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Engineers Find Nuclear Meltdown At Fukushima Plant
fysdt writes "Engineers from the Tokyo Electric Power company (Tepco) entered the No.1 reactor at the end of last week for the first time and saw the top five feet or so of the core's 13ft-long fuel rods had been exposed to the air and melted down. Previously, Tepco believed that the core of the reactor was submerged in enough water to keep it stable and that only 55 per cent of the core had been damaged."
The point is that given the inevitability of human error and insatiable greed, is nuclear the best option? This is the point the anti-nuke crowd has been making. Yes, it CAN be done safely...in theory. But, what happens when corporation A figures that regulation X hurts profits too much so they lobby to get it waivered, and regulation Y is weakly enforced, so they just ignore it altogether?
Personally, I like the idea of nuclear power. I just don't trust it in the hands of any organization with a profit motive.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Because failure of management or engineering at a nuclear power plant is still a failure of nuclear power. It's the nuclear power that causes the problem, not the management. If management or engineering fails at a wind plant, it doesn't require the evacuation of entire cities, potentially for decades.
And because we know that management and engineering DO fail.
Is there anyone out that who is saying "Nuclear Power at Any Cost?". What I seem to be hearing is that it's dangerous, but the danger can be managed.
I think the advocates of nuclear power are upset that a single incident at a 40 year old plant, due to extreme circumstances, with no deaths, is going to set back production of new plants that aren't within 500 miles of a fault line, let alone the ocean, due simply to an unreasoning fear of something that we are exposed to every day already.
Think about it. Incidents like Three Mile Island, and this most recent one in Japan create more fear when they have killed no one at all, than industrial accidents that have killed dozens or even hundreds of people, both immediately and through chronic disease. Of course Nuclear Power advocates are groaning about this latest non-disaster, it's like saying that you can kill as many people as you want, just as long they aren't killed with "the nuculer radiation".
Nuclear power can be really dangerous if mishandled, but so can coal, gas, oil or even solar power generation. All of those can create waste materials that can render areas uninhabitable if they are not stored properly. As far as explosions go, there's just as much danger from too much fertilizer being stored in one place as there is from any plant, nuclear or not.
Sure, it's released, sure, it's not great. Who is dying? The stuff is flowing into the ocean, which always had nuclear materials in it, diluted in water, so there will be some more now. Horror.
I dare you to go into one of the evacuation centers and say that to one of the 70,000 people who have no idea when (or if) they'll ever be able to return to their contaminated home.
What I seem to be hearing is that it's dangerous, but the danger can be managed.
Yes, that's the line we've been fed by the nuclear power industry for 60 years. "The danger can be managed." Problem is, Fukushima is only the last of a long line of accidents which should never have happened according to the probability scenarios used to manage the danger.
a single incident at a 40 year old plant, due to extreme circumstances, with no deaths
No dramatic and initial deaths. That's not quite the same thing.
This is the big problem with nuclear accidents: they release toxic substances into the environment which remain toxic for centuries and kill slowly over time. Each time one of these happens, it contaminates land and water, and that contamination doesn't go away.
This is why nuclear reactors are scary to people who have some imagination and can think beyond the bounds of "normal operating scenario" into "what if something goes wrong which should never go wrong?" territory.
is going to set back production of new plants
Yes, that would be a positive outcome if you're not convinced that new nuclear plants are a net long-term win to humankind.
As far as explosions go, there's just as much danger from too much fertilizer being stored in one place as there is from any plant, nuclear or not.
The point is its not just photogenic Hollywood explosions that we're talking about. It's toxic leaks of long-term radioisotopes accumulating in the environment. Not nearly as easy to measure or as exciting to report, but once it gets out of the bottle, you can't put it back in.
The interesting thing is that a power reactor meltdown, small and benign as it might look compared to a nuclear bomb, can actually release more radionucleotides into the environment than an outdoor nuclear test. Plus, it does it in a location much closer to inhabited cities and farmland.
We don't really want a lot more of those.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC