low-dose radiation. They could range from no injuries to a certain number of early deaths from cancer. I just find it interesting why certain hazards are practically ignored (e.g. fossil fuels, road accidents) while others receive major attention (nuclear power, plane crashes, terrorism) despite being rarer and overall harming far fewer people.

Re:FTFA

[Mindcontrolled]

Well, now you are talking about BP, not about Piper. That's a whole different thing. And yes, in my opinion, the clear inability of BP/Transoceanic or whoever to handle a major accident at a deepwater rig should have us reconsider the whole oil business as much as the sheer inability of TEPCO to cope with what is happening at Fukushima should have us reconsider nuclear power.

Re:FTFA

[Rising Ape]

Nuclear is a bit different in that there are other ways to generate electricity (but they suck in different ways), but there's really no practical substitute for oil at the moment, so I suspect oil accidents will cause a lot of heated debate but won't have a significant effect on its production overall.

I don't think Tepco's response has been too bad overall (though information isn't clear yet) - the plant was subjected to a challenge beyond its design basis, which is pretty much "no guarantees" territory. Clearly the design basis was inadequate, but that isn't the fault of the people trying to deal with the accident now. Still, at least the issues had been recognised in the industry, and some more modern nuclear designs don't require external/diesel power for safety.

Re:FTFA

[Mindcontrolled]

Well, I completely agree that we are dealing with just different levels of suck if we are comparing oil to nuclear - but that should be an incentive to massively research renewables and perhaps fusion. As to the competence of TEPCO - seriously? Five weeks after the incident, the best telemetry we get is a counter taped to one robot watched by a second robot's camera? A first year engineering student could hack something better in one weekend. They are bumbling fools. Discharging radioactive water into the ocean? Hey, we dump a couple of sandbags full of zeolith in the vicinity of the pipe, problem solved. Come on.

Re:FTFA

[Killall -9 Bash]

Where did the horrible, horrible, carbon in fossil fuels come from?

Re:FTFA

[Mindcontrolled]

Out of an atmosphere that wouldn't sustain our agricultural structures. Next. Gimme some decent troll, not this weaksauce shit.

Re:FTFA

[khallow]

Just as everyone shares in the benefits (more power), they share in the drawbacks. I'm unclear why you are concerned about either the Deepwater Horizon spill or the Fukushima accident. Sure, they happened and they were to an extent bad. But they also demonstrated that the systems we have in place to mitigate the harm from such accidents work quite well. Sure, there are lessons to be learned to reduce the likelihood of such accidents in the future, but these accidents confirm we have working disaster recovery processes rather than a "need" for any sort of out of the box thinking.

Re:FTFA

[khallow]

Lead by example. You seem smart enough to figure out the flaws in your own arguments. But you just haven't thought about them. Nothing is infinite, but petroleum can be replaced directly in transportation with biofuels or synthetic oil, for example. Or we could use electric motors. There's a number of sensible choices that don't require us to make a big deal out of the fact that oil (as well as everything else) is finite in supply.

Re:FTFA

[Mindcontrolled]

Ehm, yes? What is your point? That is exaxtly what I am saying. Replace it. Work on alternatives. I didn't say that we are necessarily doooooomed, but we gotta work on alternatives,as you say.

Re:FTFA

[khallow]

Then say it and shut up. I tire of the noise you introduced into this story. For example, your use of the phrase "reasonable people" (with the idiotic use of italics) which kicked off this thread of tit-for-tat. Those reasonable people have been wrong for years, which kinda makes them less than reasonable in the usual sense of the word.

Re:FTFA

[RockDoctor]

Come to Aberdeen and say that, and you'll get really good treatment at the hospital : the medics there, who also lost friends and neighbours will want you to be nice and sturdy when you leave ... so that you're still alive after Round Two and can be patched up to go in for Round Three.

I'm no medic ; but I do know enough anatomy to look forward to your visit.

Re:FTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

>But they also demonstrated that the systems we have in place to mitigate the harm from such accidents work quite well.

Wait, what? Weeks since the disaster began, and we have:

1) Still-burning fuel rods; no direct monitoring

2) Reactor vessels without structural integrity (some apparently leaking highly-radioactive crap outside the containment) from heat, shaking, etc etc.; no direct monitoring

3) How much radioactive water ALREADY released, with how much more to go?

4) Sheer physical scale (size and volume) of any clean-up and "fixes" second only to Chernobyl;(how many "scarcophagi" how big do they need to build? there goes [up, for those unclear on the concept] the worldwide price of concrete for the next several decades...)

5) Reactors in some kludged state of "not running, not in cold shutdown" with no way to check what's actually happening; any one of those could finish burning thru the MickeyMoused cooling water supply and go POP pretty much any time and without warning (even if they can monitor the temp and radiation, they can't react in the miliseconds such an excursion takes to occur); no direct monitoring

6) How do they plan to scoop all the nucleotides out of the seawater to prevent it polluting the food chain from bottom to top? Lead-wrapped Boy Scouts with fine-mesh nets?

All this (and so much more!) stil out of control or completely unknown; but YOU think what the recent Japanese quake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown shows is how WELL their "mitigation" is going?

So, tell me: do you also consider the Hindenberg's final equipment state as "running a bit hot"? What phrase do you use to describe the Titanic's maiden voyage, "running late due to minor design flaws in rivet metallurgy?"

Truly, either get a clue or be quiet. How any truly informed and objective observer can see the situation in Fukushima as a "good example" of anything except FailBlazing is beyond me.

Send in the robots

[Interoperable]

I guess that the primary reason that such duct-tape-and-cardboard methods are necessary is that people simply can't go into the reactor building due to high radiation levels. All the hardware required to cool the reactor is in place, it just needs repairs. It would surely be easier to perform those repairs than build a new cooling system, provided that access to the systems was possible.

I can't imagine that flooding the containment buildings was their first (or even second) choice but they must be restricted in terms of what systems they have access to from outside the most heavily contaminated areas.

Re:Send in the robots

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you imagine the damage from salt water to a cooling system designed for fresh and clean water? I know a outdoor swimming pool where someone thought it was more ecofriendly to use salt water instead of chlorine in the water. the system was damaged in just weeks. putting fresh water in it again did not help. two years of fundraising later the €400.000 repairs (read replacement of the pool) could be executed. This was an expensive fuckup at a non radioactive site...

Repairing the existing cooling systems is only a short term solution.

Re:Send in the robots

[Mindcontrolled]

Yeah, you are probably right - but what does that tell us? They have no concept at all to handle a major failure mode in one of their reactors, none at all. All we are seeing is seat-of-the-pants level improvisation, because they have no plan. Why do we let those guys operate a reactor again?

Re:Send in the robots

[drinkypoo]

There is no reason such methods are necessary. They are hoping to get to a condition where they will be able to remove the thing rather than having it fester for ten thousand years and therefore they are spewing radioactive material into the air in the meanwhile. Fuel rods AND fuel pellets have been seen in the open in damaged condition. This is completely unacceptable.

Re:Send in the robots

[maztuhblastah]

Yeah, you are probably right - but what does that tell us? They have no concept at all to handle a major failure mode in one of their reactors, none at all. All we are seeing is seat-of-the-pants level improvisation, because they have no plan. Why do we let those guys operate a reactor again?

Why do we let them? Because as much as we'd all love to see a form of electricity generation that uses only perfectly safe fuel, operates without any risk to its users, and emits no waste, the gods have not yet graced us with such an energy source yet.

And why do they have no plan? Well... because we can't plan for everything. We *did* have a plan for an earthquake. Then nature fucked us with a bigger one. We did know the risks of tsunamis -- but nobody thought of the possibility of a big one following a record quake.

For every disaster you plan for, there's always the chance of another one that makes the one you prepared for look like a tiny mishap. You plan for a quake at level X on the Richter scale, nature will throw an X+2 at you. You plan for tropical storms, nature will throw hurricanes at you. You plan for those, you'll get get a tornado. No matter what you plan for, there's always something that you didn't.

And then, after it's all over, and your otherwise-well-designed $PROJECT is a pile of smoking rubble, some asshole will come out of the woodwork and snort "How could those guys not plan for __________?"

Re:Send in the robots

[bill_mcgonigle]

some asshole will come out of the woodwork and snort "How could those guys not plan for __________?"

Captain Hindsight!

Re:Send in the robots

[khallow]

Yeah, you are probably right - but what does that tell us? They have no concept at all to handle a major failure mode in one of their reactors, none at all. All we are seeing is seat-of-the-pants level improvisation, because they have no plan. Why do we let those guys operate a reactor again?

Your characterization is completely wrong. They have an obvious plan: to cool the reactors, reduce what radioactivity leaks from them, and regain control of the situation. Further, while they had a tough time getting things started (after all, don't forget that magnitude 9 earthquake, which killed perhaps twenty thousand people and destroyed all the usual infrastructure around the Fukushima reactor).

Re:Send in the robots

[Mindcontrolled]

Why exactly is your love for that technology so great that you feel the need to defend those bumbling fools? Seriously, 5 weeks in and the best telemetry is a handheld geiger counter taped to a robot, watched by another robot, for like 20 minutes until they have to retreat because the cameras fog up? This is ridiculous.

Re:Send in the robots

[khallow]

I cut my previous post off too early:

Further, while they had a tough time getting things started (after all, don't forget that magnitude 9 earthquake, which killed perhaps twenty thousand people and destroyed all the usual infrastructure around the Fukushima reactor), they did the job. You're just complaining that they showed something other than perfect competence in the few days after the accident started. Why should it be otherwise when Japan has never had an accident like this ever?

But now with the power of hindsight, we can see that they pulled it off despite the rough start and that while the accident may be very expensive for political reasons, it won't be particularly harmful.

Re:Send in the robots

[Anonymous Coward]

plan for everything, and they say you are taking too much budget for 'stuff that will never happen'

Re:Send in the robots

[khallow]

I defend not just the technology, but also the society. I'm not prepared to dismantle key parts of my society because someone doesn't like the way somebody tests their robots. If you have a legitimate concern, then we can talk about it. But this is not a legitimate concern.

Re:Send in the robots

[jbengt]

They have no concept at all to handle a major failure mode in one of their reactors, none at all.

For every disaster you plan for, there's always the chance of another one that makes the one you prepared for look like a tiny mishap.

That's right, which is why, when dealing with potential catastrophes, you not only should plan for significant events even if they have a very low probability, you also have to plan properly for what to do after failure occurs despite your best plans to prevent it.

And why do they have no plan? Well... because we can't plan for everything. We *did* have a plan for an earthquake. Then nature fucked us with a bigger one. We did know the risks of tsunamis -- but nobody thought of the possibility of a big one following a record quake.

That is incorrect. They considered the possibility of a big quake followed by a big tsunami, and settled on designing to handle the equivalent of about a 6.5 quake directly under the site and about a 6 meter tsunami. Even though they knew about quakes above 8.0 and tsunamis above 15 meters in the region, they discounted those possibilities because of their low probability. You need to consider not only the probability of something happening in a particular instance, but the consequences if that does happen, since possibilities will inevitably occur somewhere, sometime.

In France for instance, nuclear plants are designed to withstand an earthquake twice as strong as the 1000-year event calculated for each site.

After an advisory group issued nonbinding recommendations in 2002, Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant owner and Japan’s biggest utility, raised its maximum projected tsunami at Fukushima Daiichi to between 17.7 and 18.7 feet — considerably higher than the 13-foot-high bluff [on which the plant sits]. Yet the company appeared to respond only by raising the level of an electric pump near the coast by 8 inches,

Re:Send in the robots

[Mindcontrolled]

Well, with your head up your arse that far, discussion is not possible, I guess. Have fun sucking your master's cock. You'll like it.

Re:Send in the robots

[khallow]

Well, with your head up your arse that far, discussion is not possible, I guess. Have fun sucking your master's cock. You'll like it.

As I said, if you have legitimate concerns, by all means bring them up. But who will be convinced that you have anything other than hot air after your pathetic whine above?

Re:Send in the robots

[Xylantiel]

This all as seat-of-the-pants because all effort up front is focused on preventing this type of accident, and less on being ready to deal with its aftermath.

But your comment is apt. There are clear lapses in oversight and on the part of the operator. The Japanese opted to not require so-called "hardened vents", which are required for this type of reactor in the US to prevent exactly the explosions that occurred at Fukushima. Basically venting hydrogen-rich gas building up in an overheating reactor presents a huge risk of explosion. This was well understood after three mile island, and the US required a hardened vent that can contain such an ignition and prevent an outright explosion. Also it mitigates against vent damage from other factors such as an earthquake. But the Japanese left this to the operators discretion. (An operator with a history of not even following actual enforced regulations.)

What happened at Fukushima is that without sufficient power to maintain cooling due to the generator destruction, the overheating cores started producing hydrogen gas. At some point the only option is to vent this. This is by design and, in fact, is one of the safety features of this type of reactor. But the vent has to work safely. Once the venting was begun, all bets were off. With the soft (sheet-metal and probably earthquake and tsunami-damaged) vents at Fukushima, an explosion was almost inevitable. This is clearly borne out at the site. They had to vent each reactor in turn, and each one exploded in turn.

It is also quite possible that the operators did not have good command of the situation as it was occurring. The US also requires more extensive internal instrumentation that is necessary for good decisions in this situation.

For the Deepwater horizon we all knew that what really went wrong is the incompetent concrete pour and the failing blowout preventer. But it seems the central problems in the case of Fukushima are being lost in the din.

I also agree that the mop-up could be being done better, but honestly the Japanese have other things going on as a result of the tens of thousands of dead from the tsunami. If the leaks at Fukushima are a bit worse than they could have been, it won't be that big a deal by comparison. But I think TEPCO has clearly shown they are not a capable operator and should be dismantled. And more realistic regulatory action is essential going forward.

Re:Send in the robots

[HiThere]

The think is, the more dangerous the consequences of a failure mode are, the more extensive the preparations need to be to avoid it. This world has seen quakes up to Richter 12. (Before there were people living there, I think. Certainly before they kept written records.) The location was Missouri. So if something is really dangerous, you need to plan for Richter 13. OTOH, those only happen every 200 thousand years. (Or possibly every 20 thousand. I don't remember my source.) So maybe it's not dangerous enough to justify the expense of the work? I'm sure that before this recent problem everyone thought that planning for a Richter 9 was unreasonably cautious. But though they are rare, they do occasionally happen. I guess the question is "Are they rare enough that it's better to just accept the damage when they do hit than to plan to survive them, with all the extra expense that is entailed?"

Unfortunately, this is not something that is subject to rational analysis and decision making. How much do you value a human life? What if you know it won't be your own? What if you suspect it might be your own? If those two questions didn't have different answers, then coal mining would be a lot different.

Re:Send in the robots

[AK Marc]

The schools near me did a change to salt after a chlorine accident sent children to the hospital. Changing all the pools in the area to salt was less than you quote for a single pool. Granted it was a planned change, rather than what amounts to sabotage from ignorance.

Re:Send in the robots

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, you are probably right - but what does that tell us? They have no concept at all to handle a major failure mode in one of their reactors, none at all. All we are seeing is seat-of-the-pants level improvisation, because they have no plan. Why do we let those guys operate a reactor again?

The same reason we let oil companies drill in the Gulf of Mexico!

Only four ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also they face the problem of being exposed as liars.

Re:Only four ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or one big problem : their shit exploded.

Interesting radiation readings

[rrohbeck]

From http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2011/04/april-20-2011-fukushima-review-of-ines.html:

On April 17th the same site had the following radiation levels recorded for units 1-3:

        Reactor 1
        Dry Well: 121.4 Sv/hr
        Suppression chamber: 97.5 Sv/hr

        Reactor 2
        Dry Well: N/A
        Suppression Chamber: 131 Sv/hr

        Reactor 3
        Dry Well: 253.2 Sv/hr
        Suppression Chamber: 103.9 Sv/hr
So that's going to take a while to cool off.

Re:Interesting radiation readings

[BrightSpark]

To put this in perspective The Health Physics Society's position statement first adopted in January 1996, as revised in July 2010, states:[13] In accordance with current knowledge of radiation health risks, the Health Physics Society recommends against quantitative estimation of health risks below an individual dose of 5 rem in one year or a lifetime dose of 10 rem above that received from natural sources. Doses from natural background radiation in the United States average about 0.3 rem per year. A dose of 5 rem will be accumulated in the first 17 years of life and about 25 rem in a lifetime of 80 years. (See Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model) For the SI people in the world, 1 rem is 100Sv. So in 5 hours or so in the suppression chanmber you would get a years dose of radiation. Mind you, it would be worse in the reaction zone of a coal-fired power station.

Re:Interesting radiation readings

[rrohbeck]

You are a couple orders of magnitude off. 5Sv is probably lethal and you'd get that in 3 minutes at 100Sv/h.

Re:Interesting radiation readings

[SpazmodeusG]

A dose of 5 rem will be accumulated in the first 17 years of life and about 25 rem in a lifetime of 80 years.
...

So in 5 hours or so in the suppression chanmber you would get a years dose of radiation. Mind you, it would be worse in the reaction zone of a coal-fired power station.

5 hours would get you 17 years of radiation as per your own post. Where'd you get one year from?

Re:Interesting radiation readings

[Fnkmaster]

Hehe, minor conversion error.

100 rem is 1 Sv, not the other way around. 1Sv of exposure is around the threshold for radiation poisoning and 8-10 Sv is considered untreatable with death guaranteed to follow shortly thereafter.

So a room at 100Sv/hour would give a guaranteed fatal exposure within about 90 seconds. Radiation poisoning would onset after 30 seconds of exposure.

So you can safely say that 100 Sv/hour is about the threshold for "instadeath".

Re:Interesting radiation readings

[Mindcontrolled]

The shills around here don't do minor conversion errors. They lie. Deliberately.

Re:Interesting radiation readings

[Fnkmaster]

Grr, posting too early in the AM. 10 Sv would take around 6 minutes not 90 seconds. Still pretty damn close to "instadeath".

Re:Interesting radiation readings

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, no, 1 Sievert = 100 rem, so in 5 hours you would get 50 k rem, and a normal lifetime dose in 9 seconds.
So according to the handy and authoritative ;-) XKCD radiation chart, the emergency workers would get a guaranteed fatal dose if they stayed for 5 minutes.
<handwaving>
Assuming the Iodine has already decayed by now, I thought the next most abundant decay products are Cesium and Strontium with half-lives of 30 years, if that's true then they could work for an hour until fatal dose in about 109 years time. ( 100 Sv/hr present / 8 Sv/hr lethal = 12.5; log(12.5) / log(2) = 3.64; 3.64 * 30 years = 109 years, if I didn't make any mistakes). Then they could work for 15 minutes until a "emergency radiation worker" 100 mSv dose after waiting for a cooling-down period of 239 years (log (100 / 0.1 / 4) / log(2) * 30), amirite?
</handwaving>

If they're not that patient then they have to use robots or something. Who's going to pay to keep the plant guarded from terrorists until the year 2250 until they can decommission it safely? Copyright doesn't even last that long (yet).
I find it very suspicious that nobody's even mentioned measured levels of Strontium-90 because it stores itself in the bones of people building new bone mass (i.e. children). They only talk about measuring Iodine and Cesium but Strontium should also be more than 5% of the fission products, almost as much as the measured Iodine (3%?) and Cesium (12%?)

Re:Interesting radiation readings

[Xyrus]

Minor correction. 1 Sv is the threshold for radiation sickness. 3-5 Sv is the threshold for poisoning (50% mortality rate). Greater than 8 Sv is pretty much guaranteed death.

Of course, this also depends on the timescale the dose was received in.

And yes, the person you responded to made a HUGE conversion error. :)

Re:Interesting radiation readings

[rubycodez]

Even that's not quite right, 0.1 Sv (10 REM) of acute dose would give detectable signs of radiation sickness within the body (millions of cell deaths but not noticeable by recipient), that 1Sv is where the recipient has some serious symptoms THEY will notice

Re:Interesting radiation readings

[AK Marc]

Who's going to pay to keep the plant guarded from terrorists until the year 2250 until they can decommission it safely?

If the workers can't go in without dying, what makes you think the terrorists can? If the terrorists did go in and take a large amount of the hottest stuff, then that would allow them to go in sooner anyway.

Re:Interesting radiation readings

[williamfrench4]

Perhaps a terrorist would be willing to complete such a mission, even at the cost of his life.

Mitigating my ass.

[unity100]

Hear Dr. Michiko Kaku (yes, famous physicist) speak about fukujima. and what you hear wont ease your mind.

http://video.godlikeproductions.com/video/Japan_Nuclear_Crisis_Dr_Michio_Kaku_41311?id=5f6b79d071f3c70b40c

there are people STILL downplaying this, believing what industry shills are drumming like morons.

Re:Mitigating my ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but I ain't gonna pay much attention to a guy that can't count to 4: "There are 3 types of civilisation: Type 1, Type 2 and Type 3. We're Type 0."

Re:Mitigating my ass.

[unity100]

yees yess moron. dont pay much attention to a guy that is one of the foremost physicists of the planet. instead, pay attention to the industry shills being paid to deceive you. yes. thats the way smart people would do.

Re:Mitigating my ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

Michio Kaku may be very good at theoretical physics, but that does not make him an expert in all matters scientific. The publicity he's achieved over the years seems to have gone into his head a little too much. He likes to paint grand visions without really knowing or bothering to research the basic stuff behind whatever field of science he's asked to comment upon.

Re:Mitigating my ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

famous != foremost. He is famous for being on television, not for his important contributions to physics.

Re:Mitigating my ass.

[Quantum_Infinity]

I do not respect this Kaku guy. He spends more time on TV than doing actual physics. He is a an attention whore. He is on every channel BBC, Science, Discovery, History and he has 'expert opinion' on everything. Moreover, he uses sensationalist language, often implying more extreme consequences of whatever he is talking about than is actually the case.

Re:Mitigating my ass.

[jafiwam]

No kidding. The measurement of "should we listen to him?" applied to journalism would make Jeraldo the greatest journalist ever and applied to politics would make Jesse Ventura the greatest politician ever, and applied to families, would make Peter North the best husband ever. "Appeals from authority" are a shitty way to do science. unity10 loses again.

Re:Mitigating my ass.

[mickwd]

Never heard of this guy before, but I did watch the interview.

Not impressed at all. As you say, very sensationalist, and a complete attention whore.

As someone still in favour of (new and existing) nuclear power, I hope the "anti-s" can come up with people better than this - they do have a a point of view worthy of serious consideration and debate. But guys like this aren't helping that. To be honest, I think the way this guy presents himself is damaging to the viewpoint he represents.

Re:Mitigating my ass.

[eyenot]

No, MY ass. The only thing Kaku is concerned (or specialized) in mitigating is his well-earned reputation as a fringe mascot.

Re:Mitigating my ass.

[Mindcontrolled]

Nice. I don't like the message so I go straight to an ad hominem. Show you colors!

Re:Mitigating my ass.

[DerekLyons]

Hear Dr. Michiko Kaku (yes, famous physicist) speak about fukujima. and what you hear wont ease your mind.

He's a physicist, so what? Just because he's a scientist (of sorts, his field of expertise is actually string theory) doesn't mean he's an expert on nuclear power or nuclear reactors or even that he knows more than the average Joe. (Worse yet, if you're familiar with his politics, you'll find he's quite anti-nuclear.)
 
TV producers love him because he's always good for a sensationalist quote - regardless of the topic.
 

there are people STILL downplaying this, believing what industry shills are drumming like morons.

And that's different from believing non-expert, anti nuclear, attention whore shills... how?

Re:Mitigating my ass.

[unity100]

yeees. instead paid industry lobbyists and random personas on internet are much more trustable. ah and i forgot - right wing politicians.

Re:Mitigating my ass.

[unity100]

yes. 'anti-s' need to come up with something "better'' than what has been officially recognized by japanese government as equivalent of chernobyl, ie a level 7 nuclear incident a week and more ago. which is already released into atmosphere, and even detected by epa in groundwater in michigan, leading to an advisory telling people not to drink water from wells.

morons.

Re:Mitigating my ass.

[unity100]

yes, instead we should believe right wing politicians and paid industry lobbyists. instead of an anti nuclear physicist, we should believe, what exactly, the OTHER side ?

what kind of moron are you ? with your logic, one has to be on your side to be believed.

Re:Mitigating my ass.

[HiThere]

To be fair, Jesse Ventura is far better than the average politician.

Re:Mitigating my ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because he is a physicist doesn't mean that he know all the ins and outs of nuclear facility design and containment design. He is trying to get as much media coverage as possible to sell his books. He has nothing concrete to add to the discussion because all of it (beyond the basic science of the matter) is out of his realm of knowledge. He is and has (mostly) always been against nuclear power generation as an answer to energy production.

Re:Mitigating my ass.

[naroom]

Mod parent up.

Kaku is getting attention because he is visibly Japanese, not because of his physics credentials; string theory != nuclear physics.That doesn't mean he's wrong; he sounds well-informed, but he should not be treated like he's a top expert.

Re:Mitigating my ass.

[unity100]

and prove me the opposite holds true for those who perpetuate nuclear energy and downplay the ALREADY officially level 7 disaster in fukujima.

reactors are like herpes

[cheekyboy]

They keep on giving for 26000 years plus.

If a damn kills a bunch of people its a one of event, a pu239 contamination means death zone for eons until planet of the apes happens.

"Don't Panic" after 42 days

[Alain Williams]

With a review after 42 days I was expecting to read "DON'T PANIC" in large, friendly letters ....

Re:"Don't Panic" after 42 days

[fukapon]

In Japan, I think they don't/won't panic. Patient is their default configuration.

Sarcasm...

[Sooner Boomer]

Well, I certainly have sarcasm (and disbelief) when I hear comments like -

For some reason, people are terrified of the safest form of power generation that is in common use, but have no problem with the US military using Uranium bullets to shoot Iraqi citizens by their thousands.

thousands..really? ..killed with depleted uraniun anti-tank bullets? thousands?

So who's downplaying?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like those downplaying that to be forcibly enrolled to clean up the mess -- just to put their asses where their mouths are.

Too sad that more often than not those who reap the benefits are different from those who pay the price.

Pro nucular? OK, go there and help mopping up now.

Re:So who's downplaying?

[unity100]

see, this 'cleaning up the mess' thing. this is not something that is local. its like the bp issue, but much much bigger. bp thing will kill a lot of ecosystems in a few decades, but, this fukujima radiation release wont take decades to kill.

Coal vs. Nuclear

[anchovy_chekov]

Ignoring all the "coal kills more people" vs. "Pu is forever" arguments, the fact remains that all these fuels are essentially nasty, polluting "fossil" fuels (albeit one from dead suns).

Maybe Fukushima and Deep Water Horizon will mark a recognition of the level of care we need to take when handling these very finite resources. I hope so.

Re:Coal vs. Nuclear

[CrimsonAvenger]

Ignoring all the "coal kills more people" vs. "Pu is forever" arguments,

Pu is NOT forever. It decays into something else after a while.

Of course, the mercury in coal IS forever....

Re:Coal vs. Nuclear

[gweihir]

Mercury is safe to eat in comparison to Pu. And Pu has a half-life that the distinction does not make a whole lot of difference. Also keep in mind that its half-life (24,100 yrs) the problem is not gone, but _halved_ and some other nice radioactive stuff created from it. Calling this "a while" is highly stupid. Also, it is quite possible (and done) to remove the mercury from the smoke.

Bottom line: Nuclear power is extremely expensive and deals with time-lines for containing its by-products that are far outside of what the human race can handle. The thing that really ticks me off is that by now it would have been cheaper to just shove all that money down the nuclear fanatic's throats and build up renewable energy source with what was left. And this stuff will continue to be expensive for > 100'000 years, a constant financial and ecological drain on humanity. Just so a few people without ethics could fill their coffers.

Re:Coal vs. Nuclear

[JSBiff]

""fossil" fuels (albeit one from dead suns)."

Most of the atoms in your body came from dead stars. Without stars, the vast majority of the universe would be hydrogen (and I think, maybe, trace amounts of a few other 'light' elements were formed during the big bang) If you want to go down that ridiculous rhetorical route, we should kill you and bury you deep under ground so your 'dirty "fossil" fuel (albeit from dead suns)' body constituents can't pollute our environment. Except. . . oh wait, most of our environment is elements which are 'fossil fuel' from dead stars.

Re:Coal vs. Nuclear

[anchovy_chekov]

The rhetoric around nuclear energy being a fossil fuel is just pointing out that we appear to be using up the energy reserves way too quickly. Uranium is comparable to oil in the sense that once it's gone it's gone.. Maybe not completely comparable, in that at least the Earth has the capacity to renew its oil reserves - albeit not in a timeframe that of use to any of us.

As you point out, most of the atoms in my body do indeed come from dead stars. The are unfortunately not a reliable energy source in themselves, but given enough time I might be able to decompose into some useful hydrocarbon based fuel. I might even be lighting the lamp your distant descendants use to read about the short-lived era when a handful of generations chewed through vastly more than their fair share of the planet's wealth.

At any rate, I hope that nothing I leave behind taints the Earth. Given the way I live I don't think that's likely, but if I can make rational decisions about how and why I use the resources that are available to me I can leave those who come after me with fewer things to worry about. Which was my original point, cutting through the rhetoric.

Re:Coal vs. Nuclear

[Rising Ape]

Uranium is comparable to oil in the sense that once it's gone it's gone..

True enough, but why not make the best use of it while it's there? It's not as if U-235 is useful for much else. By the time it runs out we should have a better technology, but why penalise ourselves in the meantime by using polluting technologies like coal or immature and expensive technologies like solar? If you're going to refuse to use something because it might run out one day, then it's effectively *already* run out.

Re:Coal vs. Nuclear

[Anonymous Coward]

"Pu is forever" only if you do not extract it from spent rods and burn it again to convert it into something else. Take out Cesium as well, and you get rid of most of the source of gamma radiation (which is the hardest to shield). After about 100 years and you no longer have a problem: we can handle a century of storage with a minimal of fuss, especially if none of the materials can be used for weapons (and some are actually useful for industrial purposes—neodymium for music earbuds say).

Most nuclear "waste" is simply un-recycled fuel. If we can use the "three Rs" for households, there's no reason why we can't use it for other things.

Re:Coal vs. Nuclear

[JSBiff]

But, there's one important difference - if used appropriately, every ton of Uranium has the energy equivalent of something on the order of a million tons of coal or oil. Also, don't forget about Thorium. Uranium is not the only nuclear fuel. Thorium is estimated to be at least 5 times more abundant than Uranium.

I've seen some analyses which estimate that, if we used fast breeder reactors (like the Integral Fast Reactor - search for that sometime, interesting reading) and Liquid Thorium Reactors, we have enough fuel supplies to last us at least 100,000 years. Also, both technologies solve the 'nuclear waste problem' by burning off the nuclear waste.

If we can extract Uranium cost-effectively from the ocean, we have enough Uranium to perhaps get us through a few billion years (and, over the course of a Billion years, more uranium will leach out of the earth's crust [there's all kind of uranium in the crust, but not concentrated enough for effective mining, but if it dissolves out, it might be recoverable] and into the oceans, making it an effectively renewable resource).

Nuclear power has it's challenges in terms of safety and economics. Fuel supply is not a real problem though. If you are *really* worried about a fuel supply which might run low in 100,000 years, I don't know what to tell you. I don't worry much about problems that far down the road.

Re:Coal vs. Nuclear

[cnaumann]

Ingesting very small amounts of Pu will (probably) not hurt you. The toxicity of Pu is grossly exaggerated. It is chemically toxic like most heavy metals, but there is nothing really special about its toxicity as a chemically. All isotopes of Pu are radioactive, the longer lived isotopes are less radioactive than the shorter lived isotopes. There is nothing special about the radioactivity from Pu 239 (half life of 24K years) that makes it more hazardous than any other radioactive material. If you are concerned about long half lives, the U-238 that is released from burning coal has a half live of 4.4 billion years.

When you 'remove' the mercury from smoke, where does it go? It does not go away, it has to be put somewhere just like the waste products from nuclear power generation. The only real difference is scale. Nuclear produces only a small fraction of the toxic waste that is produced from burning coal, but that waste is a great deal more toxic. Which is easier to deal with? A billion tons of slightly toxic waste or a a thousand tons of highly toxic waste?

What are these 'cheaper' renewable that you are talking about? Do you really believe that there is some massive conspiracy to keep cheap, plentiful, reliable, and renewable power off the market? Or is this the renewable power that you are convinced that would surely be invented if only enough money were spend on it? If you have a way to produce electricty for a few cents a kilowatt hour using renewables, go for it. You have an unlimited worldwide market.

Re:Coal vs. Nuclear

[sjames]

Pregnant women are warned to avoid seafood due to mercury contamination, mostly from coal power. That is not some sort of temporary precautionary measure, it applies for the foreseeable future. Now, name any food that any class of individual is warned away from due to nuclear contamination.

Pu is not a waste product of nuclear energy, it is a valuable fuel that we should be processing back into useful form. IF we did that, the true waste from nuclear power would decay to safe levels within 200-500 years. How many years do you suppose we need to store all that coal slag before it becomes safe? Whatever your answer is, too bad, because it's not kept isolated from the environment at all, they're hoping it will just disperse.

Solar and wind power have their place and should be more widely deployed, but unless we are willing to destroy many thousands of acres of beautiful and until now unspoiled desert habitat, they don't eliminate the need for nuclear power.

Now, for the anti nuke crowd, where's the kaboom? Wasn't Fukushima supposed to have wiped out Japan by now? Or at least given everyone a cold or something?

Re:Coal vs. Nuclear

[rubycodez]

utter bullshit, many tinfoil hat sites make that claim but for the truth you'll find arsenic, mercury, lead are more toxic (CDC list of ranked toxic substances, for example, pu is WAY down the list after #1, #2, #3 which I've just mentioned). There are no known deaths for plutonium ingestion, but plenty for other substances.

Re:Coal vs. Nuclear

[anchovy_chekov]

Fair enough, though I'm not advocating that we refuse to use natural resources. There is another option: learn to use less.

Crude oil has so many wonderful applications - from medicine to building materials - yet our preferred option is just to burn the stuff up. Given the amazing properties of materials like Uranium I can imagine future generations, upon hearing about what we did during our limited stewardship of the planet, decry "they did WHAT with it?"

Like you I believe we will find better technologies. I have no truck with the anti-human sentiment that human beings are some kind of plague on the Earth. We are awesome. But I hope that as we develop these technologies there is a parallel development of human wisdom - that we don't think that going without one-person-per-large-vehicle or ever expanding TV widths is, in any reasonable sense, a penalty.

Re:Coal vs. Nuclear

[anchovy_chekov]

For the record, I'm pro-nuclear. But I'd favour smaller, more localised energy production; maybe using fuels like Thorium, which as you quite rightly point out is much more abundant than other nuclear fuels and has a number of other benefits. I'd also favour bio-fuels that can be proven to be more of an energy gain than a sink for local economies. The chief benefit I see is a more direct understanding of how fuel use effects us, plus a reduction in "power politics" that excludes the use of novel fuels. We're a long way from either of these scenarios, but I'm hopeful.

The safety issues of nuclear power can't be removed from its economic impact - Fukushima and the effect on the Japanese economy a case in point. Likewise the devastating effects of oil spills in the ocean affect the cost/benefit of using crude. My argument was never oil vs. nuclear - it's the consequences of treating these resources as infinite.

Similarly economic issues can't be divorced from safety, where stalling economies influence the level of investment in the safe handling of nuclear and other energies. We are building extremely interwoven systems here that will have to last an extremely long time.

Without any drive towards efficient use of these resources any estimate of our future reserves is at best a guess. The only thing that seems to be unlimited is our ability to consume resources in increasingly larger amounts. Events like Fukushima and Deep Water Horizon should represent an important feedback loop in the economic/energy/environmental systems we all rely upon.

Re:Coal vs. Nuclear

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, we should build more modern reactors to improve safety levels.

Re:Coal vs. Nuclear

[toddestan]

Now, name any food that any class of individual is warned away from due to nuclear contamination.

You mean something like this?

Re:Coal vs. Nuclear

[sjames]

I'll admit that is a real problem, but isn't quite the same level of disastrous contamination. For one, 98% of the boars are safe based on a fairly conservative standard and for another, the contamination is definitely declining (admittedly slowly). However, it came from a rather exceptional event where operators did literally everything wrong on a reactor that wouldn't have even met 1969 standards in the west. No western reactor in operation today can literally explode the way Chernobyl did.

Meanwhile, coal plants continue to "leak" mercury, radium, and polonium as a part of normal operation.

Re:Coal vs. Nuclear

[gweihir]

You obviously have no clue. The problem with Pu is very high energy Alpha radiation. This is pretty special and far more dangerous (several orders of magnitude) than other kinds of radiation.

Eating it is a red herring, the danger is in breathing it. There it will reliably cause lung cancer with a dosage of 1 micro gram per person, making it the most dangerous non-biological substance known to humanity by a very large margin. It is named after the god of hell for a reason.

Re:Coal vs. Nuclear

[gweihir]

Eating Pu is not the issue. Breathing it is. There 1 micro gram will reliably cause lung cancer. Stop misdirecting people. Also, most of the deaths from radiation are statistical probabilities. Saying "there are no known deaths" is a lie by misdirection as well, as direct causality for individuals cannot be proven for practical reasons.

Re:Coal vs. Nuclear

[jonaskoelker]

It is named after the god of hell for a reason.

The reason being this: it is the successor element to Uranium and Neptunium. When it was named, we had nine planets.

The roadmap document confirms a meltdown.

[Anonymous Coward]

From the roadmap document:

"Current Status [2] (Units 1 to 3) High likelihood of
small leakage of steam containing radioactive
materials through the gap of PCV caused by
high temperature."

The only way the pressure containment vessel could have a hole all the way through it 'caused by high temperature', which is leaking to the atmosphere, is if some of the fuel has melted and pooled. Units two and three show atmospheric pressure in the reactor primary containment.
See: http://atmc.jp/plant/vessel/?n=3 and http://atmc.jp/plant/vessel/?n=2

Re:The roadmap document confirms a meltdown.

[mdsolar]

Or it has warped or cracked in some way from thermal stress. Reactors are not designed to lose coolant so high temperature tolerance may not have been included in the specs.

Re:The roadmap document confirms a meltdown.

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course fuel melted and pooled!

There needs to be an investigation done as to why the reactors were allowed to melt down, like they did. Yes, the reactors had a problem with the tsunami. It flooded the entire electrical system and shut down all cooling. That we know. But why weren't the operators able to activate steam powered pumps? Isn't there some ultra-emergency-manually-operated-valves?? I keep reading about these steam powered backups, but that's it.

To me it is not acceptable that a power station with steam powered backups didn't have a manually operated valves. In case of emergency, you be certain that reactor is shut down and then go and activate the steam powered cooling. It's not like there was no time for that. There was at least 30 minutes...

Even if such valves were in the reactor building itself, you rush the building and activate the valves. When reactor shuts down, the radiation levels are "minimal" and there is no neutron radiation.

Anyway, now they have a shitstorm. I'm still interested to know why this scenario was not planned..

Re:The roadmap document confirms a meltdown.

[Anonymous Coward]

This confirms nothing of the sort. There's a hole in the pressure vessel which could be in a number of places, and for a number of reasons.

1. Melted fuel/cladding ("corium") pooling on the bottom of the RPV and melting a hole all the way through. Certainly possible. We know the fuel was uncovered, we know substantial amounts of H2 were produced (zircalloy cladding failure). It would take a lot of corium to melt its way through the RPV, though. I'd expect much bigger problems in maintaining the water level (given that there'd be a new "drain") and much larger amounts of non-volatile fission products (Strontium-90 being perhaps them most significant tell-tale) being released -- neither of which we're presently seeing.
2. A failed weld in any of the wide variety of places in the piping that carries water in/out of the RPV. Pretty likely given the earthquake and H2 explosions.
3. Corrosion-induced failure of the head of the RPV. They've been pumping seawater and lots of boric acid into the reactor... depending on the condition of the vessel pre-accident, it's possible.

You could be right, and that would be very bad. But let's not leap to conclusions, especially alarming ones, without the relevant data. My guess: some of the primary water system's piping is cracked, probably in more than one place. The leak is relatively slow, since they're not reporting having to inject massive quantities of water to maintain the water level in the core. Plus, they're planning a heat exchanger system to recirculate the water in the core. That's pointless if it's leaking out of a big hole in the bottom of the RPV.

Re:The roadmap document confirms a meltdown.

[khallow]

To me it is not acceptable that a power station with steam powered backups didn't have a manually operated valves. In case of emergency, you be certain that reactor is shut down and then go and activate the steam powered cooling. It's not like there was no time for that. There was at least 30 minutes...

And there was eight hours after the tsunami took out the backup power. This indicates to me that the problem was something other than that they were too dumb to turn on steam-powered cooling.

Re:The roadmap document confirms a meltdown.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is they are pouring hundreds of tons of water into the reactors. From one report, 200 tons (53,800 gal) of water were being poured into one reactor. http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/23_12.html

I for one don't believe that a real picture of a spent fuel pool at the damaged reactor, LOL!

Re:The roadmap document confirms a meltdown.

[squizzar]

Scary as it seems, meltdown is one of the failure mechanisms. It's a fair way down the list, and it makes for some tricky cleaning up, but the reactors are designed with meltdown as a failure mode. TMI melted down remained contained within the pressure vessel, as did the cores at Fukushima. Also I'd like to see the manually operated valve for a system that pushes the amount of water needed to dissipate 2MW of heat - I guess you'd need a pretty big wrench. We should build more modern designs with passive emergency cooling systems, but people keep opposing new Nuclear plants. Shutting down the old ones doesn't happen, apparently we need that electricity, so what we end up with is 40 year old plants having their lives extended rather than safer newer plants.

Re:The roadmap document confirms a meltdown.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the valve would have to be quite large. But there are large valves.

http://westtechequipment.com/images/photos/big/8.jpg

Per diagrams I've seen, the water makeup pump (steam powered) was suppose to be activated via an explosive valve. The system to redirect steam should have been designed to be operated manually and this procedure should have been practiced. From what I can gather, the procedures immediately after they lost all cooling power were basically improvised. I guess we will know all problems leading to this failure within a few months.

The problem with having meltdowns is that it is not a failure mode that is tested.. There is no "reactor meltdown test facility". And when you get some radioactive particles spread around, the reactor area quickly becomes a no-go area making recovery of the situation problematic.

There are newer nuclear power plants being built now and yes, they are mostly must safer. But US is not replacing theirs at the pace needed. Canada (Ontario) just had hearings to build 2-4 more reactors and those are expected to be built by 2018. China is still building some Gen 2 reactors. Now their review is that all future nuclear plants in China will be Gen 3 or later.

Quite possibly...

[denzacar]

Thousands of civilians killed? Yes.
Thousands of civilians killed by U.S.? Again, yes.

The IBC project released a report detailing the deaths it recorded between March 2003 and March 2005[72] in which it recorded 24,865 civilian deaths. The report says the U.S. and its allies were responsible for the largest share (37%) of the 24,865 deaths.

Thousands killed by DU ammunition? Possibly.
Thousands affected by the continuous effect radiation from DU ammunition? Almost certainly.
When you measure something in thousands of tonnes you can safely say that it WILL affect large areas of land and large numbers of people.
And 4.468 billion years is a long time.

The use of DU in munitions is controversial because of questions about potential long-term health effects.[4][5] Normal functioning of the kidney, brain, liver, heart, and numerous other systems can be affected by uranium exposure, because uranium is a toxic metal.[6] It is weakly radioactive and remains so because of its long physical half-life (4.468 billion years for uranium-238). The biological half-life (the average time it takes for the human body to eliminate half the amount in the body) for uranium is about 15 days.[7] The aerosol or spallation frangible powder produced during impact and combustion of depleted uranium munitions can potentially contaminate wide areas around the impact sites leading to possible inhalation by human beings.[8] During a three week period of conflict in 2003 in Iraq, 1,000 to 2,000 tonnes of DU munitions were used.[9]

Re:Quite possibly...

[Kyusaku Natsume]

The main trouble with depleted uranium comes from its toxicity, not from its radioactivity, you can see that since as you pointed out, the half life of U238 comes in a geological timescale.

Re:Quite possibly...

[Jerry]

I find it interesting that some of those who think nuclear power is safe also believe that DU (U-238) is not. Yet, Fucushima is leaking U-235, Pu-239, and their radioactive isotopes, which are definitely NOT safe.

I also find it interesting that those who think nuclear power is affordable never include the cost of burying and monitoring spend fuel rods for the next several thousand years, nor the costs of the clean up of the Savannah River area, the Hanford site, Rocky Flats, or the many other sites contaminated for centuries with nuclear leakage or disposal.

There are two kinds of nuclear experts: those who work for or are funded by the nuclear industry, and those who are not. The first group consistently praise nuclear power's supposed attributes of economy and safety. The second group consistently points to its dangers and true costs. They point out research on going since August 6, 1945, shows that long exposure to low levels of radiation give rise to more cancers than short exposures to high levels of non-lethal radiation. This has been supported by the release of recent German studies showing that children who live close to nuclear power plants have significantly higher incidents of thyroid cancer. http://tekknorg.wordpress.com/2007/12/17/german-kikk-study-higher-cancer-risc-next-to-atomic-power-plants-unofficial-belarussian-children-cancer-data/

Re:Quite possibly...

[RockDoctor]

Yet, Fucushima is leaking U-235, Pu-239, and their radioactive isotopes, which are definitely NOT safe.

Your source for this claim is ... what?

I-131, Cs-134 and Cs-137 are reported at the moment in monitoring around the site.

Actually ... the other implication of what you wrote is that you know of non-radioactive isotopes of U-235 and Pu-239 : do tell more, I'd be fascinated.

[I don't claim to be a nuclear physicist ; but understanding isotope geochemistry questions is something that comes up from time to time in my employment, at which point I have to educate other people at work. When I say "tell more, I'd be fascinated," I mean exactly that.]

Re:The supreme scrumpyolyness of delish!

[PopeRatzo]

WTF? Methinks you may have posted to the wrong story.

No, he posted to the story he meant to.

You'll see this kind of trolling, using brand new accounts and very very long off-topic or nonsensical posts whenever there is a story that may have implications that could negatively impact a corporation or industry sector. I believe they are intended to disrupt discussion of those stories. You'll see them very often in stories that discuss telecom companies or energy industry.

I believe they are paid trolls, from organizations like New Media Strategies (or their darker cousins) who, instead of astroturfing or writing positive things about their clients, exist only to disrupt serious discussions of things that could be construed to negatively impact their clients.

I could be wrong, but I've been seeing this pattern. You'll also see a pattern where an offtopic post is followed by a string of anonymous or very new accounts being very repetitive and responding to the original offtopic post, creating a long section that many people just won't bother to scroll through and will just abandon the potentially hot story.

Yes, I'm paranoid. I believe paranoia is an appropriate reaction to life circa 2011.

Re:The supreme scrumpyolyness of delish!

[mjeffers]

I'd think if a PR firm was paying someone to be disruptive they could do better than posting shitty erotica. My guess is that this particular troll falls more into the "bored teen" category.

It's worse than herpes (Just)

[Anonymous Coward]

The waste products aren't recyclable by any technology yet conceivable by man. They remain inimicable to life for many generations. We already have hundreds of thousands of tons of used fuel lying around whilst people hope for a solution to "just come along". And that's a best case scenario. This isn't just our problem, it's a problem for future generations. IF we rationed our energy useage until sensible alternatives come along, and they will, (we are an inventive species), then we could just not avoid doing that nuclear thing. BUT the same thinking that says credit is a good idea, also says we need nuclear power now. Everything else I read is just distraction... I feel like I may come across as a "lone looney" writing this, but I'm right. And you know it.

Re:It's worse than herpes (Just)

[DrKnark]

The waste products aren't recyclable by any technology yet conceivable by man.

Actually, the technology has been conceived and already used in some places. While it is not yet applicable in a commercial scale, the technology does exist.

Re:It's worse than herpes (Just)

[Mindcontrolled]

Well, Phenix has failed on any conceivable economic and scientific level. Way to go there. Useful if you want to breed Pu for your nuclear weapons program, though. And god knows, we need more of that.

Re:It's worse than herpes (Just)

[Chep]

SuperPhenix, not Phenix, failed because of a construction defect, which the builder (a close friend of the right-wing, and strong influencer of the left as well) managed to hide until the thing was taken out of commission.

Add on that some pressure by the ecologists, when the left needed them to have half of the power, and bam, the device was taken down.

From an industriel point of view, it did produce electricity, it could have worked fine was it actually built up to spec. Too bad its burial means no progress is going to happen on molten-salts reactors either.

PS: the builder is now botching the French EPR prototype (dunno about the Finnish EPR, but I've not heard very good news either).

Re:It's worse than herpes (Just)

[Mindcontrolled]

I stand corrected. I was indeed thinking of SuperPhenix.

Dams built for flood control

[mdsolar]

Dams that fail are mainly built for flood control and may secondarily be used for power generation. It is entirely wrong to attribute deaths owing to their failure to hydro power. They usually fail because the flood is just too overwhelming but they may have preserved as many or more lives prior to failure as are lost upon failure. On the other hand, 30,000 to 60,000 is a reasonable estimate of the number of people that are being killed by Chernobyl. http://www.chernobylreport.org/?p=summary Since one cannot argue that the electricity from nuclear power has preserved any more lives than that from hydro power, nukes are clearly the more dangerous form of generation.

Re:Dams built for flood control

[HungryHobo]

that's a wierd way to look at it.
you could also say that if the dam hadn't been build most of those people would probably be living further from the river or there would be better flood defences.
And further: a catastrophic failure of a dam releasing the resevoir is going to be far more destructive than some slower yearly flooding.
A wall of water is going to kill far far far more than a slowly rising flood.

perhaps oil should get points for all the people who aren't feezing to death because of the increase in temperature in some places.

Anyway, to "the other report on chernoble", no kidding that's it's name.

It announces that fallout fell outside of the main countries looked at and then assumed that fallout in the middle of the ocean is going to cause as much radiation exposure to people as material falling in cities and densely populated areas.

All I can see from your link is the equivilent of 4000-9000? pah! lets multiply that number.

and yet even then. even after the multiplication using figures from a report commissioned by the greens the total deaths from the entire nuclear industry is still outstripped by coal in 2 years flat every 2 years.(http://www.ecomall.com/greenshopping/cleanair.htm)
or by a single hydro damn disaster.

Re:Dams built for flood control

[mdsolar]

I think you should read the report since you have certainly heard wrong concerning its contents. And, no, people die all the time in uncontrolled floods. Flood control saves lives overall.

Re:Dams built for flood control

[HungryHobo]

sure it does but the sensible approach would be a series of smaller dams and resevoirs kept mostly empty if your goal were pure flood control.

If your goal is power generation then you'd keep the dams fairly close to full to get the most power generated.
This of course increases the chances of catastrophic failure.

So while it might be fair to say that dams save lives overall actual hydroelectric power generation most certainly has a bodycount which can't be ignored unless you want to be dishonest about the relative risks.

Re:Dams built for flood control

[mdsolar]

Dams that are there purely for hydro power are remote and generally don't fail since they can be emptied easily under stress. It is the flood control dams that are in the most critical positions and fill to capacity under stress. Same goes for levees, those low dams you desire.

Well... actually both.

[denzacar]

Since the main way DU shells get to affect the civilian population is through fragmentation - which leads to inhaling and ingesting radioactive particles by said population.

Re:Well... actually both.

[ColdWetDog]

It's not like inhaled lead particulates are good for you .... The uranium replaces lead which isn't such a great metal to grind into dust and spray around the environment.

This is why we need sharks. With lasers.

Re:Well... actually both.

[TheTurtlesMoves]

No, as P just told you it radioactivity has nothing(so close to it) to do with it, especially depleted U. Its the fact that it is a heavy metal like lead and Mercury and it bio accumulates.

Re:Well... actually both.

[rubycodez]

You have a common misconception, depleted uranium has plenty of radioactivity, when ingested not only has 60% the alpha release of natural uranium but also makes beta emitters as decay products (thorium-234 and protactinium-234) with twice the disintegration rate of the alpha emitters.

Re:Well... actually both.

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... no not even. Heavy metal is stupid term and people should stop using it. There is no such thing as heavy metal poisoning, there is only mercury, lead, cadmium poisoning. Poisoning by those elements has widely different effects and risks. The only thing they have in common is poising can be slow and insidious and cause long term damage. For instance mercury bio-accumulates, lead does not.

Uranium as a poison isn't much worse than a lot of other things and poisoning is very unlikely as uranium isn't very bio-available and has a short metabolic half life. Meaning very little of the uranium you ingest or inhale is absorbed and that which is, gets cleared very quickly from the body. So unlike mercury, lead and cadmium poisoning is acute, not insidious and long term damage unlikely. Simply, below a a rather large dosage threshold Uranium is harmless. (At least as a chemical toxin)

Re:Well... actually both.

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Not enough to matter. US soldiers handle it without gloves for example.

Can we give up on the Coal vs Nuclear distraction?

[dbIII]

Except for in places where it isn't in the coal, which is just about everywhere outside of the USA because mercury really isn't all that common. Even when it is in the coal how is it going to get into your system when the flue gasses are scrubbed with water to remove the NOx and SOx which as a side effect very easily condenses the mercury removing it into ash dams or other pollution controls?
If you are going to say stuff like you do above in a public forum you really have a responsibility to say something tied to reality and know just a little bit about what you are talking about instead of just making shit up. When you are talking about a mercury threat a few orders of magnitude less than domestic light bulbs it really doesn't justify comparison with plutonium.
I'm aware that the plutonium is also usually very well contained so is usually also ignorable. We just happen to be discussing a situation where a significant amount of it may have escaped.
The "coal is dangerous" shit whenever nuclear is mentioned is getting very old. We all know it kills people, in fact there is almost a weekly death toll in direct mining accidents alone. However usually the comparison is brought up as a frankly very childish distraction along the lines of "little jimmy is being bad, why can't I be bad too". It's depressing and each time it is used I have to tell myself that the person who used it is a real human being and not just a juvenile lying weasel that thinks everyone else is stupid.

Re:Can we give up on the Coal vs Nuclear distracti

[Rising Ape]

Since we have to produce power somehow, why is it unreasonable to compare the hazards of different major power sources?

Flue gas scrubbers, while pretty good, aren't 100% effective - so some pollutants are still released. Not to mention CO2.

real info

[anonieuweling]

Please see the videos at http://fairewinds.com/updates for some truth.

Re:real info

[Anonymous Coward]

all your truth belong to us

Option 3

[dbIII]

I didn't think of a typo instead of ignorance or deliberate misinformation. I'm sorry I went over the top a bit there.

Re:Option 3

[neokushan]

No harm done =)

Let that be a lesson to other people on slashot - sometimes it is possible to be wrong and there's no harm in admitting it.

You have missed that it is a distraction

[dbIII]

You have missed that it is a distraction that comes up frequently whenever there is an attempt to discuss civilian nuclear power is discussed on it's own merits. What results is a childish sandpit fight instead of a discussion of the advantages or disadvantages of the many different civilian nuclear technologies. It's frequently pushed by those that really know very little (as in not even to a high school general knowledge level) about nuclear power anyway. Last time I attempted to do so some idiot instead muttered about coal being full large amounts of "radioactive carbon 13" which produces heaps of radioactive carbon dioxide for us to breath in - that's the sort of fabricated lies I'm talking about designed just to cheer for a team.
So if we're talking about nuclear let's stick to nuclear and leave the comparisons to when we're talking about comparisons. I'd rather discuss this in the realm of science and technology than wander into tinfoil hat luddite land.

Re:You have missed that it is a distraction

[Rising Ape]

People coming out with untrue statements (coal CO2 is actually depleted in C-14 compared with natural levels) is a different matter of course. As is deflecting legitimate criticism with a "he does it too" argument.

However I don't think you can assess a technology in isolation. Nuclear opponents like to point out the bad sides of nuclear as a direct argument as to why it shouldn't be used. If you look at it that way, why would you want something that has even a small risk of severe accidents? Seems obvious. But to have a *meaningful* discussion about energy technology you must weigh that against the downsides of other forms of energy (or of having less energy), because ultimately you're going to have to choose something - and that will have its own disadvantages.

Re:You have missed that it is a distraction

[khallow]

You have missed that it is a distraction that comes up frequently whenever there is an attempt to discuss civilian nuclear power is discussed on it's own merits.

"Own merits" include favorable comparisons to alternatives. Classic example is discussions of democracy or capitalism. Lot of people don't like them, but they routinely fail to come up with viable alternatives.

Dr. Michiko Kaku on Fukushima

[wintermute1974]

The true shame of the 24/7 news media is that it moves from story to story without any sense of scale or importance. Because there has not been any continuing visible signs of the continuing catastrophe since the gas ventings, they have moved on to other stories.

Having listened to Dr. Kaku, I'm just glad I don't work as an engineer for TEPCO.

Re:The supreme scrumpyolyness of delish!

[Xyrus]

Precisely. The manufactured FUD industry has been around for a long time, but really started taking off when the crackdown on tobacco came about.

Now with the internet, it gets a whole lot worse. The general population in the US isn't very well educated (we've been consistently lagging the rest of the developed world), and critical thinking isn't really at the top of the curriculum. It's both appalling and amazing how a few well placed psuedo-scientific articles/posts/etc. can turn the population against well established science. With entertainment/political channels now posing as sources of fact, it's only getting worse.

The old adage of "Believe only half of what you see and none of what you hear," applies very much to today's world.

Re:The supreme scrumpyolyness of delish!

[Securityemo]

Alternatively, someone is testing out software to spamflood the site (or similar) and needs to check what gets through the filters. That's obviously generated text combined with some random text from the internet, to have the structure of a real post while actually being nonsense.

Re:Can we give up on the Coal vs Nuclear distracti

[Xyrus]

Plutonium and Uranium are non-volatile nuclear fuels. The only way they escape a nuclear reactor is a raging inferno capable of over 6000 F, a massive explosion that shatters the fuel rods and disperses the particles, or (to a much lesser extent) damaged fuel rods with exposed surfaces flacking the material into reactor water. Neither of these two fuels have escaped in any significant quantity.

The biggest concern with nuclear accidents isn't even the fuel, it's the fission by-products. Nuclear fuel is not very radioactive, and due to it's low volatility it doesn't disperse very well outside of extreme events (Chernobyl). The real danger comes from the volatile, highly radioactive, products of nuclear reaction like Cesium and Strontium (Iodine has a half life of 8 days, so is only a short term concern).

You also have a responsibility for factual honesty. Mercury is only one of the contaminants in coal, and even the best scrubbers do not remove all pollutants. But other than mercury, there are also heavy metals, toxic compounds, and radioactive elements as well. This is why waste products like fly ash is treated as a serious environmental pollutant. If a major coal depot or coal plant had a major disaster, it would just as effectively turn the surrounding area into a toxic wasteland. The same goes for oil refineries (which are under even more stringent regulation than nuclear plants due to their potential of becoming an ecological disaster).

The point being, of all of our current power sources, nuclear ranks as one the safest in regards to both pollution and mortality. Fossil fuel sources are ranked as they deadliest. I would much rather live next to a nuclear power plant (and have) than an oil refinery (which is actually illegal) or a coal plant.

Funny?

[MichaelKarnerfors]

What's funny about it? I'm afraid I fail to see the humor. :)

/Michael, admin of said site

Re:Funny?

[MichaelSmith]

His site is obviously intended to be fairly radically pro nuclear. Most similar organisations will at least use a neutral sounding name. But if you read down the article he actually does a pretty good job of documenting what has gone wrong with the reactors so for me his article had the affect of turning me off nuclear power.

Re:Can we give up on the Coal vs Nuclear distracti

[Mindcontrolled]

Fly ash is treated as serious pollutant like, well, what do we do with it again? Yes, we use it as filler in concrete and blacktop. The heavy metal content is pretty much sequestered into clay minerals and glass-like compounds, and the radioactivity of coal ash is in the same order of magnitude like soil or fertilizer. How about you develop a spine and stop telling the lies your masters fed you?

The Plutonium Monster is a myth

[MichaelKarnerfors]

I'm sorry but I just have to nip this nonsense in the bud because I'm sick and tired of this completely unscientific fear-mongering that takes place. The Plutonium Monster is a myth.

Plutonium has about the same chemical toxicity as cadmium and caffeine. And unless you intend to grind the stuff into powder and snort it, it's not going to do you any recognizable harm. It's next to insoluable in water when in its oxide forms and not volatile... it doesn't go anywhere in the environment.

People make a big fuss and say "oh but it has such a long half-life... 24 100 years!". Well the thing is: a substance's radioactivity is inversely correlated to the half-life. Radioactivity comes from decay. Less decay means longer half-life... and conversely longer half-life therefore means a less radioactive substance.

The big worries are the short-lived ones. Iodine-131 is biggest worry of all, because is hot, it's plentiful and it's very volatile and mobile in the environment. With a half-life of 8.02 days, it falls apart so fast that even a trillionth of a kilogram falls apart at a rate of 4.6 MegaBecquerels. That's the big worry in the short run... and that is what caused the cancers from Chernobyl. 4000 cases of thyroid cancer, because the Soviet authorities didn't screen for and didn't stop contaminated food: they let the kids drink milk that was contaminated with I-131, even though it was completely preventable.

In the longer run it is the medium length half-lives that are a nuisance. I-131 falls apart fast and from Fukushima we're already down to 1 in 40 left of the original inventory from when the reactors shut down. In the long run Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 are the top contenders of being trouble. They have a half-life of around 30 years, which makes them hot enough to be a bother, and long-lived enough to remain a while. They are also - just like I-131 - rather volatile and mobile in the environment.

Plutonium - in comparison - is a not a big worry. Its specific activity is low and it doesn't get around. If it falls out of the reactor is stays put near the accident site. Now I know alot of you have been listening to the scare-mongers and tabloid news... and if you did: the joke's on you. It's just that "Plutonium" is a charged word... "Iodine" and "Caesium" isn't... so waving the Plutonium Monster around is an efficient way of making a buzz.

I'm not saying this to downplay anything. I-131 and Cs-137 are big problems in an accident like this and they need to be dealt with. Just focus on the right stuff, ok? Plutonium is not the major worry here.

/Michael, co-founder of Nuclear Power Yes Please

Re:The Plutonium Monster is a myth

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you. This was a good comment.

Re:The Plutonium Monster is a myth

[RockDoctor]

Good points, well made.

It's just that "Plutonium" is a charged word... "Iodine" and "Caesium" isn't... so waving the Plutonium Monster around is an efficient way of making a buzz.

Well maybe the Fukushima débÃcle will introduce an Iodine Monster too (as well as a probable Slashdot-accented-character-eating Monster). And generations as yet unborn will learn the mantra "can I haz uniodised salt, puleeze".

A decade ago, I'd have laughed at educated intelligent people abandoning something as well-demonstrated as vaccination. These days, I wonder if we'll see the return of goitres in the First World?

The Darwin Award production line must be manning up for a busy decade.

Fast Breeders vs. Coal vs. Nuclear

[fritsd]

"Pu is forever" only if you do not extract it from spent rods and burn it again to convert it into something else.

Thank you! I think I've spotted another pro-nuclear weasel word! Pity I'm not a real specialist so I can't honestly be very clear about it but I'll give it my best:

"Burn" implies, in common language, to put something on fire until it is reduced to harmless ashes and smoke. (If you burn PVC plastic it can be nasty though.) But, if you'd burn something in a high-tech waste processing facility, at really high temperature, and then you filter out the fly ash (mildly toxic) and scrub the flue gases (hydrochloric acid etc.) really well, then you probably still end up with netto energy (heat) and only 5-10% of the original waste remaining, in a quite inert form. The idea is that everything in the waste is burnt with oxygen and broken down to small molecules that are relatively easy to deal with (i.e. instead of dioxins, you burn them to CO2 and a bit of hydrochloric acid).

But.. You shouldn't be allowed to use the word "burn" here in this context of nuclear waste. Because you're not talking about burning with fire, you're talking about transmuting it with neutrons in a fast breeder reactor. If you are allowed to use the word "burn" here then this puts the analogy with fire in peoples minds. And that analogy is flawed.

If a fire is hot enough, you can manage to burn everything in it down to the constituent atoms, which will form small and simple molecules when they escape from the fire as ash or gas.

If you build a special, intensely radioactive nuclear fission plant, with special cooling fluid (liquid sodium -- burns in air and water! it is needed because the more common water or heavy water get too radioactive), you can have excess radioactivity in the form of neutrons, that can react with anything suitable nearby and make it more radioactive. If the stuff those neutrons react with is a rod of spent conventional nuclear fuel such as the ones in the pool nr. 4 in Fukushima Dai-ichi, or worse a "MOX" rod from reactor 3, then in addition to transmuting part of the radioactive waste that you want to get rid of, you will produce some new radioactives. Some quickly transmute to something stable, some to high-radioactive but short-lived isotopes, and some to medium-radioactive but longer-lived isotopes. Some are relatively harmless, and some others have half-lives of 100 000 years instead of the 20 000 years of Plutonium.

What is exactly produced is kind of vague and the specialists probably can tell you it has to do with the size of a barn and what atoms look like when they are bombarded and how slow the neutrons are. But it is *NOT* *LIKE* *BURNING*.

IANANE, but I'd like to see your proof that you can "burn" all of it cleanly, or show experiments that prove that at least the end product will indeed be safer after about 100-200 years than the beginning product.

A thought experiment: what if Fukushima had been a breeder reactor, they'd have had the earthquake, and that the primary coolant loop had been breached? It would look something like the Monju accident, at least until they'd started pumping seawater on it.. I don't know what it would have looked like after that, but you could probably see it from Tokyo: "is it a bird? is it a plane? no, it's the roof of the Fukushima fast breeder!"

Re:Fast Breeders vs. Coal vs. Nuclear

[squizzar]

'Burn' is quite commonly used regarding nuclear power generation to describe the mechanism by which fuel is consumed. Maybe it's not the _best_ word to use but it doesn't strike me as a particularly unreasonable or misleading term. Also you do know that every reactor there will have plutonium in its fuel? It might have been put in the fuel for Reactor 3 to start with, but it will have been generated in every other reactor as part of the standard operation. Towards the end of their useful lives _all_ fuel rods will be releasing more energy from plutonium than from uranium. Fast breeders were mainly used for weapon production because they will produce Plutonium faster than they consume it (hence 'breeder'). That plutonium can then be extracted. Or it can be 'burnt' in a conventional nuclear reactor (or presumable the same reactor. A normal reactor makes use of a tiny proportion of the uranium in the fuel. A fast breeder makes use of nearly all of it, so producing a lot less waste. The molten salt reactor designs - of which experimental models have been built - can 'burn' all the actinides with a 10^2 - 10^5 scale half life. That means the resulting waste is a much smaller radiological problem - the stuff with 100,000+ year half lives is pretty much inert for practical purposes, and the stuff with 100 year half lives is not so hard to deal with.

Re:Fast Breeders vs. Coal vs. Nuclear

[AK Marc]

(liquid sodium -- burns in air and water! it is needed because the more common water or heavy water get too radioactive)

I thought that water was good because it doesn't hold radiation. But it's bad because the operational temp is lower than ideal.

Re:Can we give up on the Coal vs Nuclear distracti

[fritsd]

It's a good idea to compare the hazards of *all* different major power sources, but for some reason in all the Fukushima discussions on Slashdot I've only heard rehashings of the same argument:

"You're against nuclear, therefore you must be in favour of coal, which is even worse".

as if there are only two choices.
Obviously both coal and nuclear should therefore be phased out in favour of sustainable energy sources such as hydro, solar power, wind and solar photovoltaic.

Re:Can we give up on the Coal vs Nuclear distracti

[Rising Ape]

Hydro's limited, wind's somewhat expensive and intermittent and solar's very expensive and intermittent. There's no easy answer.

Coal's a valid comparison because it's the most used fossil fuel for electricity, and large numbers of coal plants are under construction worldwide. Wind and solar are small fry in comparson.

Well...

[denzacar]

It's not like inhaled lead particles will radiate from inside your lungs for the next couple of eons.

On a positive side, with DU in your lungs you can start smoking like a chimney. It's not like smoking will give you cancer or something.

Re:Well...

[khallow]

It's not like inhaled lead particles will radiate from inside your lungs for the next couple of eons.

Your lungs won't be around for those two eons either.

On a positive side, with DU in your lungs you can start smoking like a chimney. It's not like smoking will give you cancer or something.

Synergy. Apparently, coal miner smokers have a far greater chance of lung cancer than either regular coal miners or smokers.

Re:Well...

[AK Marc]

When you eat a banana, the potassium radiates you from the inside. There has been nothing that has indicated that the uranium, barely more radioactive than background, is linked to anything because of the radiation levels. But heavy metal poisoning is much more common and harmful. It seems some people inflate the radioactive aspects for effect, not for accuracy.

Re:Well...

[RockDoctor]

When you eat a banana, the potassium radiates you from the inside.

No fair!

How do you expect us to get a good thorough-going scare story going if you go around publicising true facts like that!

Re:The supreme scrumpyolyness of delish!

[PopeRatzo]

I'd think if a PR firm was paying someone to be disruptive they could do better than posting shitty erotica.

I'm not so sure, given that they're probably paying minimum wage to a bunch of sociopathic kids.

One summer, when I was in high school, I worked for a "clipping service". My job was to scan scores of newspapers, magazines, looking for any mentions of a rolodex full of their clients. Anytime I saw a name mentioned, I would clip the article, paste it to a card and reports would be sent to the client.

Now that can all be automated, and using Google give those same bored high-schoolers a list of clients and tell them to screw around with any discussions of their clients that might be construed negatively. In this case, the "client" might be some nuclear energy PAC or something.

It all sounds silly, but then so does the entire business plan of New Media Strategies (which has the Koch Brothers as a client). And NMS is doing very well, I understand.

There's money in astroturfing/sockpuppetry/social network hacking.

That's old technology

[bill_mcgonigle]

So people who want political independence on a smaller scale (state, local or individual) oppose nuclear power. They want technology they can control. They want it to be within their own reach.

Go ahead and oppose light water reactors, we'll all join you. But lightwater reactors are a subset of nuclear reactors, some of which satisfy your criteria.

Re:Can we give up on the Coal vs Nuclear distracti

[Solandri]

The "coal is dangerous" shit whenever nuclear is mentioned is getting very old. We all know it kills people, in fact there is almost a weekly death toll in direct mining accidents alone. However usually the comparison is brought up as a frankly very childish distraction along the lines of "little jimmy is being bad, why can't I be bad too". It's depressing and each time it is used I have to tell myself that the person who used it is a real human being and not just a juvenile lying weasel that thinks everyone else is stupid.

How the hell are you supposed to compare how bad different technologies are if you can't compare how bad they are? The line is only brought up because of people incorrectly comparing against nothing - zero deaths. As if all other technologies except the one being critiqued have zero deaths associated with them. That's simply wrong.

Nothing is 100% safe. If you're ever comparing something to 100% safety, that's a dead giveaway that you've made an error in your thinking process. It's not "little Jimmy is being bad, why can't I be bad too." It's "little Jimmy is this bad, little Susie is this bad, and little Joey is this bad, so which one should I put in charge?"

Re:Can we give up on the Coal vs Nuclear distracti

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for in places where it isn't in the coal, which is just about everywhere outside of the USA because mercury really isn't all that common.

Huh?? That is a crazy statement right there.

http://www.hgtech.com/Information/Coal_Hg_Emissions/Coal_Hg_China.html

China burns more coal than any other country, about 1.4 billion tons in 2002. The amount is forecast to be 3.3 billion tons by 2020. China is also the world's largest producer of mercury emissions, with coal combustion as the greatest single source. China produces about three times more mercury per ton of coal burnt than the U.S. because of a lack of modern pollution control technology and because the average concentration of mercury in Chinese coal is about 150 ppb as compared with about 100 ppb in the U.S.

So, Chineese coal is 50% more mercury than US. Also, China is burning those 3.3 billion tons in 2009, never mind 2020.

I lived in places in Poland that at least used to have Mercury Air Index due to large consumption of coal. The entire region had greatly increased number of birth defects and other abnormalities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_coal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#Environmental_effects

As you wrote,

know just a little bit about what you are talking about instead of just making shit up

Exactly!!

Re:Can we give up on the Coal vs Nuclear distracti

[Anonymous Coward]

Coal's a valid comparison because it's the most used fossil fuel for electricity, and large numbers of coal plants are under construction worldwide. Wind and solar are small fry in comparson.

This is a sad but 100% correct comparison. China used to be a coal exporter. Today, they are a net coal importer. They have burnt over 3300 tons of coal last year. Almost 50% of world production. It is estimated that China will physically run out of coal this century, although they have largest world reserves.

Look at the list of coal power stations, sort them by generating capacity,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal_power_stations

13 of top 15 coal power stations in the world are in China. Of course, this is only a partial list.

Basically, some people are deathly afraid of nuclear power yet the world is killing itself with and over fossil fuels. Coal will run out within a few decades in China. Oil is already at running out (peak production). Natural gas is no longer easily accessible and if we move onto gas, it will be gone within a few decades.

No matter what, nuclear power is in the future. As some Russian official has said, "countries that turn away from nuclear power today will become very dependent very soon on those that don't"

Re:The supreme scrumpyolyness of delish!

[khallow]

You'll also see a pattern where an offtopic post is followed by a string of anonymous or very new accounts being very repetitive and responding to the original offtopic post

This pattern isn't new, it also appeared in the early days of the USENET back in the 80s. A nutcase with a bad case of OCD would find USENET and begin posting about their obsessions. Eventually, if they were a big enough nuisance, they'd get banned by their ISP and then start posting under false names and other such games to get around the ban. The use of puppets to simulate false agreement started to be used then as well.

So this could well be a mentally unwell person dumping some rant or it could be a clever, automated process to appear to be so. If someone is being paid to do it, then they're probably a waste of time and money, since it doesn't have that much an effect. But a completely automated way of doing this might in conjunction with an organized propaganda effort, be a way to help disorganize communication avenues.

Re:Can we give up on the Coal vs Nuclear distracti

[squizzar]

I thought the detected amounts of plutonium were no higher than the amount they expected to find. I seem to recall 5 samples being analysed, and only two of them being linked to Fukushima Daiichi - the rest being from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. Or in other words, there is no more a plutonium 'problem' now than there was before the tsunami.

Re:The supreme scrumpyolyness of delish!

[PopeRatzo]

This pattern isn't new, it also appeared in the early days of the USENET back in the 80s. A nutcase with a bad case of OCD would find USENET and begin posting about their obsessions. Eventually, if they were a big enough nuisance, they'd get banned by their ISP and then start posting under false names and other such games to get around the ban. The use of puppets to simulate false agreement started to be used then as well.

The difference is that now puppet-trolling has been monetized and there are incentives other than just sociopathy. See "New Media Strategies" to see what I mean. Just look around their website. Take a look at some of the employees. You won't see the names of all of the clients, though.

It's the difference between having a crazy guy standing on the corner with a handmade sign screaming about the end of the world and having a high-tech mob using mil-spec sockpuppetry to disrupt anyone else from having a serious conversation.

Re:Can we give up on the Coal vs Nuclear distracti

[Xyrus]

Lies?

The USGS itself reports that within 1 km of a coal burning plant radiation levels are up to 5% higher than normal background radiation (and that's on regulated US plants). The fly ash used in commercial products also has to meet strict guidelines before it can be used.

Sequestered? This is from a quick google search:
An investigation led by expert hydrogeologists has identified 39 more coal combustion waste (CCW) disposal sites in 21 states that have contaminated groundwater or surface water with toxic metals and other pollutants. Their analysis is based on monitoring data and other information available in state agency files and builds on a report released in February of 2010, which documented similar damage at 31 coal combustion waste dumpsites in 14 states.

And another little snippet:
Toxic constituents depend upon the specific coal bed makeup, but may include one or more of the following elements or substances in quantities from trace amounts to several percent: arsenic, beryllium, boron, cadmium, chromium, chromium VI, cobalt, lead, manganese, mercury, molybdenum, selenium, strontium, thallium, and vanadium, along with dioxins and PAH compounds.

And that's just the fly ash. This doesn't get into how much of these materials go straight up the smokestack. The EPA is in the process of revamping its regulations on coal plants to put stricter controls on these toxins.

Just because something is used in commercial instance does NOT mean it is not a serious pollutant. Petroleum distillates, for example, are quite useful but you don't wan't somebody dumping metric tons of them around your house.

At any rate, you have neither refuted nor given evidence to show that coal is safer than nuclear power, which was what this is about. Being insulting shows a lack of creativity and intelligence. Stick to logical arguments and scientific evidence.

Robots

[hackus]

Interesting.

Well, in case you are wondering, the reason why they are using Robots is it is now impossible to have any ground people in those reactors for one of two reasons:

1) You have to have people willing to die to work on site. I hear there is a shortage.

2) The plans they have in light of #1 are BS.

Secondly, information about the real state of the reactors is not forth coming from Tepco, which is criminal of itself.

I did here that the spent fuel rods, in the fuel piles have ignited and pretty much are burning themselves into the ground. I didn't know this but apparently the coatings on the spent fuel rods give off hydrogen if they are not kept cooled, which is what happened when the fuel piles boiled the water away. I think they are coated with Zirconium alloy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zircaloy

The Japanese people must immediately stop the contamination of the Pacific Ocean by pumping radioactive plutonium into the seawater.

In case you are wondering why the call it plutonium, it comes from the Greek word Pluto, who was the god of the underworld.

Putting it another way, 1lb of Plutonium, if you divided it up and gave each person on the face of the globe a piece to carry in their hand, could kill every man women and child on the face of the globe right now. All 6 Billion plus people.

That is why it is called Plutonium, it is that deadly. That is why they named it after a God. It has God like powers to kill all life.

If this doesn't kill Nuclear Power nothing will. Good riddens too. There are much better ways to generate electricity with much high densities of power output than these Nuclear Fission Plutonium plants.

Besides, the whole thing is a scam to get Plutonium for Bombs.

It has to stop. Oh, and it will stop, very shortly.

-Hackus

The N vs C comparison is almost a Godwin

[dbIII]

The nuclear vs coal comparison if translated into an analogy about people would be along the lines of "he only murdered a few people - it's not like he's a genocidal dictator".
Now do you get what I'm talking about?
It's almost always a completely offtopic way to distract which gets brought up here whenever nuclear power is mentioned and adds absolutely nothing because we've all heard about coal miners dying in accidents if nothing else.

Sorry, you don't have a clue or are lying

[dbIII]

There is more than one type of ash and the above poster was talking about fly ash. Those traces of heavy metals you were writing about end up in ash dams that are part of the pollution control system, and those are the "contaminated sites" because they are deliberately designed to be the places where you put the nasty stuff.
You are effectively pretending to to be horrified that there is rubbish in a rubbish dump! Shame on you.
Also shame on you for your handwaving about nasty stuff that goes up the stack after the pollution controls without naming it - just deliberately invoking the fear of the unknown. Who could guess that we only use the pollution control to remove the not especially dangerous stuff but leave the true horrors to escape and feast upon the flesh of children - that's the sort of bullshit you are invoking. If you don't know what it is and don't know if it's there then don't pile on the stupid ghost story. Using coal creates a lot of real problems and kills real people without adding stupid ghost stories.
The nuclear vs coal comparison brought up in situations like a discussion of a nuclear accident is really a Godwin invoked almost universally to distract or cheer for team nuclear idiot fanboys. I don't want to hear mindless cheering. Instead I'm interested in the actual technology.

Re:Can we give up on the Coal vs Nuclear distracti

[dbIII]

It is EXACTLY like that. Look at the article. Tell me what it has to do with coal.
The comparison is a distraction equal to a Godwin. Look at all the other posts in this thread to see how much it diverges off the topic of a damaged reactor for a shining example. One idiot insists that because I've said something about pollution controls of mercury I have a responsibility to also bring up every possible toxic substance involved with coal fired power generation and it's a discussion about a damaged nuclear reactor!
It's a childish and petty way to score points for team fanboy 1970s nuclear. I for one don't think it was perfect back then and would like to discuss nuclear power without idiots that insist it was perfect before they were born trying to drown out the discussion by bringing up their coal trump card to kill it.

Re:Can we give up on the Coal vs Nuclear distracti

[dbIII]

You also have a responsibility for factual honesty ... other than mercury, there are also heavy metals, toxic compounds, and radioactive elements as well

The post I replied to was two lines long - one about plutonium and one about mercury in coal. You seem to be expecting rather a lot if you are chastising me for not bringing in all those other things you mention as well. Such behaviour which really cannot expect a polite response is one of the reasons I'm calling it a pointless distraction. Thanks for going to the trouble of typing up all those pointless elements on the script such as "I would much rather live next to a nuclear power plant" instead or merely cutting and pasting from the thousands of posts of that type that have littered this site every time there is an article about something involving nuclear power. It's tired old bullshit of saying "at least X is not as evil as mass murderer Y". Let's just drop the pointless comparison unless we have an article that actually is about comparing the two forms of energy generation.

Just some random information related to the topic.

[elFisico]

Greenpeace estimates that the Chernobyl death toll throughout the past 25 years sums up to 300.000 casualties. During the last 25 years there were about 300.000 victims of traffic accidents in Belarus and Ukraine.

A breached hydo power dam in China caused 30.000 immediate deaths and 120.000 deaths through plagues and famine.

The highest estimate given in a study of total Chernobyl victims is 900.000 worldwide. There are 1.2 million deaths due to traffic accidents worldwide each year.

Ash from coal plants is investigated as a source for uranium, as the concentration of uranium in the coal ash is higher than in several uranium ore deposits.

The background radiation in the town of Chernobyl is now twice as high as the background radiation in Kiev.

The Chernobyl exclusion zone has become a wildlife reservate for wolfes, which were nearly extinct before the desaster.

Damage to the Ukrainian economy due to Chernobyl is estimated at 6% of its BIP. A new sarcophagus will cost more than 500 M€.

Risk coverage in Germany and Switzerland for nuclear accidents: 1%.

Only the whole truth can make you free...

transporting fuel rods, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

why don't they move all this material to a more stable place? this still has the potential for great harm.

Kinda like...

[denzacar]

Synergy. Apparently, coal miner smokers have a far greater chance of lung cancer than either regular coal miners or smokers.

Worrying about all that cholesterol in your last meal before execution, ain't it?

Seriously? You will compare bananas to Uranium?

[denzacar]

Why not compare water to cyanide too while you're at it?

Come on! Please? Clearly some people still believe that you are not talking out of your ass. Prove them wrong. It is your DUTY as a troll!

Re:Seriously? You will compare bananas to Uranium?

[AK Marc]

Did you miss the recent slashdot poll? The question was about radiation exposure in number of bananas. Everyone knows that all potassium is radioactive. And that bananas are a good source of potassium. I'm not trolling. I'm pointing out the simple fact that nearly everything is radioactive.

Well, that and that you are a fucking moron for dismissing the primary effect of heavy metal poisoning.