Fukushima To Become Nuclear Dump?

mdsolar writes "Japan's atomic energy specialists are discussing a plan to make the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant a storage site for radioactive waste from the crippled station run by Tokyo Electric Power Co."

Comments

Words

[Anonymous Coward]

Words are fun.

"Dump" vs "Storage Site" or "Spent Fuel Storage" or "Waste Storage".

You can tell when someone is trying to sensationalize a story by the words they choose.

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[houstonbofh]

Or, perhaps a discount source for radioactive materials? http://www.thedump.com/

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[captainpanic]

So, is TFA using strong words, or is the nuclear industry generally using euphemisms for their problems? You can't deny either of them. And the truth lies in the middle.

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[DarkOx]

Or maybe they are just calling a spade a spade. What does one do at a dump? They store waste. Its a correct word. I bet your local municipality calls their "dump" a "waste management facility" or something similar. I guess the connotations are less negative so the people who live near or work at it don't feel as bad?

"dump" has an undesirable connotation and I think that its fair use of the term, this is objectively not something you want in your back yard; so I don't "dump" is pejorative here.

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[SomeKDEUser]

Except spent fuel can be recycled in a breeder reactor. It is only "waste" if you give up on using it!

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[denis-The-menace]

Mod parent up!

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[Jawnn]

Calling it a dump is hardly sensational. The word "dump" has always had, in common parlance, a definition that equates to "a place where things no longer wanted or useful are discarded". Ergo, any place where we put the mess made by nuclear energy processes is a dump. It may rub your pro-nuke sensibilities the wrong, but you really need to get over that, because calling it "storage" is just plain stupid. Storage? Seriously? Stored there until... what? You find a way to render it useful for something? Please.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I also thought it was blindingly obvious, that if something radiates so strongly, that it can kill people and even heat shit up, that that what radiates out, is *ENERGY*. (You know, kinetic for mass, and electromagnetic for photons.) Duh.

The best way to get rid of it, is to *transform it to usable energy*! E.g. electricity.

We should tell hippies and media cattle, that we will build a facility, that will suck all the radiation out of the uranium, and transform them into rocks and kittens with sunflowers and butterflies. Or something like that. You know what I mean.
They'd rave about that new waste neutralization plant that's greener than the grass on the other side of the fence, and paint big hippies with joints and kumbaya music on the outside. ;)

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[dbIII]

All of it? Back to school with you!

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[GooberToo]

And the truth lies in the middle.

Not in this case. Far too often,the truth is far, far, far, far, far, far closer to what physicist and the industry has to say on the subject. Sadly, public knowledge seems to be closer to the middle or completely on the other side.

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[SomeKDEUser]

No, not all of it, but as long as something can be reused, it is not "waste". It becomes waste only when nothing can be gotten out of it. "Recycling" is not "Reusing". Reading comes before nuclear engineering, so I guess it is back to small school for you?

Also, pet peeve of mine about rabidly anti-nuclear people who are against any and all storage facility for nuclear waste:
  - Even if the world decided to shut down all plants tomorrow, long term storage would still be needed (in fact, especially if the world decided to shut down all plants)
  - Even if all the waste from plants magically evaporated, there would still remain all of the scientific/medical waste (a very significant fraction of the total).
I cannot help but think that people holding a strong opinion both against storage and against nuclear power are brain-damaged. And in the event of them needing it, they should be denied radiotherapy. And X-Rays. I would deny them smoke detectors, but that would not be fair for their neighbours.

Of course, storing anything at the Fukushima site for the long term is idiotic bordering on criminal. This is a separate issue.

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[dunkelfalke]

That is the theory. In the practice there are currently only three breeding reactors online, one in India, one in Russia and one in Japan (that one had a previous sodium leak and fire). What makes things even worse, two of these three are research reactors, only the russian one is the real deal.

Breeding reactors are very expensive and complicated to operate, it is far cheaper to dump spent fuel somewhere. So yes, it is waste.

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[SomeKDEUser]

Only while supplies last. It also depends on the state of the technology. Also, as pretty much no one has found a dumping ground for their "waste", it might well be that it is in fact a losing proposition to try to store the spent fuel, in the long run.

Not so much because of technical problems, but because everywhere is someone's backyard.

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[snowraver1]

Yes, exactly. 'Spent' fuel is still useful, but a different reactor design is needed to burn it. Eventually (assuming humans don't do extinct first) this spent fuel will be a gold mine for future power plants. I also think that a conventional dump will eventually be a gold mine. A municipal landfill has a very high concentration of many elements, all that is needed is a seperation method.

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[AmiMoJo]

And in fact they have re-processing facilities on site already.

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[dbIII]

No, not all of it, but as long as something can be reused, it is not "waste". It becomes waste only when nothing can be gotten out of it.

Interesting dictionary you have there.
What is it with this weird argument technique of pretending to be very stupid so that people think you are not mentally competent enough to be found responsible for a lie? Do you think people will fall for it or are you just happy if they go away in disgust?
Also try reading some material on nuclear power written AFTER 1970 and see what is thought of plutonium fast breeders by the civilian nuclear industry now. For extra points find out about the reprocessing plants in France and why they are shut down at the moment.

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[mrchaotica]

I was under the impression that France reprocessed their waste/fuel.

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[parens]

Most dumps around my part of the US euphemistically refer to themselves as "transfer stations".

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[AmiMoJo]

If you want to have this debate don't start by trying to paint people not in favour of nuclear as extremists. I personally think we should be building more renewable power generation facilities, and while in the mean time we need nuclear power we should look at it as something we want to get away from because there is a cheaper, greener and safer alternative now.

I'm perfectly happy to benefit from radiation, in fact my mother is only alive because of it. Obviously it produces waste that has to be dealt with, but there is no other option when it comes to medical or scientific uses. We have a choice when it comes to power generation, and trying to create as little extra nuclear waste as possible seems like a no-brainer to me.

But hay, go ahead, keep attacking your straw man instead of making an actual argument as to why nuclear is the superior long term option when compared with renewable. Unlike you, I am actually listening.

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[stooo]

Yes, France reprocesses. and it's a disaster. To recover 2-3% U and Pu, they pollute the atlantic, the air contamination can be measured across europe, and the resulting waste (98%) is concentrated, and very dangerous. Also, an insane quantity of UF6 and other wastes are illegally exported to Russia, and "store" it under open sky ...

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[peragrin]

Don't lie.

Tell them we have a new method for sucking all the radiation out of the uranium and turn it into water.

Then use the power from the breeder reactor to break down sea water to fresh water for drinking.

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[peragrin]

That's only because the USA and japan and Europe has banned all new reactors of safe designs and decided to extend the life of the old reactors by 2-3 times their original design lifetimes.

That's like taking your pickup truck to 500,000 miles because you like the color. It makes no sense.

I am not saying to not build safely, but to actually build the new safe designs before we need them to be built in a hurry, and thus under specced.

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[SomeKDEUser]

The point is that the difference in the amount of waste is not significant -- not in the sense that it reduces the number of storage location you need. Waste is not really relevant in the discussion of nuclear. Because if waste were relevant, only wind, hydraulic and solar thermal would qualify as clean energies. And they are not enough. One day, we will have fusion power. Fusion, not renewable, is the long-term future.

What comes between now and the first fusion plants, I don't know. I hope lots of nuclear and renewables, but likely lots of coal/gas and some renewables, and big climate problems. And I believe the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the ecological movement, who is wholly right about the problems, and almost wholly wrong about the solutions.

And the reason they are wrong is that it is a movement with strong Luddite streaks. Fringes matter: the guys saying we should go back to the 17th century are not very many, but they push they whole movement in their direction. They _care_. If you need (to be accepted as a legitimate part of the movement) to take the political stance of no nuclear, and the stance of no fossil fuel, either something has to give, or you need to take the stance of "no energy" -- political messages about trade offs only work if you talk to engineers. If you go for no energy, you have to admit you are in favour of lowering standards of living. Once you have made that step, you make it a virtue. With it comes the notions of "simpler life", "mad scientists playing god".

You start thinking that the solution comes from rituals (sorting your waste is a ritual: very, very useful for aluminium, somewhat for plastics, iron can be sorted automatically -- but in reality, robotic, industrial sorting centres are the solution) and not from knowledge in a broad sense (technology and science, awarenass of the usefulness of your actions), and then you oppose technical solutions on principled grounds. But we live in a very complex, highly technological society.

When people oppose the construction of storage locations for nuclear waste, they _think_ they are opposing the nuclear industry, but in reality, they are also opposing medical and scientific uses. This is sadly not a strawman: most people don't realise what nuclear waste is made off. And they are against it "because". Reducing waste amounts, unless it is by an order of magnitude (not possible, because of the "uncontroversial" usage) is essentially useless.

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[ironjaw33]

Or, perhaps a discount source for radioactive materials? http://www.thedump.com/

Their TV advertisements are one of the reasons I gave up cable TV and never looked back.

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[SomeKDEUser]

By definition, waste is what you do not use, otherwise, it is not waste. Obviously. As for the closure of Super-Phoenix, it was a purely political decision, brought about by the necessity of keeping the ecologists on board the then coalition.

"OMG Nuclear power sucks! we are afraid!! OK says the politician, see, I closed the plant, happy, now? See! he closed the plant, it proves it was dangerous!"

I dislike this world where political expediency is taking the place of reality. This goes as much for Republican policies as with large swaths of the "Green" movement. The world is complicated, everything is a trade-off. Deal with it.

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[MachDelta]

Won't happen. Breeder reactors have already been smeared as potential sources of 'nucular wepins', what with all that concentrated plutonium they produce.
You'll never get the public behind that with anything short of "But Jack Bauer is guarding the place."

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[AmiMoJo]

Waste is not really relevant in the discussion of nuclear.

On what grounds do you make that claim? Nuclear waste needs to be handled carefully and stored for extremely long periods of time. Waste output is a factor when deciding to use any form of electricity generation, including coal, gas and renewables. Even PV solar produces waste during manufacturing and disposal which is one reason that solar thermal is so attractive. Wind and wave can be mostly recycled.

And the reason they are wrong is that it is a movement with strong Luddite streaks. Fringes matter: the guys saying we should go back to the 17th century are not very many, but they push they whole movement in their direction.

Absolute nonsense. The green movement has been very successful at convincing governments and the populations that vote them in to change for the better while improving our standard of living. Climate change aside, less pollution means better health and quality of life. Less wasteful use of energy, e.g. by having more efficient cars or electronics that use less power in standby mode helps reduce our dependence on expensive energy sources and goes some way to slowing the rising costs.

Just to be absolutely 100% clear: the mainstream green movement is not suggesting we give up our modern high standards of living or ability to travel or anything like that. We don't have to because we either have or will soon develop the technology to do it all cleanly, the main problem being that development is expensive and slow and there are various powerful groups with a vested interested in keeping the status quo. No conspiracies, just oil & gas companies. Oh, and people like you who have bought into the anti-green propaganda they put out.

You are setting up a straw man here. You wouldn't just people who think animals should not be harmed unnecessarily by the actions of criminals who attack lab workers in the name of animal rights. You wouldn't judge all socialist movements by the actions of Chairman Mao, or Christianity by the actions of Hitler. Wait, actually you probably would if your logic holds.

Your sorting example is utterly bizarre. We started doing it by hand because at the time the technology to do it automatically didn't exist. It still doesn't because, much like trying to iron clothes or any number of other tasks robots find extremely difficult, sorting rubbish based on material is a hard problem to solve. On the other hand it is very little effort for us to put paper in one box and plastic in another. Nothing ritualistic about it, pure pragmatism.

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[SomeKDEUser]

No, some level of sorting is useful (it is nearly criminal not to sort aluminium, for example). But the reason you sort is probably not because it is useful. You do it because you feel it is right. It is a ritual. Like in many places, where the glass is sorted by colour and then, when picked up, ends up in the same bin anyway. You can only sort to some extent, and the result must be inspected anyway.

Although I don't judge people who think that animals ought not to be harmed by the actions of the assholes who attack lab workers, I do judge members of friendly political movements who shrug their shoulders and mumble something about the cause being right. I don't know that Hitler was such a devout Christian, but he is a cautionary tale of right-wing christian conservatives coopting extremism for their cause... I dislike some truly horrible campaigns by animal right supporters who create a climate such that some feel justified in performing criminal acts -- coopting extremism for their cause.

You think that I dislike the greens because of the oil and gas companies? No, I dislike them because of the way they vote on issues touching ecology. Otherwise, they tend to be a party I rather like. Sad isn't it? Until they start to campaign against gas and for nuclear they will not get my vote. Hell, I might even vote for them if they just shut up about that subject. The biggest risk to us all is climate change. Carbon reduction should be the number 1 goal. If the political compromise you cause to happen is coal/gas/renewable instead of nuclear/renewable, never mind what you wanted, you were on the wrong side of the line, and you played with our collective lives because of political posturing.

And you are extra-guilty for realising how important the problem is, and not bringing about a solution.

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[LanMan04]

Breeding reactors are very expensive and complicated to operate, it is far cheaper to dump spent fuel somewhere.

That depends entirely on who it's "cheaper" for.

Nuclear company and their annual profits? Cheaper. For everyone else? Not so much.

You know what else is cheaper? No environmental regulations of any kind...which is why we have them.

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[dbIII]

That plant was designed in 1968, was only completely shut down a few years ago and is still being dismantled I believe so you can take your "purely political" fantasy and file it under "things don't last forever" - also I wrote "reprocessing plants" anyway which you should know is a different thing.
There's not much that can be reprocessed with current technology and it's very difficult and expensive to do so. So even in the best case it's almost all going to be wasted.
Just think about reprocessing fuel for more than two seconds. An alloy that is very strong and has a very high melting point needs to be turned into either powder or molten metal (or gas!) for separation and it's radioactive enough that nobody can go near it and unshielded electronics in robots get fried - plus it's a neutron source so anything that is close to it for more than a short time becomes low grade radioactive waste itself. Reprocessing is very difficult and currently far more energy intensive than producing new fuel from ore. It's a research project not an industry.

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[SomeKDEUser]

Super-phoenix was never put into operation. So much for "shut down". Phoenix, the research project, was successful enough that its successor was built. Politics caused it to never be started.

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[dbIII]

Super-phoenix was never put into operation

WTF!
There is even a wikipedia page about it you lying idiot! Stop wasting everyone's time trying to tell people something you don't have the slightest clue about, look for yourself and get a clue instead.

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[SomeKDEUser]

Quoting the page:

During 11 years, the plant spent 63 months of normal operations, mostly at low power; 25 months of outages due to fixing technical problems of the prototype; and 66 months were spent on halt due to political and administrative issues.

Mostly did not operate normally. I recalled not at all, but I was wrong. The plug was however not pulled because it did not work, but because of a political decision, taken after the issues had been fixed, so your argument about the whole idea being bad/not working remains wrong.

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[budgenator]

The previously molten fuel sludge, that's congealed at the bottom of those reactors will need a lot of work before it can be fed back into a breeder reactor.

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[SomeKDEUser]

Oh, clearly. And we all hope it is in fact congealed...

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[cheeks5965]

Breeder reactors have already been smeared as potential sources of 'nuclear weapons'

ftfy

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[AmiMoJo]

Dude, you are talking out of your arse now. Sorting is a chore, not a ritual. We stopped sorting coloured glass a long, long time ago. I'd love it if someone invented a magic sorting machine to save me doing it myself, but no-one has. Just in case you need further convincing I'd point out that to make people do this chore they have to fine them for not doing it.

Your next argument is even more nonsensical. I don't know who these people are who shrug their shoulders because any time I have spoken to or listen to them on TV they always condemn violence without hesitation. Let's say for argument's sake that they do exist, well does that make their point about the cause being just any less valid? Of course not because the point stands on its own and is not reliant on violent action to be valid, nor does it seek to justify such action.

You seem to be unable to separate ideas from the people who support them. Worse still you seem to think that the majority of people who disagree with you are nutters.

Most green parties around the world are in favour of nuclear over coal and gas, but think that the majority of investment should be in renewables. That isn't a difficult concept to understand so I don't know why you are struggling with it. Nuclear is the best of a bad bunch, preferable to coal and gas in countries where it can be done safely, but renewables are both viable and the most preferable option of all. It really isn't that hard to understand.

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[sodul]

Like the Chernobyl cloud stopped at the french borders at the time, as if the country had magical anti radioactive particle barrier ?
Like BP only had a minor leak in the gulf ?
Like Fukushima had perfect safety records ?

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[sjames]

What does one do at a dump?

Toss things indiscriminately into a pile and forget all about them. As in, tip them out of a dump truck into a pit. I'll bet that's not what they'll be doing.

In a storage facility though, you place things in their proper place, enter it into inventory, and track it.

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[sjames]

You don't need a breeder to use re-processed fuel.

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[dbIII]

taken after the issues had been fixed

You didn't read much of it did you?
Here's some background probably not in that article that might help make it clear why it has been considered a bad idea since about the late 1970s. Back in the 1960s there were not a lot of developed Uranium mines and a lot of the deposits we mine now had not even been found. Also the Uranium reactors in use at the time required a higher purity of fuel than later reactors. That made it appear that reserves of the Uranium isotope required would soon run out. The French military also wanted relatively large amounts Plutonium for their radidly expanding nuclear weapons program. Those were the major reasons behind the construction of Plutonium fast breeders and none of them are valid today. Thus it is now a bad idea.
As for the implementation - that wasn't very good either but considering the reactors there were the only full scale reactors of their type built anywhere that wasn't entirely unexpected - first attempts often have problems. One thing that was never solved and made those reactors incredibly expensive to run was the problem of having a working large scale liquid sodium cooling system. The best they could do was replace a lot of the pipework at intervals and shutdown a reactor every time they had a minor sodium leak. With the huge ongoing costs, aging technology, and no need for the Plutonium produced it was only a matter of time before France shut down their worst performing plant. What better bone to throw to the greens than a plant that was bleeding money for little use anyway? Some of this stuff is in the article - all of it was in the global press (I'm not French).
Accelerated Thorium reactors on the other hand make sense today, but they are a very very different thing to Plutonium fast breeders. They can use up SOME of the high grade waste but that still leaves a lot. There are plenty of ways to deal with what is left but pretending it doesn't exist does not help anyone. Sadly that's the PR line, and since more money has been spent on PR about nuclear waste than actual R&D on storage techniques or storage itself they can convince plenty of suckers to beleive all kinds of crap.

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[khallow]

The idea that this waste is a goldmine because we know it can be processed is some very creative marketing on your part.

The reactors already exist. There are at least four reactors which currently do some sort of reprocessing of fuel rods. And given that by recycling rods, you can greatly enhance (Wikipedia claims up to a factor of 60) the amount of energy extracted from nuclear fuel as well as reduce high level radioactive waste, the product sells itself.

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[yndrd1984]

The only source I could find that lent support to any of your claims was Greenpeace. Sorry, citation needed.

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[bhiestand]

That's like taking your pickup truck to 500,000 miles because you like the color. It makes no sense.

I am not saying to not build safely, but to actually build the new safe designs before we need them to be built in a hurry, and thus under specced.

No, it's a bit more like paying marginal operations and maintenance costs rather than paying billions to decommission your old truck and billions more to buy a new one when the regulators say "that's fine, you can do that."

That's only because the USA and japan and Europe has banned all new reactors of safe designs and decided to extend the life of the old reactors by 2-3 times their original design lifetimes.

Banned? I don't know if you're just trying to use loaded language or intentionally mislead people. First, there is no "safe" design, merely safer designs. Second, new designs aren't "banned", they just haven't been approved... in large part because very few serious attempts have been made to build them since the 70s. Third, Obama took some flak (on this very site) for attempting to spur the construction of new nuclear plants by promising massive loan guarantees.

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[dunkelfalke]

They use chemical extraction, not breeding reactors. While this helps to recover uranium, you still have other actinides and all the fission products left to deal with.

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[dunkelfalke]

I am all for forcing nuclear power plant oprators to rebreed their spent fuel. But such a law would force them out of business immediately.

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[bryan1945]

The first one is in French and looks to have been dropped.
The 2nd one was from the company itself. With scientists saying it was much greater, which turned out to be true.
The 3rd was from the company that admitted it falsified records.

I don't see 'scientists' or 'industry' in your argument(s). Just companies trying cover their asses.

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[LanMan04]

Nationalize them.

Nuts!

[Peter H.S.]

Yes, make a nuclear waste dump on a site known to be hit by magnitude 9.0 earthquakes and Tsunamis. Great idea that shows how safety conscious the nuclear industry is.

Re:Nuts!

[Riceballsan]

"known to be hit by magnitude 9.0 earthquakes" is a tad excessive of a way to put it. Particularly due to the fact that it is inaccurate to put it as plural. There has been a total of 1 9.0 earthquake there, in recorded history. I'm not completely disagreeing with the possible risk I'm not sure what the damage a smaller earthquake would do to a nuclear waste storage facility, just the way you phrased it sounds kind of silly. It's akin to saying "look at the idiots building the freedom tower, in an area known for having planes crash into tall buildings".

Re:Nuts!

[darkstar949]

I hate to say it, but there really isn't any way to keep the plant from being a nuclear waste dump to some extent since they are going to have a really hard dismantling the entire site to dispose of the damaged reactors for a couple of decades. As such, it is likely better to put the entire site under nuclear waste dump protocols and just write the entire site off as an active power plant.

However, I don't see adding additional waste to the site from other locations as a very good idea, so hopefully they are just limiting things to the damaged reactors and the containment necessary.

Re:Nuts!

[kmdrtako]

nukulars?

awesome scientists?

on there team?

so u can be sure?

Is that you, W?

Re:Nuts!

[Bengie]

The entire island is surrounded by faults and oceans and they have no such thing as "un-used" land. No matter where they put it, it will be near a site that will eventually be earthquake active. About every place they could put it would fall under "hit by magnitude 9.0 earthquakes and Tsunamis", just probably not on record.

Re:Nuts!

[nedlohs]

But is trying to move all the nuclear waste of multiple melted down nuclear plants going to be more risky than just making it a nuclear waste dump in place in a not so optimal location?

Both choices have risks.

Do you really know enough about both sets to declare it nuts already?

Re:Nuts!

[Cwix]

The problem with your analogy is the place is subject to all sorts of earthquakes. Yes, not all of them are 9.0 but they are subject to regular earthquakes. It would be like if the trade centers had to weather a plane (of varying sizes) crashing into it monthly.

Re:Nuts!

[afidel]

The problem is that the area has had higher tsunami's in the not so distant past, there are stones along the hillside (some more than 600 years old) that show a line below which past tsunami's have wiped out homes.

Re:Nuts!

[he-sk]

First of all, the geological record in Japan contains proof of previous tsunamis of the same height as the most recent one and presumably caused by an earthquake of similar strength. So your decision to only count earthquakes of which there is a seismological record while excluding other data is somewhat arbitrary.

Secondly, the 1952 Kamchatka earthquake, although it occurred north of Japan, was also a 9.0-magnitude quake, did result in a tsunami, and most importantly, was caused by the same fault line that brought us the recent quake.

In other words, the GP's use of plural is completely justified.

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[LinksAwakener]

One thing you're not considering is building codes of today vs. when the plant was created. There are MUCH stricter laws in place--especially in Japan--that would reduce the risk of earthquake damage tremendously. It wouldn't *eliminate* it, but it sure would make it a lot safer. That having been said, nuclear energy is still the safest form of energy, orders of magnitude safer than coal or oil. Again it's not perfect, but the deaths-to-MW-h ratio is truly amazing.

Re:Nuts!

[drinkypoo]

They have waste lying around onsite as well, as do many (most?) nuclear reactors in operation. So they might as well stuff that in there, too.

How to choose a site?

[drolli]

do they choose it based on the assumption that there will be no big natural desasters close to this place?

Sea level rise

[mdsolar]

Japan is a signatory to the London Dumping Convention which prohibits disposing of nuclear waste at sea (as is the US). Putting a dump site close to the ocean (like at Humboldt Bay Nuclear) means that the site will have to be moved, likely at great expense, owing to seal level rise.

Re:Sea level rise

[hedwards]

Probably not. Even under the worst case scenario the sea levels aren't going to rise that much. At the end of the day they'll just build a dike if need be.

Re:Sea level rise

[pmontra]

Maybe they're moving the ocean somewhere else. It would be less bizarre than proposing to store nuclear waste there.

Re:Sea level rise

[mdsolar]

I think you are considering sea level rise this century which will likely be less than six meters. But nuclear waste is a problem for much longer than 90 years. The number should be 80 meters for complete melting plus tsunami wash so 150 meters or higher above current see level would be needed for a nuclear dump.

Re:Sea level rise

[calzakk]

Radioactive seals swimming around... not good.

Re:Sea level rise

[maxwell demon]

Maybe because there are people working at the plant, and working under water isn't that easy. Also remember that things like Diesel generators don't like water (actually, that's how the whole thing started in Fukushima, the Diesel generators being damaged by the Tsunami).

Another thing to consider is that sea water is an excellent electric conductor. I leave it to your imagination what it means for an under-water power plant.

Re:Sea level rise

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny that you dismiss a scientific argument as a hoax, but claim a 2000 year old bedtime story as the truth.

Or...

whoooooooooooosh. I very much hope whoooooooooooosh.

Re:Sea level rise

[black3d]

Hmm.. I think both of your figures are two orders of magnitude higher than reality. As an aside to the current conversation, could you link for me where those come from?

Re:Sea level rise

[mdsolar]

Some estimates for sea level rise this century come in at about two meters. An exponential process might lead to five meters: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/2/2/024002/fulltext

For the maximum possible sea level rise (expected under BAU carbon dioxide emissions eventually) 80 meters is calculated here: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/

Re:Sea level rise

[SquirrelDeth]

But won't nuclear powers lower carbon emissions slow down the effects of global warming? And I don't think there is enough ice on the planet to raise sea level 80 meters. Just a quick glace at a globe and I see many times more blue than white, the oceans are 361 million square km and Antarctica is 14 million square km.

Re:Sea level rise

[mdsolar]

Actually, nuclear power increases over all emissions owing to its high opportunity cost which displaces more effective technology. http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library%2FE09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly

Here is a calculation for maximum possible sea level rise: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/

Re:Sea level rise

[countertrolling]

...seal level rise...

Will result in a proportional decrease in the penguin level

Re:Sea level rise

[pixelpusher220]

radiation would not spread as far as long as the plant wasn't near a major current

Well except for the fact that the radiation is *hot* and the nearby water would be heated and, like, RISE. Oops.

Re:Sea level rise

[jon_doh2.0]

Americans and irony. WHOOSH indeed.

Re:Sea level rise

[jon_doh2.0]

You're a no brainer.

Re:Sea level rise

[khallow]

I think you are considering sea level rise this century which will likely be less than six meters.

The rise will probably be less than a meter.

But nuclear waste is a problem for much longer than 90 years. The number should be 80 meters for complete melting plus tsunami wash so 150 meters or higher above current see level would be needed for a nuclear dump.

90 years is probably longer than the treaty will last. I think it's a good bet for Japan to make. The Fukushima site will be a long term problem anyway. Turning it into a storage/dump site for radioactive waste is a nice bit of synergy.

Re:Sea level rise

[mdsolar]

A meter is less than six but you should say possibly less than a meter since most current estimates come in over a meter. http://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/21527.full.pdf

Re:Sea level rise

[gujo-odori]

Just to cite a single data point about sea levels, there is an aquifer-fed lake (Lake Merced) in San Franciso. Lake Merced is very near the beach, maybe 300 or 400 yards. At the lake, there is a sign describing the history of the lake, and the most interesting point for me was that long ago (during the last ice age, IIRC; haven't been to Merced in a long time) the coastline was about 20 *miles* west of where it is today. The Golden Gate was a dry-land canyon through which the Sacrament-San Joaquin rivers drained to the sea. According to Wikipedia (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay) the sea rose 91 meters when the ice melted.

If we look back millions of years, most of what is now the western United States was covered by a warm, shallow sea. Sea levels can fluctuate tremendously, so it behooves us to get the location of nuclear waste storage dumps as right as we can on the first try. Take-overs are hard, since any problem that threatens one would need to be predictable decades in advance in order to build a new dump and relocate the waste, unless there were a large number of dumps with a lot of capacity. Even then, moving the waste (assuming it could be moved) could take years.

Re:Sea level rise

[surveyork]

Introducing thermal solar, now with heat storage for extended periods of power generation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy

Re:Sea level rise

[khallow]

A meter is less than six but you should say possibly less than a meter since most current estimates come in over a meter.

I didn't see that in your reference. I saw a reference to a bunch of temperature estimates from the IPCC combined with a paper which posited a tenuous relation between global temperature and sea level. All I know is current sea level rise is about 3 millimeters a year. At that rate, we'd see less than 30 cm rise in the next 90 years.

Re:Sea level rise

[jon_doh2.0]

In that instance it was indeed, yes, hard to tell. It really really was.

Though, i will admit that tone of voice is often the giveaway.

Re:Sea level rise

[mdsolar]

Not at all. Within a few hundred years tens of meters is assured under BAU emissions. You should read up.

Re:Sea level rise

[mdsolar]

Usually reading the abstract helps with scientific papers:

We propose a simple relationship linking global sea-level variations on time scales of decades to centuries to global mean temperature. This relationship is tested on synthetic data from a global climate model for the past millennium and the next century. When applied to observed data of sea level and temperature for 1880–2000, and taking into account known anthropogenic hydrologic contributions to sea level, the correlation is >0.99, explaining 98% of the variance. For future global temperature scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, the relationship projects a sea-level rise ranging from 75 to 190 cm for the period 1990–2100.

Re:Sea level rise

[khallow]

And that's what I got from reading the abstract. There's no firm numbers here, but just one group extrapolating from their model using temperature estimates from other groups.

Re:Sea level rise

[mdsolar]

That's why they are called estimates.

Re:Sea level rise

[khallow]

That's why they are called estimates.

If you had read the abstract, you would have seen that the whole thing depends on a poorly tested relationship between temperature and global sea level.

Response to the voice of common sense...

[Pollux]

I'm sure most posts that show up in this thread are going to be very similar in nature to the parent, but don't jump to conclusions so quickly. When the industry talks about long-term storage, here's what they're referring to... (from the article):

The disposal of high-level waste is more complicated since it needs to be solidified into borosilicate glass and placed inside heavy stainless steel cylinders about 1.3 meters high, the World Nuclear Association said. The casks are then usually transferred to interim storage sites before a long-term underground repository is built.

Storing nuclear waste as borosilicate glass in dry-cask storage is an expensive process, but once complete, the casks are quite durable. This is a much safer storage option compared to leaving the spent fuel pellets in a swimming pool.

Nuclear Dump

[Anonymous Coward]

God already took a nuclear dump there didn't he? Who are we to argue? /troll

pfft

[eyenot]

i've been saying this from day-1 "they're going to have to scrap the whole thing, it'll never function properly or safely ever again, and you watch, it'll be more than just encased, they're going to completely fill it with materials that slow radiation".

like ocean mud. three to one, place a bet with me, grimy mud from the bottom of the deepest oceans will be involved because it was discovered that more than any other substance including lead and ceramics, mud from the bottom of the ocean is the best barrier against radiation. the only reason they wouldn't do that would be to spare expense. i'd say ten to one but two factors against it happening are: 1. it's expensive to do 2. apparently the people involved with this plant are cheap asses who spare every possible expense whenever they can.

anyways. i thought it was horrendous that they kept trying to keep it as a viable, working power station for so long. greedy dumbfucks.

Re:pfft

[maxume]

You are angry because you misunderstood what they were doing.

The second they injected seawater into each of reactors 1, 2 and 3, they knew they were abandoning the investment in those reactors. Since then, their efforts have been to restore active cooling, which is the best long term solution to the problem (they can bring the fuel under control, remove it and store it properly).

Trying to bury it would have been foolish.

Re:pfft

[eyenot]

but, every time they approached the press about cooling the reactors, it was always coupled with statements about providing power, so gee, you can't really blame me, can you? after all, i'm not a nuclear engineer!

Re:pfft

[phayes]

It doesn't take a nuclear engineering degree, you needed only to read any of the hundreds of serious reports or even the comments here on the fukashima incident here on /. to learn that power is needed for months to continue cooling the by-products of the initial power-producing fission in a reactor after it has been shut-down. Without the cooling, the waste heat is sufficient to boil off the water, then melt the fuel assemblies. If the fuel then falls to the bottom of the reactor in it can restart criticality. Instead of presenting yourself like you were an authority saying "i've been saying this from day-1" and embarrassing yourself, you'd have been better off lurking & learning.

100.000 years

[captainpanic]

The comments here once again show that people only look for the duration of their own lifespans (or perhaps a little more) regarding the storage of nuclear waste.

Nuclear storage must be done in a place which is inherently safe. Which is safe without human intervention in the next decades/centuries/millenia.
You can't dump it somewhere and make a plan to "build a dike if need be". Who will guarantee that a dike will be built if need be in 250 years from now? Or 2500 years from now?

Re:100.000 years

[calderra]

I don't see how "this containment site broke" is a qualifier for a good containment site. Anyone care to explain?

Re:100.000 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Thing is, you can reprocess nuclear waste to reuse it one more time, reducing the decay time from a few millenia to less than a hundred years.

Re:100.000 years

[kevinNCSU]

Not that I think this is a good site location, but in your hypothetical, if there's no people or organized government around to do so who cares? In such a post-apocalyptical world no ones going to care about a little nuclear waste winding up in the ocean when there's a zombie ripping their face off to get to their delicious brains.

Re:100.000 years

[Anonymous Coward]

I thank the Gods every day that /.ers are not responsible for managing this..

Except for your post, I would gladly have you oversee as QA anyday Sir!

Re:100.000 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that I think this is a good site location, but in your hypothetical, if there's no people or organized government around to do so who cares? In such a post-apocalyptical world no ones going to care about a little nuclear waste winding up in the ocean when there's a zombie ripping their face off to get to their delicious brains.

A more likely scenario than a zombie apocalypse will be a change in government. One that may not be aware of the nuclear waste storage area and therefore unable to respond to it. Even if the same government is in place it may simply be forgotten.

Re:100.000 years

[Will.Woodhull]

Nuclear storage must be done in a place which is inherently safe.

While that is the sane approach, the only place within human reach that would meet the criteria would be the surface of the Moon. For although there are regions in the Earth's crust that are isolated enough from any ecosystem in their undisturbed state, building the necessary tunnels and shafts for moving stuff into storage in those regions would permanently break that isolation. Also, those regions are proving to be much harder to identify and much smaller in potential storage capacity than we used to think.

But placing cold nuclear waste on the lunar surface is not that far fetched. We already have the rocket technology to do the lifting at costs comparable to developing any deep Earth storage facility. The design of the casks used during the intermediate cooling period could be modified to handle a soft impact with the regolith, and more importantly to survive a crash back to Earth when a launch needed to be aborted.

There would be a number of long term advantages, too. Today's nuclear waste is probably going be feedstock for some future technology; putting it on the Moon would keep it out of the hands of dirty bomb riffraff while keeping it accessible to future scientists and engineers.

The major problem with this approach is that it threatens the profits of the nuclear power industry. It could be implemented with today's technology, but that means that the costs of long term storage would start coming due now, rather than being put off until after all of today's CEOs and Board Members have retired. That is probably the biggest reason why no money is being put into exploring this approach. It is a direct threat to the bonuses and retirement plans of the people who frame the discussions about the future of nuclear power.

Re:100.000 years

[captainpanic]

In such a post-apocalyptical world no ones going to care about a little nuclear waste winding up in the ocean when there's a zombie ripping their face off to get to their delicious brains.

Exactly what I said then: we're only looking at our own life spans and a little bit more. After that, we don't care.

I for one am happy that the ancient Roman empire hasn't left a couple of nuclear or toxic dumps across Europe... even though the Dark Ages may be considered a post-apocalyptical era, compared to the organization or the Romans.

Re:100.000 years

[dbIII]

Actually glass is a bad idea because water leaches heavy elements out over time, and that's been clear since probably around the 1960s (hence the old proposals of encapsulation and then storage in salt mines or deserts where water is not a problem). The waste storage technology Synrock avoids glass structures and keeps things crystalline for that reason.

The concept that there will be dangerous amount of radiation after a lifetime

That all depends on how much there is to start with and what it is. If you have lot of stuff with a relatively long half life it could be as much of a health risk as a little bit of very active material. The answer is to treat it with respect instead of the PR scam of pretending that there is no problem.

Re:100.000 years

[Sabriel]

Nuclear storage must be done in a place which is inherently safe.

While that is the sane approach, the only place within human reach that would meet the criteria would be the surface of the Moon.

Which would be incredibly expensive. A far cheaper and safer method would be to bury the waste in a deep subduction zone in the Earth's crust. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Geologic_disposal

Nuclear waste - like so much else in our world - has become a political, not technical, problem.

Re:100.000 years

[Will.Woodhull]

A far cheaper and safer method would be to bury the waste in a deep subduction zone in the Earth's crust.

That only seems to be an option because we are so ignorant about the processes of plate tectonics. Dumping the casks into regions that now appear to be involved in Richter 9+ quakes every so often does not sound reasonable.

Consider that three decades ago one candidate for long term storage was dropping the vitrified waste into mid ocean rifts where it would take millons of years for ocean floor spreading to bring them back into the biosphere, But then we learned about black smokers and that these places were a lot more active, chemically and biologically, than anyone had thought could be the case. Thinking that the subduction zones would be safe repositories simply because we do not know of any risks at the moemnt is not prudent. Not only do we not know of any risks, we do not know very much at all about what is going on there.

Besides, moon shots with unmanned vehicles are pretty cheap, and probably comparable to the costs of developing the deep water surveying and placement technologies needed to set casks in subduction trenches.

Re:100.000 years

[pixelpusher220]

bury the waste in a deep subduction zone in the Earth's crust.

A novel idea.

An issue that I see is that the containers of the waste need to be strong enough to resist geologic forces. Otherwise as it starts its journey down the waste is released and may come back up with the water and magma vents common to such subduction zones.

But otherwise seems somewhat feasible.

Wouldn't drilling a 'really deep' whole in a non-geologic zone work just as well? If it's 15 miles down in the middle of a plate with no seismic activity, seems a reasonable risk to me.

Re:100.000 years

[fafaforza]

The sea level won't rise to dangerous levels overnight. There would be plenty of time to move the material to another site. The positive aspect of this site (if there's anything positive about the whole situation) is that it's already contaminated, will have no civilian occupation, and will be swarming with trained staff.

Re:100.000 years

[bware]

Besides, moon shots with unmanned vehicles are pretty cheap, and probably comparable to the costs of developing the deep water surveying and placement technologies needed to set casks in subduction trenches.

Where do you get that moon shots are cheap? A Delta IV Heavy launch costs upwards of $300M, independent of the cost of the payload. Word on the street is that the real cost is something like $700M (big launch vehicles are heavily subsidized by the military. Shuttle launches cost something like $1B). SpaceX claims that they'll get that cost down to $60M for the equivalent of a DIV medium, but that won't go to the moon. I wish them the best, but I'll believe it when I can use my Visa Plutonium to make the deposit on one.

In addition, a not small percentage of these will fail. And rockets, like nuclear power plants, tend to work when they work, and fail spectacularly when they don't, and for the same reasons. Lots of energy in a small volume. Something between 7-10%. So every 15 launches, you get to write off a complete launch facility due to radioactive contamination (blowing up on the launch pad - best case), and a whole lot of downwind real estate (airburst - worst case).

Even in the best case, it ain't cheap to abandon a launch site - "the $4 billion SLC-6 was refurbished at a cost of about $300 million to accommodate Delta IV missions.".

Subduction zones don't seem like a great idea; too many unknowns, though I'd bet that undersea researchers would be thrilled to get a fraction of the cost of moon shot to explore the idea. The next generation deep sea submersible had an estimated cost of $21M in 2008.

Re:100.000 years

[cstacy]

Nuclear storage must be done in a place which is inherently safe.

While that is the sane approach, the only place within human reach that would meet the criteria would be the surface of the Moon.

I thought the moon was a bad idea since 9.13.1999 ?

Re:100.000 years

[khallow]

0.1 millimeters is immortality. Sand doesn't weather much below this size. And why use 100,000 years for your danger period when a few centuries is more appropriate? Remember we should be recycling the fuel rods.

Re:100.000 years

[khallow]

Until you discuss recycling of nuclear fuel, there's no point to discussing how much you care about future generations of humans. As has been repeatedly pointed out, that turns the so-called "100,000 year" problem into one which can be handled by humans without invoking the safety of generations a ridiculous period of time in the future.

It is all a big cover up.

[leuk_he]

(read quickly because this comment will deleted soon by those in power)

Since Nuclear power is statisticstically safe, and the power plants would have shutdown in the earthquake it is very unlikely that such a disaster really happened there. All that we can see is that real news is censored, everybody in a wide area was moved away, A No fly zone was erected , even as radiation at high altitudes is completely neglect able,and independand research are kept a great distance.

All that surely must point to something more serious and it can only lead to the conclusion that the tjunamis was caused aliens landing and that they came to land close to fukushima, or that the hatching eggs of godzilla caused the tsunami and now they are researching Godzilla at that location, or whatever, this region was filled with old folklore that either came to life or is now lost for the next decades.

By making a storage there it is a sure thing that they can keep the peopla away for some more decades, while they at the same time have a good excuse to build some huge buildings that can hide the cover-up. And since no more people live there, there is no-one who can protest.

Re:It is all a big cover up.

[circletimessquare]

cool story bro

Re:It is all a big cover up.

[black3d]

Not sure if serious, so can't mod funny. >

Re:It is all a big cover up.

[idontgno]

You should have modded funny. It doesn't matter whether the poster believes it or not.

Like joy, you should take your humor wherever you find it.

Re:Same scale as the Chernobyl

[Mascot]

There are tons of articles if you do a google. From what I've seen, it boils down to: Chernobyl rating, but not Chernobyl bad.

Re:Same scale as the Chernobyl

[maxwell demon]

There is and was NO THREAT to anyone's health at Fukushima.

Sure, that must be the reason why they created an evacuation zone around Fukushima. Governments just like to evacuate people for no reason, right?

But the ejection of graphite and 9 day burning of the core obviously referred to Chernobyl. He doubted the claim that Fukushima was the same scale as Chernobyl, of which you hopefully don't deny that it had graphite ejection and burning. And since you even claim that there was no thread at all for anyone's health at Fukushima (which you hopefully don't claim for Chernobyl), you actually confirmed his doubt, after calling him a liar.

Next time before you answer a post, maybe you first read and understand the post you answer to, instead of blindly reacting on a few trigger words.

Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down?

[slashqwerty]

Hello nuclear engineers, can someone explain why it takes so long to shut down a nuclear power plant? I think my high school physics book was written by a pro-nuclear lobby. It assured me a nuclear plant can drop some control rods into place and stop the reaction. That may be true, but it still leaves a huge safety problem if it takes several weeks or even months for the reaction to stop.

Proposals for 'passive' cooling systems involve putting a big tank of water over the plant. If the plant shuts down you let gravity feed the cooling system. If a major incident happens, such as an earthquake or tsunami, it is likely to damage the tank and let all of the water out. What good is a passive system that is subject to the same problems as the plant itself?

Why can't we build a nuclear power plant that requires an active system to keep feeding the reaction, and make the reaction stop within minutes rather than weeks?

Re:Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down?

[eyenot]

i just found this article in bloomberg, it's a play-by-play analysis. the tone is fairly apologetic and tends to put the people responsible into a heroic light, but wtfe. after you read this you'll know why all the different shit happened. it's fairly in-depth.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-25/japan-s-terrifying-day-saw-unprecedented-exposed-fuel-rods.html

Re:Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down?

[mortonda]

This has been repeated many times here on slashdot. The reaction stopped, but the core is still VERY hot and has to be cooled for a while. This is what failed. When the core gets hot enough, the fuel melts the containment and falls to the bottom, and might start reacting again.

I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I wonder if we could come up with some sort of design that would allow the fuel rods to mechanically fall in different directions to spread out the heat.. ideally without any extra power needed.

Re:Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down?

[betterunixthanunix]

Hello nuclear engineers, can someone explain why it takes so long to shut down a nuclear power plant?

I am not a nuclear engineer, but my understanding of the problem is that the fission byproducts decay very fast and release a lot of heat in the process, so until those byproducts are gone the rods need to be cooled.

Re:Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down?

[BlueParrot]

The splitting of atoms stops the moment you drop in the control rods ( i.e in a second or two ), but the waste products are still intensely radioactive, generating megawatts of heat. This is still a lot better than having the reactor running, because the heat generation from the waste is very predictable and stable, and it is also less than 10% of the full reactor power, dropping to less than 1% within a day or two.

The reason passive cooling is believed to be safer is pretty much that it does not rely on any machinery, electric power or moving parts. In this particular situation the problem was that all the water from the tsunami short-circuited the electronics of the plant, so the cooling pumps ceased to work. It is possible to build a nuclear plant in such a way that pumps are not needed at all. As an example in the ESBWR design by Hitachi the reactor is tall and positioned further down than the turbines and heat exchangers. Thus the hot steam rises upwards while the colder water flows down, with no need for pumps.

You are correct that if the water itself is lost then a meltdown is very likely to occur unless it can be replaced quickly. However if the reactor's containment structure is solid enough then most of the radioactive fallout would still be contained without contaminating the environment. One of the problems with the Fukushima Daiichi power plant was that its containment is of a poor design and was unable to withstand the pressure. Contrast this with the three mile island plant where the containment dome kept almost all of the radioactive gases inside.

Another issue is that many reactors have teh nuclear fuel in zirconium tubes. This is good in one way because zirconium does not absorb very many neutrons so you don't need to enrich the uranium so much. However, if the zirconium overheats then it can react with the cooling water to form explosive hydrogen gas. This need not cause a problem if the containment is strong enough to contain a hydrogen explosion, or if the plant has the ability to safely vent the hydrogen to the atmosphere. Neither of this was the case at Fukushima, and it is strongly suspected that hydrogen explosions were involved in damaging the containment.

Re:Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down?

[Bengie]

They already have designs that self cool and the nuclear reaction actually has a negative feedback, which needs to be blocked.

The newer core designs, aka not 60 years old, would have kept the cores cool even without power and the rods would have went into a negative feedback cycle which would have cooled them down faster.

The newer, safer, less-waste designs are much more expensive, so here's hoping to actually putting money into new plants.

Re:Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down?

[Andy Dodd]

Google "decay heat".

It's toughest to manage in the first couple of hours after reactor shutdown. Had they kept the cooling systems going just a bit longer, there would likely have been significantly less damage.

"Proposals for 'passive' cooling systems involve putting a big tank of water over the plant. If the plant shuts down you let gravity feed the cooling system. If a major incident happens, such as an earthquake or tsunami, it is likely to damage the tank and let all of the water out. What good is a passive system that is subject to the same problems as the plant itself? "
1) So far there is no evidence that the plant (especially safety-critical items) suffered significant quake damage - One of the service pits cracked, but that's not supposed to be safety-critical. (Obviously, since they DID play a part, future plant designs are going to take that into account.)
2) Nothing within the reactor or turbine buildings was damaged by the tsunami - only unprotected (but unfortunately safety-critical) items outside of the reactor and turbine buildings. (This is why an ABWR probably would have survived without problems - they have additional backup generation inside the turbine building)
3) Newer plant designs have even more quake-hardening than the Fukushima reactors

End result - An AP1000 or ESBWR almost surely would have weathered this disaster without core damage. Both eliminate the need for backup generators.

Re:Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down?

[Andy Dodd]

ESBWR is close - the core stays in the same place, but there are heatpipes going to large cooling pools at the roof of the building.

Worst-case, you need a fire truck at the 72 hour mark.

Re:Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down?

[Vaphell]

it's like when you burn coal/wood (mechanics aside) - when you put out the fire, the leftovers still generate decay heat. So now imagine that the coal you burn is several orders of magnitude more potent and generates so much decay heat that it can melt itself and everything it touches with no problem, destroy the containment and initiate tons of chemical reactions thanks to plentiful energy. You need to cool it for months if not years - that's how much decay heat it produces.
Nuclear fuel has enormous energy density/output so you don't have to burn millions of tons of coal - that's the point of using it.
If you want actively feed the reaction, just go back to coal.

As for cooling systems being not foolproof - that's one of main problems with 40 years old designs. Knowledge progressed but real world applications did not. Nuclear industry froze in time because of TMI and Chernobyl.

Re:Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down?

[LWATCDR]

sigh....
The chain reaction will stop as soon as the rods are dropped. There is left over heat from decay product that is that must be removed by the coolant or else the core can get hot enough to melt. I keep hearing people talk about the reaction going on after that but the fuel in a standard reactor requires a moderator like water for the reaction to continue even without the control rods. Now this does not apply for graphite moderated reactors like the one at Chernobyl but a modern western power plant reactor with no coolant will not support a chain reaction. The coolant is also the moderator so you can not the imaginary runaway blob of radio active death that is so popular in the media.

Did you not bother to listen to CNN, read a newspaper, or pay attention to any of the other news sources when this was happening?

Re:Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down?

[petermgreen]

The root issue is that fission is a messy process. You smash one reasonablly stable nuclius into multiple peices but these peices are not always stable (i'm not sure if any of them are stable) which have varying half lives. As those decay they produce heat and decay products which themselves have varying half lives. As these elements decay they produce heat.

Stopping fission reactions is relatively easy (just kill off the neutron flux with control rods) but there is no way of stopping the fission products that have already been produced from decaying.

Re:Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down?

[mortonda]

Sounds like a lot of plumbing that could break in an earthquake... :(

Re:Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down?

[TheSync]

One suggestion to worrying about melt-down is to have the fissile material already melted. Flibe Energy is suggesting the use of molten thorium flouride salt reactors, which have the interesting property of not generating plutonium in the waste stream.

Re:Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down?

[hackertourist]

There's not much space inside the reactor vessel, so you can't separate the fuel rods by much.

Also, separating the fuel rods isn't going to decrease the amount of energy that's produced. All of the energy still goes into heating up the reactor vessel and its contents, so you end up with the same problem.

You're better off designing a more failsafe cooling loop.

Re:Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down?

[petermgreen]

One suggestion to worrying about melt-down

Well "vaporise up" sounds a lot worse to me than "melt down" ;)

Seriously though the fact that the fuel itself is already molten does nothing to solve the problem that the reactor system has a limited maximum temperature beyond which components will melt or otherwise be damaged allowing the fuel to flow to places it shouldn't and that given the amounf of power concentrated in a reactor that temperature can very likely be reached by decay heat alone..

Re:Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down?

[khallow]

Also, separating the fuel rods isn't going to decrease the amount of energy that's produced. All of the energy still goes into heating up the reactor vessel and its contents, so you end up with the same problem.

It helps prevent criticality incidents, which does increase the amount of energy involved. And increasing the surface area of your molten core does help cool it down.

Re:Why are nuclear plants so hard to shut down?

[TheSync]

the reactor system has a limited maximum temperature beyond which components will melt or otherwise be damaged allowing the fuel to flow to places it shouldn't

The design of FliBE is if the fuel gets too hot, it melts through a relief valve where through which it drains out and is spread out over a large area to reduce reactivity and cool down.

One problem is

[WegianWarrior]

that while common logic dictates long term storage in bedrock that is highly stable, there is no such place in Japan. Well, there is plenty of bedrock, but being situated pretty much on top of an active fault line, there is little in the way of truly stable bedrock. There is plenty of better places to build deep geological repositories, most nations don't really want to have somebody elses nuclear waste transported along their coasts to reach those places - if the were even willing to accept the waste in the first place, which is far from likely.

It may be that using a broken power plant is the best option for Japan right now. If that is the cause, I just found another reason why I'm glad I don't live in Japan (earthquakes and tsunamis are near the top on that list).

Re:One problem is

[vikisonline]

I'm sure Iran or North Korea wouldn't mind. We should talk to them.

Re:Same scale as the Chernobyl

[oobayly]

Of course, you could have read my post properly. Also it would be quite difficult to eject graphite from the core of a BWR, due to the distinct lack of it.

Your reaction is why I put my disclaimer, unlike you I'm not a rabid supporter. People like you do more damage to the perception of the nuclear industry more than any anti-nuclear campaigner can.

There is and was NO THREAT to anyone's health at Fukushima.

Official (and verified) reading quote over 1000mSv/hr, several hours exposed to that would certainly be a threat to somebody's heath.

Oh, you're an AC, <sigh>, what a waste of electrons.

yellowstone

[eyenot]

i don't think we should go on looking at tectonics as a stored-energy situation, based on probabilities. there is this whole entire other way of describing zones as 'active' and so on that goes against all of that, but for some reason scientists use both models. how can a serious scientist seriously look at the problem of earthquakes and volcanoes as both an assurance (where some areas are definitely more likely to be hit by these disasters than others) and also as a probability (where if one of these disasters just occured, it's less likely to happen again anytime relatively soon)? i mean, by putting a region under a category as 'active' that would by necessity mean that it's therefore that much less likely for anything to happen there, because it already happened before.

i know i sound confused but i'm not. i think the scientists who try and predict or assess these things need to pick one of two models and stick with it, and i don't think the gambling-based probability model is where it's at. i think they should just get to the nitty gritty on categorizing different regions based on what they can observe in nearby fault lines and volcanoes, and just always keep alert over those regions.

consider what all of this crap means about the american northwest, for example. there's been this spooky thing going on with yellowstone national park for some time, which should have brought to american awareness the fact that the entire area there is a huge, flat, supervolcano. that's heating up to the point where it melts peoples' shoes. the big tip-off should've been "old faithful" going nuts. "gee something's going to happen, here". man, if people thought mt. st. helens was bad, if yellowstone blew it would be like mt. st. helens was a pimple and the person's eye just fell out of their head. there would probably be many thousands dead from the explosion alone, and then millions from the after affects. life west of the grand canyon would get nasty. and yet our science hasn't progressed to the point, yet, where it's become obvious that these zones we keep picking up on, like "the ring of fire", are best considered connected for a *reason*? perhaps because they all operate on the same mechanism?

and before you go saying that yellowstone blowing is fringe or some bullshit, don't forget:
1. there are several very serious scientists trying *right now* to warn people about yellowstone
2. it's a safety issue affecting potentially millions of lives and the american economy on a level like you're seeing japan facing, now, on top of what problems we already have
3. pretending it's fringe just because you don't "get it" amounts to disinformation

Re:yellowstone

[mrchaotica]

Although you're right that we should be worried about Yellowstone (personally, I vacillate between wanting to go see it before it blows up and wanting to stay the Hell away in case it blew up while I was visiting!), your post is somewhat off-topic. Also, you really do sound confused. I see no conflict between the idea of two geological models, if both are useful but in different ways from each other. What the geologists are saying is simply that they know something will happen eventually, but they don't know exactly when, which makes perfect sense.

Hot seal food

[mdsolar]

Radioactive fish to feed the seals? http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/26/greenpeace-japan-nuclear-plant-radiation-accumulating-in-marine-life/

Re:Fukushima in my pants

[maxwell demon]

I have Fukushima in my pants.

Ah, I understand: You weren't able to keep your containment closed, and now your pants are contaminated. :-)

Waste

[MrL0G1C]

About 90 percent of the world's 270,000 tons in used nuclear fuel is stored at reactor sites, mostly in ponds of seven meters deep, such as those exposed at the Fukushima site when hydrogen explosions blew the roofs off reactor buildings.

- Tell me this doesn't you cringe. The only kind of nuclear power I'd ever accept is that which doesn't leave behind nuclear waste and doesn't have the potential to explode.

Re:Waste

[circletimessquare]

then you want breeder reactors, which leave 1/10th the amount of waste, generate 10x more power, and have less harmful radioactive waste byproducts with halflives of a century rather than 10,000 years

problem is, breeder reactors make plutonium. nobody wants anyone making plutonium

nuclear power is over, it's a historical, ostracized energy source as of march 11, 2011. all serious nations are moving away from nuclear. nuclear is a wonderful power source in all regards except for the waste nightmare and the fact that althought hings rarely go wrong, when they do, they REALLY go wrong

if you deny nuclear power is an endangered species, you indeed are living in denial, and you just remind me of baghdad bob:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf

Re:Waste

[circletimessquare]

no, no, no

it's JIGAwatts

Re:Waste

[Will.Woodhull]

I agree with the above, but want to point out that the ultimate failure of the nuclear power industry has nothing to do with a lack of foresight by engineering or science.

The underlying problem is one of an inadequate accounting system. The nuclear power industry is the first time anyone has tried to do cost benefit analysis on processes where the overwhelmingly greatest costs are in managing the waste stream: post-production costs. Early accounting systems were developed to manage costs of feedstocks, production, and moving product to market. Waste was not accounted for, which led to the incredible pollution problems of the last century. Handling the accounting of waste management or post-production costs continues to be a kind of correction tacked on to the basic bookkeeping systems in current use, rather than an integral part of any accounting system.

If it had been otherwise, it is doubtful that any business would have ventured into nuclear power generation. It would have been obvious that the total cost, including handling the waste stream, is too great to justify any reasonable investment.

Re:Waste

[circletimessquare]

well said

Re:Waste

[circletimessquare]

thank you, nuclear baghdad bob

Re:Waste

[Reservoir Penguin]

Then good thing my country, Russia is not a "serious" nation. We are moving ahead to doubling the amount of energy generated by nuclear, with dozens of reactors under planned and under constructions.

Re:Waste

[MrL0G1C]

Yeah ok, what I meant is no way to explode and poison millions of people and animals - I lived under the Chernobyl radioactive cloud, we used powedered milk because the cows were concentrating the radiation in to the milk, it was over a decade before all of the livestock were deemed to be safe to eat. Renewable energy can power our world needs several times over, we just need to start investing in energy storage - some of which is over 90% efficient, so it really doesn't matter if the supply isn't constant.

Re:Waste

[pacman on prozac]

You should take Russia seriously because if you shut off your nuclear generation then you'll end up dependant on their gas to keep your lights on.

Re:Waste

[Reservoir Penguin]

As I said, I'm glad Russia is not a serious country. I'm sure you also have a similar rant ready for China and India, other not so serious countries also expending nuclear with Russian assistance

Remain in blissful ignorance and keep outsourcing your production and IT to us. When we are ready we will forcefully remove your head from your ass.

Re:Waste

[subreality]

It would have been obvious that the total cost, including handling the waste stream, is too great to justify any reasonable investment.

I feel this way about burning fossil fuels too. It's really easy to burn things and not bother accounting for the exhaust. That leaves us with renewable energy which isn't currently able to scale to our needs. The technology will improve, but if our demands keep going up, it may not be possible to meet them.

That brings us around to two options that I see: a) reduce our needs, which doesn't look likely to happen soon; b) nuclear, including accepting the cost of waste management.

Re:Waste

[khallow]

The underlying problem is one of an inadequate accounting system. The nuclear power industry is the first time anyone has tried to do cost benefit analysis on processes where the overwhelmingly greatest costs are in managing the waste stream: post-production costs.

Keep in mind that the cost-benefit vastly changed from the days when most plants were designed and built. I don't believe that the designers could have predicted the obstacles that NIMBYism and nuclear nonproliferation would put in the way of fuel rod recycling and nuclear waste disposal.

I would go as far as to call this sort of failure, sabotage, since the people putting up most of these barriers (such as the nixing of the Yucca Mountain site) are opposed to nuclear power in the first place. Preventing reactor operators from disposing properly of radioactive waste is a big step to eventually ending nuclear power.

Re:Waste

[khallow]

The technology will improve, but if our demands keep going up, it may not be possible to meet them.

[...]

That brings us around to two options that I see: a) reduce our needs, which doesn't look likely to happen soon; b) nuclear, including accepting the cost of waste management.

There's also a first option, increase supply. Wind scales to several orders of magnitude above current human demand for energy. Solar scales a few orders of magnitude beyond that. Speculating that you need to use nuclear or whatever because somehow vast energy sources won't be able to provide us with sufficient power, just doesn't strike me as a realistic concern.

Nuclear is a good choice because it is a base load power source. You just run it for years at a time, with a little downtime to remove old fuel and maintain the reactor. But there's no issue with alternative energy sources other than they tend to be too unreliable in themselves for providing most of a society's power.

Re:Waste

[subreality]

I have no problem with using wind and solar for as much as we can, but coverage is spotty both geographically and temporally. Between the two we can probably get 40% of our present need, but it's going to take a long time to build out that kind of capacity. Solar is a fledgling technology and will take some time to experiment with how to build large-scale facilities; wind just needs a ton of manufacturing.

Hydro is great, but it's about tapped out. Not entirely, but it's not the base load of the future. It's a great peaker to fill in between wind and solar, though.

So for the next 40 years while we build out, and after then in areas and times when we need more than the sun and wind are offering - and I must emphasise that this will be optimistically at least 30% of our generation needs - what shall we use?

Re:Waste

[Will.Woodhull]

"In theory, there is no difference between theoy and practice, but..."

But there are now more than 40 years of spent fuel rods laying around in pools and casks awaiting some form of final disposition. Which rather strongly suggests that all the forty year old theoretical methods of handling the problem, including vitrification and deep sea storage, have been found to have no practical relevance. Gee, it is almost as if reality is more complex or subtle than the simple theories, that were intended as persuasive sales floor patter, would suggest.

There are some things, like responses to hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes, that do not fit anywhere under the theory of capitalism and cannot be effectively managed by the tools of profit-oriented industries. At this point the clearly obvious conclusion is that nuclear power generation is another of these things. I do not believe it is beyond human capability, but it has now become very hard to convince me that it can be done properly with the accounting systems and other tools of profit-oriented industry.

Re:Waste

[Tweenk]

problem is, breeder reactors make plutonium. nobody wants anyone making plutonium

1. Thorium breeders don't produce plutonium.
2. Plutonium from breeders is not useful for weapons.
3. Plutonium is far less toxic that the anti-nuclear clowns claim.

all serious nations are moving away from nuclear

Way to pull a no true Scotsman. The only nation pulling out is Germany, which is heavily infested with Greenpeace and other similar paranoid fanatics. It's obvious that they will return to coal - even the energy comissioner of the EU said so. US, France, Britain, even Japan is not going to abandon nuclear power.

nuclear is a wonderful power source in all regards except for the waste nightmare and the fact that althought hings rarely go wrong, when they do, they REALLY go wrong

Your characterization of accident consequences applies more to hydro power. Fukushima failed to kill anyone. Compare this with 171 000 dead from the Banqiao dam failure.
How many people are dying because of nuclear waste every year? Not even a single one.
I am very disappointed that otherwise rational people like you have given up reason and parrot the doomsaying from the media and anti-nuclear clowns. Even more worrying is the fact that your absurd, fact-free rant was modded up to +5 Insightful. Slashdot is no longer the place I thought it is.

see level

[mdsolar]

Is that a baseball term?

Safest

[mdsolar]

Be careful. The safest thing is to not create nuclear waste in the first place. That is only common sense.

Re:Safest

[bertok]

Common sense, but wrong.

There is an inherent risk in all power generation technologies -- just about the truly safe power generation method is solar, but that's not practical everywhere, and has only been cost-effective recently.

All other methods kill people. Coal kills thousands a year directly, tens of thousands indirectly. Oil kills people -- think oil rig fires, accidents, wars over oil, etc... Natural gas isn't fantastic either, producing it is just as dangerous as drilling for oil, it just pollutes somewhat less. Even wind power has the occasional industrial accident, mechanics falling off the tall towers, getting electrocuted, or whatever.

We aren't better off without power either -- the availability of cheap energy enables fertilizers, medicines, and heating -- without which we'd starve, get diseased, or freeze. Manufacturing of all modern goods requires electricity, and we need manufactured goods to live! There's too many of us now to survive without tools, machines, and automation.

Essentially, it's a tradeoff: one thing that kills people vs another source of death. We just pick the one that's better overall. In that sense, nuclear power is a very good trade: it's killed something like 40 people directly in its entire history, and no more than a few thousand indirectly, mostly from one accident at a poorly-managed old plant. Nuclear material from Fukushima has killed 0 people so far.

For contrast, the construction of the Hoover dam has claimed 112 lives, but you'd be hard pressed to find people who think that it was a bad idea to build it.

Re:Safest

[mdsolar]

Nuclear waste gets a lot of bites at the apple so I doubt you can make a comparison of this type credibly. Chernobyl alone will likely result in 30,000 to 60,000 excess cancer deaths so the problems are just getting started. http://www.chernobylreport.org/?p=summary

Re:Safest

[mrchaotica]

For contrast, the construction of the Hoover dam has claimed 112 lives, but you'd be hard pressed to find people who think that it was a bad idea to build it.

I don't think it would be that hard; stream ecologists, for instance, might have something to say about it.

The people against it are probably in the vast minority, though.

Re:Safest

[Rising Ape]

That report was paid for by the Greens. Would you be satisfied if I produced a report by Areva and Westinghouse?

A more neutral and authoritative source would be the WHO report, which says something like 4000-10000 excess cancer deaths. That's still a lot, of course, but the truth is that we really don't know the effects of chronic low-dose radation exposure - it may be a lot less in reality. Or more, of course, but that seems rather less likely, because then the dose-response curve would have a rather implausible shape - steep at low dose, going shallow in the middle before steepening again in the region where we actually have decent data.

Re:Safest

[mdsolar]

One of the main problems raised against the WHO report is that it did not consider all contaminated populations.

Re:Safest

[TrisexualPuppy]

Yet another greenpeace troll by a greenpeace troll. GJ on getting yet another FUD article slipped through, md. Even I get a retarded submission through every now and then.

Re:Safest

[gdshaw]

Common sense, but wrong.

There is an inherent risk in all power generation technologies -- just about the truly safe power generation method is solar, but that's not practical everywhere, and has only been cost-effective recently.

All other methods kill people.

Actually, solar power kills people too (especially rooftop solar). You are quite correct that it is a tradeoff though, with coal being orders of magnitude worse than nuclear.

Re:Safest

[khallow]

Chernobyl alone will likely result in 30,000 to 60,000 excess cancer deaths so the problems are just getting started.

There are two problems with the report you cite. First, it assumes that radioactive isotopes will continue to be present in the environment and harm people. Second, it uses linear interpolation for low radiation doses.

I'd take the IAEA or WHO estimates more seriously.

I hope Japan can solve its nuclear issue

[jenkiskhan]

Although a bit terrifying to what happened in Japan, but I hope they are able to solve problems in Fukushima Nuclear Earthquake damaged by the Tsunami a few months ago. Damage caused by the world community is very disturbing, because the resulting radiation and until recently its handling is still encountering several problems. I am sure, with the ability of Japanese nuclear experts and assisted by several scientists from the United States, France, Russia and other countries, then the matter would be resolved, sooner or later. Fukushima hopefully not become a nuclear waste as feared by some people

Re:I hope Japan can solve its nuclear issue

[rhyder128k]

I can't parse those sentences. Are you a script of some sort?

Tsunami stones

[mdsolar]

Some of the old tsunami stones were washed away and some were not. Evidence of past seismic activity similar to this year's?

Re:Same scale as the Chernobyl

[SomeKDEUser]

The scale is not based on the consequences. Not directly as in "level x means y people died/ z km^2 became unusable". It is more of a statement on how much the plant was damaged/can be repaired/(mis-)operated.

So you could have a accident at the maximum level completely confined in the plant, and a low-level incident killing people (typically because large turbines are dangerous/small radioactive releases can be really badly placed and timed).

Of course there is a moderately strong correlation between the two, in practise.

Hey, guys, dump it all over here!

[macraig]

What could go wrong?

Japan: I meant to do that!

[Idou]

Pee Wee style.

Re:Same scale as the Chernobyl

[DarenN]

Actually the scale is not about damage to the plant either. The International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) considers three factors [PDF]. The first factor refers to the effects on people and the release of radioactive materials, the second to the plant itself and the third to the failure of safety systems.

Obviously, the Fukushima accident (that's a INES term, by the way) is very high on the second and third factors, and it remains to be seen how high on the first factor.

Better wording:

[Chrisq]

Fukushima To Remain Nuclear Dump

To add a bit more about fast breeders

[dbIII]

Plutonium fast breeders were shown to be an expensive waste of time way back in the 1970s - the exception is if you are just starting out on atomic bomb production. That's probably before you and the weird cargo cult nuclear fanboys here were born. Everything in nuclear has moved on apart from the fanboys and the lobbyists that just want fleece the taxpayer by getting governments to buy old nuclear technology.

Re:To add a bit more about fast breeders

[dbIII]

go ahead and read my post again

Go and read mine - notice the AND after the word you :)
Now do you see that I'm not calling you a weird cargo cult nuclear fanboy? I'm most definitely insulting them since they appear to love technology but hate the underlying science, and I'm definitely insulting the major parts of the nuclear lobby that have spent more money on hookers for Senators than their companies have spent on R&D. It's either TMI painted green or imported technology with development paid for by the Japanese taxpayer (Westinghouse and Hitachi).

Re:To add a bit more about fast breeders

[circletimessquare]

oops

i'm a hypocrite

apologies

Re:To add a bit more about fast breeders

[dbIII]

I don't think so, probably just in a hurry.

Re:To add a bit more about fast breeders

[circletimessquare]

no, i shot my mouth off and got a shaming i deserved, to your credit you weren't even mean about it and i would have been. i shall endeavour to be a better person

Re:To add a bit more about fast breeders

[dbIII]

Fast reader reactor - nothing more :)

Dry casks

[mdsolar]

Dry cask storage does not involve vitrification. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage

When life gives you lemons . . .

[MarkvW]

Make poison lemonade!

This is very bad

[stooo]

Hello Fukushima Dai ichi is the worst dump site possible ! First it is situated directly over many future earthquakes. It can be reached by : - tsunamis - tropical storms and hurricanes, very common in this region - erosion - geological unstability - ground water Therefore, any stored material stored will, in a few years, leak without home to the ocean. In the lifetime of waste (million years), nearly all material will leak.

Wee little problem

[rubycodez]

the storage tank for the water leaking from two reactors with holes in containment, also has a leak. more of a slow distribution site than a nuclear waste storage site, haha.

Ouch!

[b4upoo]

Maybe they could call it population control. Storing a hazardous waste product in an areas proven to be vulnerable to tidal waves and severe earthquakes sounds like one way to kill of millions of citizens of their nation. If this were any more twisted I would think the Tea Party has a branch in Japan.

Anonymous whiners

[mdsolar]

Did the anonymous whiner read the linked study?

Re:Anonymous whiners

[surveyork]

Not all solar power is photovoltaic, not all photovoltaic technologies are as contaminant. Uranium mining is a part of nuclear power that seems to be left out of the debate. Uranium mining is not without environmental/health harm. Just for the record: I'm not a tree-hugger, and I consider myself nuclear-agnostic.

because it's unstable !

[stooo]

A nuclear criticity is inherenly unstable. Also "shutting down" works only in ideal conditions. When the fuel is liquid, it accumulates, and there is no easy way to stop that uncontrolled criticity. Also, every piece of material present around is made radioactive by induced radioactivity and contamination. So scrapping a plant is impossible (you can, at most, store the plant in pieces elsewhere, as very dangerous junk.) All this waste will leak, no matter what is done against. All containment materials degrade after decades. So there is, and there will be more and more consumed land. http://www.elenafilatova.com/index.html

Argh!

[ThatsNotPudding]

Putting a dump site close to the ocean (like at Humboldt Bay Nuclear) means that the site will have to be moved, likely at great expense, owing to seal level rise.

Goddam seals ruin everything!

Re:Same scale as the Chernobyl

[Coren22]

Here is your choice:

1. preemptively evacuate people just in case something goes ungodly wrong and the reactor blows up
2. being the asshole who gets 10s of thousands of people killed because you didn't evacuate the immediate area when you had the chance.

What you are saying is akin to the opposite that happened in New Orleans during Katrina. Why didn't they evacuate sooner on the off chance that the levies wouldn't hold? Please stop being nieve and repeating the same dump comments as the media.

Re:Same scale as the Chernobyl

[gdshaw]

Can anyone provide a source for this, I'm not denying this is the case, I'm just interested to know how, seeing as about 25% of the graphite was ejected and something like 5% of the core burned in the open for 9 days.

There are a couple of factors at work here. First is the fact that the INES scale only goes up to level seven. If you did a very simplistic numerical comparison then you might rate Chernobyl at ten times Fukushima, but since you are already at the top of the scale then the increased severity is not reflected in the INES level.

Second, the effects of the release are likely to be proportionately much smaller for Fukushima than Chernobyl. This is partly due to good luck (winds blowing in the right direction) and partly better management (like having a containment building, a much safer reactor design, and promptly evacuating the immediate area).

Related-Huge radioactivity spike at reactor #1

[surveyork]

There was a huge spike in radioactivity at reactor #1 from May 22 to 25. I think the readings are from the drywell. http://atmc.jp/plant/rad/?n=1

Re:Same scale as the Chernobyl

[gullevek]

And then we go back to the caves?

First, 300.000 people will NOT die because of Fukushima. Never. Ever. For that we would have to had an open core burning fire.

Nuke will never go away, because there are no big alternatives.

Worst case is that because of this, no new plants will be built and in a view years all the old plants planned to be decommissioned and replaced by new ones will be extended and become real ticking time bombs.

"the industry"

[vaporland]

Well, "the industry" told us two days after the disaster that the fuel rods were intact and the containment was intact.

Then last week, "the industry" told us last week that the opposite was true.

The last director of TEPCO replaced the previous one when the previous one was caught lying and covering up problems.

"the industry" has a long history of covering up problems. Read "We Almost Lost Detroit" for an unvarnished view of "the industry"

Pardon me if I don't trust "the industry"...

Re:"the industry"

[vaporland]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-27/tepco-faces-massive-problem-containing-radioactive-water-at-fukushima.html

submission

[mdsolar]

Thanks. But there is only one accepted submission listed for you: http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/05/30/1211240/New-Ebola-Drug-100-Effective-In-Monkeys which does not seem all that retarded. It does have only 129 comments so it might be less interesting than the present article which happens to be news you can use. You know, stuff that matters, not FUD.

Re:So you know the future!!!

[khallow]

Fuel rod recycling already happens. So it's a bit easier to develop than an FTL drive.

Location, location, location

[uninformedLuddite]

It's not like anything could go wrong at this particular dump. A well chosen spot