Japan Widens Evacuation Zone Around Fukushima

mdsolar writes "Japan has started the first evacuations of homes outside a government exclusion zone after the earthquake and tsunami crippled one of the country's nuclear power plants. 5100 people are being relocated to public housing, hotels and other facilities in nearby cities."

Comments

Nuke power

[M. Baranczak]

If the Japanese can't do this shit safely, then who can?

Re:Nuke power

[Flipstylee]

Anyone else apparently, that plant was due for replacement/shutdown many years ago.

Re:Nuke power

[Rakshasa Taisab]

The Chernobyl reactor was brand new... If you're going to be all panic mode about stuff at least get the easily verifiable facts right.

Re:Nuke power

[Microlith]

Obviously it is impossible, which is why we have yearly meltdowns and hundreds of huge exclusion zones around the wo...

Wait a second. We don't. It seems that, unlke oil or coal, the total number of major disasters is way lower on the nuke side.

It's too bad we can't actually build the newer, safer designs. People might protest. It reminds me of the protests when the Cassini probe was launched, all because it had a plutonium RTG on it.

Re:Nuke power

[plopez]

Chernobyl was new but read this:

http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~pbawa/421/ETHICAL%20ISSUES%20CHERNOBYL.htm

And before you vilify the Soviet system for fraud, incompetence, corruption etc,; read up on the Diablo canyon reactor. It had serious quality issues as well. Such as the shock absorbers on the foundation which were intended to protect it from, IIRC, 7.3 magnitude earthquakes being installed in reverse. Quality issues abound in all construction even reactors. I don't even trust the Germans to do it right.

Diablo canyon and Chernobyl also points out that if a good reactor design can be made, building it to spec is still a problem.

Trivia tidbit: I do believe that the author of the Chernobyl memo is Uri Andropov who chose Gorbachev as his successor to the post of General Secretary of the CP of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev who instituted Glasnost and Perestroika, which eventually led to the peaceful downfall of the Soviet Union.

Re:Nuke power

[RoFLKOPTr]

or three mile island ?

"According to the American Nuclear Society, using the official radiation emission figures, "The average radiation dose to people living within ten miles of the plant was eight millirem, and no more than 100 millirem to any single individual. Eight millirem is about equal to a chest X-ray, and 100 millirem is about a third of the average background level of radiation received by US residents in a year.""

Accidents happen. Nobody died. Can we stop bringing up TMI as one of the poster children for why nuclear power is dangerous and deadly, because TMI is a horrible example for that purpose given how it pretty much proves the opposite.

Re:Nuke power

[Zulkis]

How about oil spills? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills Or mine disasters? http://www.usmra.com/china/disasterwatch/ (just China)

Re:Nuke power

[SquirrelDeth]

So is Chalk River in Canada. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalk_River_Laboratories But our Prime minister fired the nuclear watch dog when she said to shut the plant down after the last time the reactor had a spill. http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/303953

Re:Nuke power

[mellon]

We can't build the newer, safer designes for two reasons. The first is that the nuclear industry, by which I mean both the operators and the regulators, have utterly failed to be honest and diligent. By this I mean that they generally do their best to try to paint a happy face on any problem that may come up, rather than saying "here's what's bad about this, and here's what we're doing about it." Consequently, each time something genuinely bad happens, public trust is further undermined. And they do their best to find the cheapest possible solution to any problem, rather than actually trying to solve it, because if they had to actually solve it, it might be cheaper to simply shut down the plant.

The root of this problem is that nuclear, like solar, is not actually economically competitive with carbon sources. We'd like to stop using carbon sources of energy, but it's difficult because it's cheaper (partially because we never count the cost of the externalities). The difference between nuclear and solar is that in the case of nuclear, there's a temptation to cheap out on safety so as to make it more economically feasible, or to simply not account for externalities, like the cost of exclusion zones when a serious accident like the ones at Chernobyl and Fukushima happens.

So the point is not that nuclear is inherently unsafe, or inherently a bad idea, but rather that the economics of nuclear power tend to increase risk, not decrease it, and that what is being risked is an outcome like the ones in Fukushima and Chernobyl.

Re:Nuke power

[Waffle Iron]

Anyone else apparently, that plant was due for replacement/shutdown many years ago.

Every time there's a nuke plant disaster, some people argue that the particular situation is a special case that can be safely ignored. Undoubtedly, the same arguments will pop up the next time there's a major accident, sabotage or attack (which will undoubtedly be yet another special case).

Re:Nuke power

[PNutts]

Nuclear energy is quite cheap once the plant is up and running they can be run indefinitely with proper maintenance.

Fukushima Dai-ichi's energy was cheap until 3/11/2011 and it was properly maintained as much as any of them. Also, the Titanic was a great ship that provided excellent transportation until halfway across the Atlantic.

Re:Nuke power

[Python]

The Soviets sucked. But lets review the three power reactor accidents that have presented any potential or actual risk to the public and lets see how those accidents shook out:

1) Chernobyl: A soviet designed reactor with no containment that had a steam explosion because the operators were not trained for the experiment they were running, and they lost control of the reactor by disabling all the safety systems and doing things all the other reactors in the USSR said no to. No shock there that it had a steam explosion. (Operator error, design flaw)
2) Three Mile Island: A faulty pressure relief valve on the PWRs pressurizer and a bad design for the indicator, plus poor location of the indicators on the back of a panel, no release but core damage. (Operator error, design flaw)
3) Fukushima: a Tsunami induced beyond design basis accident, where the Units survived the earthquake and apparently the safety systems were working until the Tsunami took out the Diesel generators knocking all but the RCIC safety system out. (Beyond DBA)

Effects:

1) Chernobyl: Core Damage and exposure plus release plus fire. Worst case accident. Expected because the soviets just didnt give a fuck, they built a faulty reactor, had no containment and they blew it up with faulty procedures and an arrogant approach to Nuclear engineering. Big shocker to no one that they had a loss of containment accident and killed a lot of people trying to bring it under control. Classic Soviet Engineering Fuckup.

Actual Measurable Effects: Unit destroyed, lots of deaths of personnel involved in controlling the accident. Area contaminated, but effects have been much less over time than expected, tours are available of the area now. Worst case loss of control accident.

Cause: Experiment coupled with Operator Error/Arrogance. Soviet reactor design was unstable at low power, Night shift was untrained for the experiment that they were told to run. Plant tried to run experiment during the day, but was told to stop due to Brown Outs and passed this on to the junior night shift. Shift lost control of reactor, steam explosion took the lid off the uncontained reactor. Because Soviet reactors were designed to be refueled while running it had no containment and the rest is history. No one builds reactors like this except the Soviets, so this kind of accident can not occur with non-soviet designed reactors.

2) TMI: Core damage, no known release. It scared a lot of people at the time because it wasn't clear, at the time, what was wrong or what the effects were. Communication was poor and people understandably were panicked. No known release was measured, and a number of studies have looked into this. Increased rates of cancer were not detected, but its possible it did occur. Unfortunately, at the time the accident occurred the movie China Syndrome came out and this may have also had some impact on public perception of this accident.

Actual measurable effects: Core Damaged, Unit unusable, No deaths, no known direct health effects although there is some debate from residents on this point. Scientific studies so far have concluded that if there was any release (and there is no evidence of , it did not have any impact on public health and safety. The material than ended up the aux building did not contain solids at room temp, so any release was likely xenon (and maybe some argon or krypton), and possibly some radioactive iodine. Data at the time of the accident indicates that the release was less than 2 mrem, or 1/40th the natural dose for residents of a high altitude city. In short, not above background levels and no evidence of I-131 or C-137 in mammalian milk in the surrounding areas. So, the actual effects were scary sounding, but not anything that would have adverse impacts on health.

Cause: The Babcock and Wilcox valve indicated it was closed if the solenoid was de-energized, not when it was actually closed. It stuck open, and the indicators said it was closed. There were sensors on th

Re:Nuke power

[Rising Ape]

How many oil plant and coal plant explosions did we have in recent years?

You don't need explosions for those to harm people. Air pollution, mining incidents, global warming... if all the consequences of coal were piled into a single, per-decade event it would be an appalling accident, far worse than Fukushima.

Re:Nuke power

[edxwelch]

"Nobody died"
This is the tired old logic of the nuclear appologist.
Only count the deaths. Ignore the fact that some of the health effects like cancer and birth defects take years to become evident. And ignore the fact that the huge swaiths of land has become uninhabital and that the groundwater has become poisened.
Oh yes, then the idiotic chest x-ray comparison.
Chest x-ray is external radiation, but people living near Fukusima are in danger because of internal radiation (ingesting radioactive isotopes from air, dust, food, etc.)

Re:Nuke power

[RoFLKOPTr]

To your logic: the fact that in a majour catastrophe nobody died, does not make the technology causing that catastrophe safe. The opposite is true: if the technology would be save the catastrophe would not have happend.

It wasn't a catastrophe. It was an accident. Nuclear power is not safe in the same definition that almost EVERYTHING we do is not safe. Are cars safe? Nearly 40,000 people die every year in car accidents, let alone the tens of thousands more that are severely injured. Are planes safe? Planes are the safest method of efficient long-range travel in existance, but 1,000 people still die every year. And there are thousands of aviation accidents that don't actually cause any harm... I think earlier you called those "catastrophes". There are thousands of aviation catastrophes every year, resulting in about 1,000 deaths per year.

Let's try some risk-benefit analysis. There are about 140,000,000 automobiles in the United States. Let's just estimate that means 140,000,000 people drive frequently given that most people who own a car drive every day and some households have only one car for several people while some households may have several cars for one person. 40,000 automobile-related deaths per year means that approximately 0.0003% of those served by the automobile industry die because of it each year. Nuclear power accounts for about 20% of all power generation in the United States. Given a population of 307,000,000, I think we can safely approximate that around 61,400,000 people are served by nuclear power in the United States. 3 deaths in the history of nuclear power in the United States (3 people died in an accident at the Nuclear Reactor Testing Station in Idaho Falls on January 3, 1961) means that less than 0.00000005% of people served by the nuclear power industry have ever died because of it. We see 45 deaths per year directly attributed to coal power which produces energy for 150,000,000 people giving us a death rate of 0.0000003% per year, let alone all the wild speculation by the environazis trying to attribute every lung-related death in coal power areas to the coal emissions and we see numbers claimed to be sometimes approaching 10,000 deaths per year. That's all bullshit, of course, but that's what people claim. The fact is that nobody can claim any more deaths in the United States due to nuclear power than those three that died during the technology's infancy, because there is no environmental impact with which to attribute random numbers to.

The media oversensationalizes every little thing that ever happens, and you have been sucked in. Everything we do is dangerous. I suggest you stay inside wrapped in a warm blanket for the rest of your life because that's the only way you'll ever protect yourself from injury. Be careful not to stub your toe on your bedroom door on the way to the kitchen.

Re:Nuke power

[thermopile]

A fantastic summary, but I quibble with the "no evidence of any significant release of radiation" quote for Fukushima. Two months ago, I would have said it was impossible for a reactor in Japan to contaminate the drinking water in Tokyo, but that's exactly what happened. To the detriment of the industry (and I'm a nuclear engineer), there was a significant release of radiation.

That said, in the grand scheme of things, it has not presented a harm to the general public that is greater than other risks: look at the poor folks in the spillways of the Mississippi. Or the coal ash spill from the coal-fired plant in Kingston, TN.

Three incidents like you describe above, over thirty-two years, is a pretty darned good safety record, with the 440+ commercial power reactors around the world. Why does nuclear have a bad rap? One possibility is it stems from fear since it all started with a few mushroom clouds, but whatever the reason, it seems awfully visceral.

Re:Nuke power

[RoFLKOPTr]

"Nobody died" This is the tired old logic of the nuclear appologist. Only count the deaths. Ignore the fact that some of the health effects like cancer and birth defects take years to become evident. And ignore the fact that the huge swaiths of land has become uninhabital and that the groundwater has become poisened. Oh yes, then the idiotic chest x-ray comparison. Chest x-ray is external radiation, but people living near Fukusima are in danger because of internal radiation (ingesting radioactive isotopes from air, dust, food, etc.)

How many years are we supposed to wait? Three Mile Island happened over 30 years ago and there has been no evidence of increased cancer rates as a result of that accident. And the only other accident that caused any injury in the history of nuclear power in the United States was in 1967 when somebody fucked up and improperly removed a control rod from the reactor, causing an explosion and the death of its three operators. That's it. Stop being blindfolded by the sensationalization and the stigmas related to the word "nuclear" and look at the facts.

Re:Nuke power

[Python]

Agreed. I've actually got a Nuclear Engineer education and studied TMI, its an example of a contained accident. No release. TMI is an example that shows conclusively that the defense in depth used in nuclear reactors worked despite the mistakes made by the operators and despite the flaw in the BW PORV.

So yes, it is nonsense to use TMI as an example of how nuclear power is unsafe. TMI proved that even when everything failed, it was still possible to stop the accident.

Chernobyl, however, is a great example of how not to build and operate a reactor. That accident proves what happens when you dont have defense in depth, when you dont have good procedures, when you dont have containment, when you put poorly trained operators on the night shift and let your good operators go home to enjoy May Day. It also says you shouldnt experiment with big power reactors to find out what happens when things go wrong. That was classic communist thinking, screw the peasants its all for the greater good. Chernobyl is a textbook case of what can happen when you bypass all your procedures, disable your safety systems and build an unsafe reactor.

So if you want to use something as an example of how nuclear power can be done poorly and unsafely, use Chernobyl. If you want to make the argument that when everything goes wrong, nothing bad happens, sure bring up TMI.

And if you want to look ignorant, bring up TMI as an example of an accident that hurt people around actual Nuclear engineers and scientists.

Re:Nuke power

[angel'o'sphere]

The way for solar is not photovoltaic (which only works if there is sun/daylight) but thermal. It is easy to store enough heat over daytime to continue producing energy over night.

Wind and Solar are only "expensive" in terms of construction costs.

If we had started with them like 40 years ago, they would run them on maintenance costs: which means they cost close to zero.

Regarding reliability: you know, you have a hugh grid. There is always sun or wind somewhere on the grid. Right now you are depending on oil/coal or what ever from foreign countries. With wind you would only rely on your country and/or your neighbours.

angel'o'sphere

Re:Nuke power

[anagama]

How is it NOT a failure of engineering for the earthquake and tsunami threat to be minimized? History and tsunami stones pointed to real dangers that would lead one to think it is retarded to put generators that require fire, and for which water is a fatal enemy, at sea level. You cannot dismiss Fukushima because it wasn't designed for the event -- the earthquake and tsunami are an indictment of the engineering, not a reason to excuse the engineering.

Re:Nuke power

[plover]

And I'm glad Chalk River is still on line. My wife needed the isotopes they make to help treat her cancer.

Their "spill" was 47 liters of heavy water. No damage, nobody harmed. If they stopped making radioisotopes, they'd kill tens of thousands of patients due to lack of treatment options. And it's not like they can stockpile those compounds. The half life of the useful ones are all pretty short.

There's this fragile thing called perspective. I don't know why so many people lose it when they hear the word "nuclear".

Re:Nuke power

[Python]

> If you believe that, you are beyond hope.

I don't believe it, this is what I do for a living. I know what happened, I understand the BW PWR used, I studied the accident and I am a Nuclear Engineer. Please educate yourself and read the DOE and NRC studies, and maybe listen to some actual Nuclear Engineers and stop believing everything you read on the Internet.

Re:Nuke power

[SquirrelDeth]

The spill you are referring to was 47 kilo's not liters. There was also a 800 liter spill and a 7,000 liter a day spill that lasted over a month that was pumped into the Ottawa river. They need a new plant and since they take a while to build sooner is better than latter. If the plant gets shut down for good how many years would it take to start producing isotopes again? As for perspective why shouldn't people drive 50 year old cars that pollute like a bastard and leak oil once in a while?

Re:Nuke power

[Rising Ape]

The meltdown "boom" is a much vaster explosion, spewing radioactive material over a wide area.

Except that won't happen, and I don't know where you got that from. The molten fuel is extremely unlikely to have the correct geometry to go critical, since it needs to have a moderator present as well. The intact core is close to the maximally reactive configuration, and a molten core is unlikely to spontaneously assemble itself into a lattice of fuel + water. Criticality in a meltdown may be a concern for fast reactors, but these aren't fast reactors. Even then, it wouldn't be a massive blast like the hydrogen explosions - but the heat released could cause the containment to fail so it would be a problem, yes.

Re:Nuke power

[drinkypoo]

You should not believe everything you hear. There is no fly ash anymore in a modern plant since 15 - 20 years (in EU especially, not sure about USA, the last discussion with a /. er from there revealed that they "should" have even stricter limitations but seem not to be enforced).

I personally know a guy who was paid to climb stacks here in the states and you can find out-of-spec plants as fast as you can pay people to climb them.

Anyway, regarding fly ash: it is separated in a way that most of it can be used as building material, e.g. for roads or as hard plaster in buildings. Only a very small amount gets deposited.

We did actually have a case with some sheet rock from china sweating radioactives and toxics, as you may recall; it was made from fly ash. A great deal of fly ash seems to be made into concrete, which seems like a decent way to entomb radioactives if it's sufficiently uniform, except that the suckers who are working with the stuff are going to breathe a certain amount of it past the sides of their respirators, assuming they're even in the first world where they get to use them. Here in the USA you can track increased radioactives downwind of pretty much any coal plant. I would guess that it's worse in China. The jet stream brings a crapload of Chinese pollution here. There are now days where there's more Chinese pollution in Los Angeles than there is of the local kind.

Re:Nuke power

[Python]

>> primary containment appears to be intact but we won't know for some time.
>No. Both unit 2 and unit 1 containment and pressure vessel have leaks.

Right, primary containment is intact, which means that the core is still protected. Leaks from water lines are not loss of primary containment, and water leaks are not as hazardous as you have been led to believe.

>> WHO has stated that there is no evidence of any significant release of radiation.
>No. Material discharged from the plant from March 11 to early April was estimated between 370,000 and 630,000 terabecquerels and continues
> at 154 terabecquerels per day.

No, the WHO did in fact state that. You should visit their website, its a fact.

Currently measuring shows that I-131 has been detected in three prefectures, with values ranging from 1.5 Bq/m2 to 4.5 Bq/m2. Cs-137 was detected in eight prefectures, with values ranging from 3 Bq/m2 to 44 Bq/m2. Gamma dose rate for Fukushima prefecture was 1.7 Sv/h, in all other prefectures where sources where detected, reported gamma dose rates were below 0.1 Sv/h with a decreasing trend.

>>Measured increased amounts of radiocative caesium and iodine in the vicinity of the plant, but not at dangerous levels.
>No. It is at danerous levels - hence the exclusion zone.

No, the exclusion zone is not a measure of dangerous release, its to get people away in case there is a dangerous release.

> > No evidence that any uranium or plutonium has been released.
> Yes there is. The explosion in Unit 3 blew pieces of fuel rod up to a mile from the site. Uranium and plutonium was vapourised and detected both in the soil in Fukushima and as far away as California.

Nonsense, neither WHO nor IAEA support your claim here. As the party making the affirmative assertion has the burden of proof, if you have a reliable source for all these claims I would be happy to retract my statement. I can find no evidence to support your assertions.

Re:Nuke power

[thermopile]

I'm really not trying to get into a debate on semantics, but releasing a few TBq of radiation counts as "significant" in my mind. At the very least, it's way more than background.

This article by some nuclear engineers at NC State is an excellent, fact-based breakdown of what the effects are of the Fukushima accident, with known numbers to date.

Bottom line: Three cancers.

Three cases of cancer that would not otherwise have occurred, and this is using the (very conservative) linear-no-threshold assumption.

Others in this thread have been bleating about how bad nuclear power accidents have been. The following quote from the UN's final report on the Chernobyl accident (a summary can be found here ) doesn't support their claims:

"Apart from the increase in thyroid cancer after childhood exposure, no increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality have been observed that could be attributed to ionizing radiation. The risk of leukemia, one of the main concerns (leukemia is the first cancer to appear after radiation exposure, because of its short latency time of 2 to 10 years), does not appear to be elevated, even among the recovery operation workers. Neither is there any proof of other non-malignant disorders that are related to ionizing radiation. However, there were widespread psychological reactions to the accident, which were due to fear of the radiation, not to actual radiation doses."

People's fear is very real and important. But it's not substantiated by facts.

Re:Nuke power

[shutdown -p now]

Heavy water is 11% more dense, so 1ml of it weighs 1.1g (hence the name).

Not that it matters much - that's what, 4 liters extra?

Re:As long as .....

[El Torico]

The turtles will take care of that.

Slashdot on nukes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, this is Slashdot, nukes can do no wrong! Clearly this must be propaganda from the bleeding heart eviro-nuts who don't hold the same opinions as me!

Re:Slashdot on nukes?

[Mindcontrolled]

No, they probably are not paid, I give you that. They are useful idiots. For every poster that is actually engaging into a discussion, I can give you ten who just spam the site with the usual lies like "coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste". What I find most fascinating is the fact that in the nuclear threads, suddenly stuff like global warming and peak oil is real and nuclear power is our salvation. In every other thread, those two things are usually made up by a global conspiracy of socialist scientists and/or Al Gore for the sole purpose of grabbing your hard earned and well deserved money.

Re:Slashdot on nukes?

[bky1701]

"In every other thread, those two things are usually made up by a global conspiracy of socialist scientists and/or Al Gore for the sole purpose of grabbing your hard earned and well deserved money."

Uhh, no. I think you're confusing slashdot with Fox News. Easy mistake to make.

Seems to me like you can't deal with the fact there might be people of different opinions on slashdot, and want to use that to demean anyone you disagree with. Like the GP said, basically, but worse.

TEPCO has ruined nuclear power for decades

[Animats]

Much of this is TEPCO's fault, and specifically the fault of their CEO, Masataka Shimizu. A few weeks after the hydrogen explosions, it came out that the CEO had ruled that only he could authorize any release of radioactive material, including venting hydrogen to the atmosphere to avoid an explosion.

When that decision needed to be made, the CEO was not present when wanted. When the earthquake occurred, he happened to be in another part of Japan and had trouble getting to TEPCO HQ. But there was no backup plan if the CEO was unavailable. Nobody took over and made the decision. (In the US, policy is that the on-site plant manager can make that decision.)

The CEO wasn't seen in public for weeks after the disaster. He was rumored to have fled the country, that he'd committed suicide, or that he was in a hospital. The Prime Minister of Japan personally went over to TEPCO headquarters to demand answers and action. Even that didn't help, and his office had to directly take over management of the disaster.

Masataka Shimizu is still CEO of TEPCO.

Japan used to have a tradition of seppuku in such situations.

How many years are we supposed to wait?

[hoboroadie]

Patience, friend, the catastrophe you seek will occur. The closest man's creations have come to achieving longevity measurable in geologic time is our creation of fissionable material. Those poisons will outlive the pyramids.

Re:Japaneese Slavutych?

[drinkypoo]

Now I wonder how would the counterpart in Japan look like, if Japan chooses a similar solution.

The problem is, they're not exactly swimming in land in Japan. (They're swimming in radioactivity.) They'd have to build it on the side of a mountain or something. Seriously though, the best option is to expatriate as rapidly as possible. Spend some of their money while it's worth something to secure some land for their citizens in some other nation and send them packing. Whole towns are now flooded at high tide since the 'quake. Japan is facing a chronic land shortage.

All this comes off as insensitive I'm sure, and I'm sorry, but it doesn't make sense to build anything in Japan any more. I'd be talking real seriously with Brazil. They already have lots of Japanese and surely they could benefit from lots more. The Japanese are very serious about protecting the environment in their own country, so it might actually improve their environmental conditions to import them all.

Re:Contaminated Groundwater

[Python]

The IAEA has stated regarding possible ground water contamination:

"As of 10 May, the restriction on the consumption of drinking water relating to I-131 - which had been applied since 1 April as a precautionary measure for one remaining location (the village of Iitate in Fukushima prefecture), and only for infants - was lifted."

Re:Perspective is a funny thing . . .

[plover]

Seriously? You're comparing having to move your house to saving my wife's life, and the lives of the other people saved by those radioisotopes? Jeez, I'm so very sorry for the terrible inconvenience. Let me get right on that perspective changing.