Slashdot Mirror
Japan Doubles Fukushima Radiation Leak Estimate
DrBoumBoum writes "The severity of the Fukishima disaster continues to go up, from incident level 4 to level 5 to level 7, and now to 20% of total Chernobyl radioactive spill. The story is not over yet as the plant keeps on leaking radioactive material and may still do so for a long time."
Me irradiate you long time.
Fools. The lot of them. Trying to hide the real nature of this accident has undermined nuclear power technology greatly.
Wrong movie, Ebert.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
To anybody with even a remote understanding of nuclear physics that number means absolutely nothing. What matters, especially for long term effect, is the form of radiation. Which the article of course doesn't mention.
Why should we have doubted anyone over a governments predicitions or estimates. Always add an additoanl 40% to 60% more than what any government proclaims.
i guess that will double the deaths to, um, where's my calculator... zero
A few studios are already planning the next major release for certain hot titles.
Fallout 4: New Japan. Welcome to the Tokyo wasteland!
Modern Warfare 3: Assassination of the No.1 terrorist in history by US SEALs in a foreign central urban area
everytime a fukujima related escalation came up, nuclear apologists came up and fucked around with excuses, insults, assaults, rationalizations, this that. this happened how many times ? 4 up to now ?
and yet, gee, another time the thing got escalated into an even more perilous situation.
yes, come, fuck around with shitty excuses AGAIN. i wonder what level of peril will be the level you stop doing that.
Read radical news here
These people give engineers everywhere a bad name. Incompetent and pathological liars. Incredible.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The story is far from over, stay tuned for the next 100 admissions of "well, see it's a bit worse than we thought [read: admitted]".
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
It is most worrisome that there are reports of radiation level near Tokyo is increasing.
"A group of Tokyo parents filed a request Tuesday asking the metropolitan government to change the way it determines radiation levels in the capital after their own study found relatively high levels of contamination around Koto Ward."
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110608a6.html
5.77 microsieverts per hour of radiation measured near Tokyo at ground level
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9a0Q1v93SA
SNPP all most had a level 10 once good thing that the guy in Sector 7-G hit the right button.
As Time Magazine blogger Eben Harrell pointed out on March 30th:
Arnie Gunderson says as of June 3rd:
Another recent post points out:
The situation at Fukushima is not stable and in fact the danger is increasing. The stopgap cooling by injecting tons of water into the reactors and fuel rod storage is creating a massive burden of highly radioactive water that is a storage and disposal nightmare. There has been some limited success in providing recirculation cooling to the spent rod pool for unit 1, but that has a modest effect on the radioactive water situation.
The plan to reduce radioactivity in existing water and recirculate it for cooling is still in process. It is not clear if the capacity of this system will be able to keep up with current cooling needs, much less deal with the backlog. If the reactors and fuel storage are generating new radioactive material, the cleanup system is even less likely to be adequate.
If there is re-criticality the cleanup becomes that much harder. There is also the possibility of more fires/explosions because of radioactive decay heat sources. Continued earthquakes or typhoons could trigger other large release of radioactive material into the general environment.
The plant is leaking highly radioactive water right now and this problem is being swept under the rug. There will be a permanent exclusion zone at the plant site. Even worse, the ocean region will have long lasting radiation contamination that will cripple the seafood industry for a large area of the Japanese coast. Things are a lot worse then anyone is willing to admit.
Why is Snark Required?
According to this documentary, US officials wanted reactors built in such a way they could contain a full meltdown. GE and Westinghouse lobbied hard and got their way by adding more cooling backups instead.
This means these reactors were built under the premise that a loss of cooling and therefore a full meltdown is "impossible", then Fukushima happened...
So now we have 3 reactors with several tons of radioactive fuel melted at the bottom of their containment vessels. I believe the presence of Iodine indicates the fuel is still firing up self-sustained nuclear reactions. There is no way to contain it, no way to control it.
I am not an anti-nuke nut but Fukushima might make me one. The problem with these nuclear plants is that, if the impossible happens, we are all fucked.
Show me a nuke design built in a way a meltdown can just not happen, or if it happens, can be fully contained, controlled and cleaned without affecting the environment.
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
1. From the IAEA's preliminary report (pdf):
To date no health effects have been reported in any person as a result of radiation exposure from the nuclear accident.
2. From Wikipedia's page on the 2011 tsunami:
The Japanese National Police Agency has confirmed 15,365 deaths, 5,363 injured, and 8,206 people missing
Just sayin'.
Oil/coal have operational pollution issues, but they don't have catastrophic failure issues. Yes the Gulf Oil spill was a sort of catastrophic event, but even oil is eaten by microbes. The downsides are limited to a decade or so...and life continues there even during this time. Not great but not nearly on the scale of a nuclear accident.
Radioactivity : ...) even by small animals
1) IS "eaten" by microbes (well it's converted into energy and used), small plants and (I've read one paper claiming
2) has reduced far faster than predicted in all known sites (none of the nuclear test sites are unlivable, and even radiation levels in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have decreased faster than anticipated). So after decades, nearly all of the affected areas are perfectly liveable for humans, and less dangerous than natural high-radiation areas (Chernobyl is long since back to a perfectly safe place to live, only the actual plant itself is still dangerous, and only in long-term exposure)
3) radioactivity has failed to produce casualties and even mild increases in disease have been near-completely absent except in the case of atomic bombs
I mean can we please get some perspective. How many people died in Japan :
from water movement itself ? 12000 (and counting)
from fossil fuels ? 240 (and counting) (mostly refinery explosions or pressure problems)
from wind power ? about a dozen (let's avoid high towers when an earthquake hits)
from solar power ? 4 (again, don't be on rooftops maintaining or installing solar panels during earthquakes)
from nuclear power ? 0 (*one* got mild burns and *may* get sick in 20-30 years)
And let's just not compare number of people displaced due to nuclear power versus number of people displaced due to fossil fuels. We both know perfectly well the answer won't favor fossil fuels.
Care about CO2 ? Nuclear power does better than any other power source (including solar and wind, due to solar panels and wind towers being mostly made of oil)
Care about general environmental effects ? Nuclear does better than any other power source. In fact, all the places on earth with increased radioactivity have more and richer plant life, *and* animal life
In general nuclear power has tiny mining operations (as compared to fossil fuels, and compared to coal mining, uranium mining barely exists at all). The production facilities are equally tiny. A little place 400 meters on each side producing 5 gigawatts with *zero* other effects on the environment ? And the worst of it : the only argument, the waste disposal, is bogus : the waste from nuclear reactors is far *less* dangerous than the uranium that produced it, so nuclear waste actually makes the world safer. Just try producing a single gigawatt without destroying part of the environment with anything else, including wind, solar, or anything at all. (solar panels take away the main energy source for life on this planet for anything below them, and you need a *lot* of them for a gigawatt (and even a desert is teeming with life), and wind power obviously changes athmospheric flows, which doesn't matter in tiny quantities, but will have major implications if deployed at scale)
You want to make the world a safer place ? Great ! I'm all in favor of that. You should *support* nuclear power. In fact, you should support massively expanding our nuclear capacity, so it can replace other forms of energy. Given numbers like above, how can anyone claim to be an environmentalist and be against nuclear power ?
I mean, I try to maintain a distance from these kinds of things and it seems to me that all this anti-nuclear is just people with ipads, 50 inch tv's, jogging around the park in nike shoes with builting mp3 players shouting that modern technology is bad because the girl on the idiot box said so. I mean, you have to admit, it sure looks that way.
The only reason people died in 1986 is because socialist politicians sent "workers" (that probably translates to you and me) into a 5000+ degree celcius cloud containing chain-reacting uranium.
And despite that cowardly moronic act, far fewer people died than in the average oil refinery accident.
I mean at what point do you start thinking these anti-nuclear people are just morons looking for something to shout "mommy !" for.
1) IS "eaten" by microbes (well it's converted into energy and used), small plants and (I've read one paper claiming ...) even by small animals
I'd like to see a source supporting this claim. Please understand, I quite strongly agree with you in general, but this one seems a little weird, and it's the first time I've ever heard it. If true, providing a reliable source would greatly strengthen your argument at large, and I think that would be a good thing.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Just to be clear, in a light water reactor, you need water between fuel rods to have fission. Neutrons have to be slowed down ("moderated") by interacting with the water molecules before they are of an energy that can effectively fission the U-235.
A solid pool of melted LWR fuel cannot become critical.
You make a good case, and you probaby would like this book by Bernard L. Cohen that says much the same:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/BOOK.html
Also, at some point, even with meltdowns, we can just site new nuclear plants where the old one melted down. So, Fukushima is now a good place to site more plants, as is Chernobyl, given the evacuations and the grounds are already contaminated. We could also produce synthetic fuels in those areas and ship them elsewhere. And we could build lots of robots to do the work.
Thorium reactors are even safer and we have much more thorium (thousands of years) than uranium and plutonium (hundred years?) for reactors.. But ironically it is said that thorium technology was not developed in the 1940s and 1950s precisely because it was safer and you could not make bombs from it.
With all that said, I'm still rooting for stuff like solar roadways, maglev wind, or the Rossi/Focardi eCat.
http://www.solarroadways.com/
http://www.maglevwindturbine.com/
http://pesn.com/2011/05/31/9501837_Cold-Fusion_Number-1_Claims_NASA_Chief/
Even various forms of hot fusion are looking promising.
Although solar thermal could have done the job from the 1970s and on. Renewables IMHO have been cheaper than fossil fuels when you consider the externalities like pollution, health impacts, risks, defense costs, and so on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
One can argue about the externalities from different nuclear options (such as who pays for the permanent evacuation around Fukushima or follow on effects like loss of agriculture or other economic problems in the area). If we do see a nuclear resurgance, it is going to look very different than today's plants (or should).
Conventional nuclear tends to be fairly centralized which has various political implications in a democracy. Yes there ideas like Hyperion, but they still probably require big central plants to make them and reprocess them. Mainstream nuclear in general requires a higher level of transparency then our society seems capable of on a sustained basis so far. Fukushima is just one more example of that lack of transparency or foresight.
Still, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, as if our society ran off of cheap thorium power, our politics might be better and less short-term if it assumed abundance instead of scarcity.
The good news is, we have lots of energy options, and the human imagination continues to invent more of them:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR40.txt
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I'd like to see a source supporting this claim.
Biologically induced nuclear reactions are nothing new. Here is the link that you asked about :-)
Really?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Just to be clear, in a light water reactor, you need water between fuel rods to have fission. Neutrons have to be slowed down ("moderated") by interacting with the water molecules before they are of an energy that can effectively fission the U-235.
A solid pool of melted LWR fuel cannot become critical.
While fission probability decreases as neutron energy (and speed) increases, it is not zero. Therefore it is not impossible for fast neutrons to cause fission, just much less likely. The melted fuel may be becoming critical for short periods of time which would explain the iodine.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
With the entire Kanto Plain irradiated, Nippon faces the greatest human health desaster in human history.
The "health care" system of Nippon cannot cope with such a disaster.
In 20 years the level of birth defects will be staggering!
By that time nearly a fifth of the population will be incapacitated and requiring some kind of assisted care for even day-to-day and hour-to-hour maintance.
No society in human history has been able to copy against such numbers.
This is an extinction event of the Nippon Race.
-
You make some good points here but I think your arguments would be much stronger if you discuss:
a) why the nuclear industry has consistently downplayed the severity of the incident at every turn (meltdowns more severe than 'expected', more radiation released than 'expected' - why aren't they honest and releasing worst case figures?
b) why the industry keeps talking about 'design flaws' instead of acknowledging irresponsible cost/risk management practices
c) discuss the social and economic impact of displacing 100,000 people and how this factors into the cost of nuclear
The way the vast majority of nuclear engineers and supporters ignore the negatives and focusing solely on the positives gives me the impression that the industry has a far too narrow focus on certain technical issues and are blissfully unaware of the real and perceived impacts of nuclear technology on the economy and society generally. Before and even after this incident I was a supporter of nuclear energy. However, the industries response to this disaster has pretty much convinced me the industry is incapable of running a nuclear enterprise responsibly.
*zero* other effects on the environment
So it's magic huh? It effects the environment. Perhaps not in the way that combustion does, but there are still outputs that apparently are dangerous enough to warrant centuries long storage. That we don't store anywhere except at the very sites where the possibility of meltdown and explosions are.
What could *possibly* go wrong. Oh right.
Nuclear is *not* the answer. It is a necessary short term 50-100 years requirement though. It will take probably that long to entirely switch to renewable fuels. Technology needs keep improving for renewables to be grid scale, but they are improving.
Saying nuclear is better for the environment is like saying coal is great...except for what it releases. 'Coal bad' != 'Nuclear good'. Sorry it isn't and won't be the solution. Renewable sources are the only long term solution.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I'm sorry, but that is nothing unusual.
People get Geiger counters and then they have fucked up measurements. That's a coincidence!!
Seriously, I could do exactly the same "measurement" anywhere in the world. Soil has massive radioactivity and these little detectors don't measure up. They are basically good to have ON YOUR PERSON to determine if you are in any contaminated area. That's all. Putting them on the ground will get you *wrong* numbers.
There is a reason why there is specific procedure for testing soil. You CANNOT do what is done in the video - it's misinformation and misleading at very least.
Here's some numbers for radioactivity in soil, oceans, etc.. all from natural background. Read the radiation levels in normal soil.
http://physics.isu.edu/radinf/natural.htm
Since tourism to Japan has dropped around 62% and tourism around Fukushima prefecture is for all practical matters non existent even if most dangerously contaminated area goes around a polygon of 10 x 50 km,500 km of 377.835 km of Japan's surface, it does make sense that they downplayed the risk in the weeks after disaster. Personally, I believe that the most intelligent course of action would have been to speak about the worst case scenario in the following week after the earthquake when tourism was dead anyway and then from that point scaling back the projections with the available data. But TEPCO painted itself in a corner since from their early press releases they were stating that they had external power available for all the units, and the first nuclear emergency was declared in Fukushima Daini that was far less damaged by the tsunami than Fukushima Daiichi.
Now, certainly this was a case of a token regulation instead of a proper, strong independent regulatory body; but sadly this is the case in most countries and most industries since savage capitalism rules.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Sounds like it's past time to add boron to the cooling water.
It is in the attachment from this press release from TEPCO:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11060707-e.html
Improvement plan for the exact nuclide analysis at the site of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station under instruction of NISA (Continued report 4)
The most surprising thing is that they found traces of Te-129 with an half life of 70 minutes in some samples from sea water not in the immediate vicinity of the NPS.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
How could it has happened?
Five idiots in the Nippon Rasist Government layed the ground work for the condemation of 200+ million inhabitants of Nippon to death by nuclear irradiation following the disaster.
What level of hatred do the five Nippon Nationals hold for their fellow countrymen.
How did the government of Nippon decide to give fire Nippon Natioals the ultamate power to poison an entire civilizaiton, and entire Race of people, the Nippon Race?
What were the motives?
What money could the five Nippon Nationals extort from Nippon businesses, cities, Nippon peoples?
--
Yes looking from some data from https://sites.google.com/site/glasnostsurfukushima/bulletins (in french) we can see that temperature is increasing in some reactor and there are pick of radiation.
from wind power ? about a dozen (let's avoid high towers when an earthquake hits)
from solar power ? 4 (again, don't be on rooftops maintaining or installing solar panels during earthquakes)
from nuclear power ? 0 (*one* got mild burns and *may* get sick in 20-30 years)
In the interests of strict accuracy that would be no deaths caused by radiation (so far at least). There was one as a direct result of the earthquake and two from the tsunami. (Even so, compared with other places on the coast that would make it a relatively safe place to be.)
I'm struggling to work out if you post is sheer comedic genius or sheer ignorance. If you are serious then it's little wonder that the fate of the nuclear industry is doomed with supporters such as yourself. If not, Bravo sir!!
Either way, I encourage you to post more.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus comes to mind.
I would argue that they have a very good handle on the real impacts of nuclear energy, and are still proponents of it because despite all of those things you mentioned, nuclear still has a better overall effect on public health than pretty much any other power generating scheme.
Yes, it is possible for things to fail. And it's possible for people to still support a thing that fails, because that thing is still better than all the alternatives. Funny how that works, isn't it?
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mine_fire ...
Of course, what are the odds that a coal seam fire would underlie a densely populated area?
I think it has surpassed Chernobyl in terms of potential danger and is on a par in terms of actualised danger. The question is what the tipping point is to make Chernobyl the second worst reactor accident.
The amount of expertise and trained personnel required to keep the reactors under control is not an endless tap. These people will eventually fatigue and continue to put there lives on the line for a management that were too incompetent to run a reactor in the first place.
According to the Seismic design criteria for Nuclear facilities, S and B class facilities (those that contain radionuclides (S) or attached to pressure vessels that contain radionuclides (B) ) should not be affected by the loss of a C class facility (a support facility like a backup generator). The actual quake measured around 140Gal at Fukushima but the plant was designed to tolerate 600Gal (S class). As evidenced the C class facilities were not as the power lines were severed in the quake, and B class facilities (the pumps) were inundated by the tsunami.
Along with the know basis design issues for a GE Mk 1 reactor (pressure vessel limits of 70psi, cooling pool seals require constant power) this is a clear cut case of criminal negligence. The importance of which, internationally, cannot be underlined enough due to the size of the installed base of GE Mk 1 reactors around the world. We need to prosecute immediately. Why?
The reactors themselves performed to specification. They scrammed, shutdown and survived the quake. What they did not survive was the negligence of the operator despite the BDIs known and circulated by GE and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Many of these Mk 1 plants are in operation. They should be audited immediately for failure modes that affect C class facilities, lest we encounter more of these "accidents".
The French Government, with a solid base of nuclear experience described Fukushima as "An accident of Apocalyptic proportions" and I struggle to find a better description.
I thank you for the information you provided.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
a lot of deaths happened in chernobyl yes. leave aside russia, the disaster affected countries in the black sea coast too. youth are still dying in my country around black sea due to cancer. leave aside russia itself. yet, these do not go indexed at all to chernobyl, for some fucking reason. i wonder why it is.
Read radical news here
So it's magic huh? It effects the environment. Perhaps not in the way that combustion does, but there are still outputs that apparently are dangerous enough to warrant centuries long storage. That we don't store anywhere except at the very sites where the possibility of meltdown and explosions are.
You know, this criticism *was* adressed in the original post. You see nuclear waste is much less dangerous than the inputs to the plant. Natural uranium ore would qualify as highly radioactive waste and ... we don't actually store it anywhere safe. It just sits in the ground, sometimes in contact with ground water ...
But once that uranium ore is passed through the nuclear chain, there's MUCH less of it around. So in reality, nuclear plants reduce the amount of highly radioactive "waste". As an added bonus, we store it safely instead of randomly.
Oops.
I find it cute how people keep claiming wind and solar are the answer ... when the actual devices involved in both cases are made 99% of oil (solar panels, and that's not counting the massive amounts of coal needed to produce the silicon wafers) or 50% oil 50% coal (read up on how metal is manufactured). You're replacing "very dangerous" hummer with a ... hummer.
And most solar panels take years to even earn back the energy investment it took to create them. And in actual weather, they last 5-10 years at best, and somehow neither transport, nor installation, nor maintenance are counted to that energy investment. Of course, transporting a solar panel from Germany to California (which was 50% of the market at one point) takes twice as much energy as producing that solar panel ... this means that there are millions of solar panels installed in California which actually ... increase and accelerate fossil fuel use. And this is being polite and assuming *theoretical* maximum production levels that you wouldn't be able to match in practice even on the equator.
Solar/wind (unless major advances in technology are made) are in reality worse than oil.
At current technological levels wind/solar is a disaster, worse than doing nothing. Not that such details matter to the masses of sheep that call themselves "environmentally conscious", laughing and congratulating themselves while destroying more of the environment than their loved hummer driving champions. Their champions, like Al Gore or Obama preaching CO2 savings are about as credible as Snoop Dogg preaching abstinence.
But hey, they get to feel good about themselves. While they're destroying the environment ...
I think it has surpassed Chernobyl in terms of potential danger and is on a par in terms of actualised danger. The question is what the tipping point is to make Chernobyl the second worst reactor accident.
Excuse me, are you living in some kind of alternate reality that we're not aware of? A reality where Fukushima exploded in a nuclear excursion (not hydrogen explosion), threw up large portions of actual core material into the air (I mean the goddamn nuclear core, not activated gases) and where there was a graphite fire burning at a couple of thousand degrees Celsius for a few days? No, I didn't think so, because that was Chernobyl. Fukushima isn't even in the same division. For gods sake, read up on basic facts and history!
I think it has surpassed Chernobyl in terms of potential danger and is on a par in terms of actualised danger. The question is what the tipping point is to make Chernobyl the second worst reactor accident.
Excuse me, are you living in some kind of alternate reality that we're not aware of? A reality where Fukushima exploded in a nuclear excursion (not hydrogen explosion), threw up large portions of actual core material into the air (I mean the goddamn nuclear core, not activated gases) and where there was a graphite fire burning at a couple of thousand degrees Celsius for a few days? No, I didn't think so, because that was Chernobyl. Fukushima isn't even in the same division. For gods sake, read up on basic facts and history!
Mr Ac there are 4 spent fuel pools with a minimum of a core in each one. Chernobyl was a relatively new reactor compared to Fukushima. The older the reactor the more accumulation of activated (and unidentified) radioisotopes, which Fukushima is leaking into the environment *right now*. You are talking 7-8 times the core volume of Chernobyl exposed coming into Japans typhoon season and the incident isn't under control yet.
I remember calculating the core material ejected at Chernobyl to be approximately 5 tons. This disaster is still unfolding and there is much more material exposed. I, therefore, *think* it is on a par in terms of actualised danger, but we won't know for another half decade when we start counting cancer rates. My question still remains valid as for how much worse Fukushima can get, because it ain't over yet.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I've posted this before, but never early enough to get much response. I'll post it again to see if anyone has anything reasonable to dispute my concern.
I've always been a big nuclear supporter of safe nuclear power, and, by safe, I mean ones where the core can reliably melt down to puddle with very minimal impact on the environment around. The thing that bothers me is that I used to believe our current nuclear plants could do this. I am no longer convinced. Indeed, I am openly concerned this is not the case.
In the four cases of partial core meltdowns we have now seen (the Three Mile Island reactor and the three Fukushima reactors), the zicronium fuel rod casings have shown themselves to be a major liability. In all cases, they reacted with the hot steam to produce hydrogen gas, which has then posed a non-insignificant threat to the containment structure. In the case of the Fukushima reactors, we saw this actually happened to unit 3, and on day 3 of Three Mile Island incident, there was significant concern that an accumulated hydrogen bubble would explode damaging the containment structure.
I realize that one in four (25%) is not yet enough samples to exactly pinpoint the probability of containment failure due to the explosion of accumulating hydrogen gas. However, combined with the fact this has been a major concern in all partial core meltdowns experienced so far, it is a figure we should all be concerned with. Containment failure due to hydrogen explosion is not an insignificant failure mode during meltdown, and I have yet to see it mitigated to any reasonably acceptable level.
So, to the nuclear industry out there. Zycronium cladding for the fuel rods is currently used in pretty much every installed reactor. I realize it was chosen due to its low neutron-capture cross-section, but, in operation, it has shown itself to be a significant liability during partial meltdown. It is time to go back to the drawing board and come up with an alternative that does not have this problem. Even if that means a degradation in performance. Until I see this happening, you have lost my support.
Then they don't have any to spare for a 500sq km exclusion zone, do they?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
In all cases, they reacted with the hot steam to produce hydrogen gas, which has then posed a non-insignificant threat to the containment structure.
My understanding of the chemistry inovlved is that there's nothing special about zircalloy in this regard. Any crystalline metal will have similar issues, as the basic process is that when there is neutron capture it is followed by beta decay, which gives you an atom of the wrong element sitting in the lattice. These sites eventually lead to micro-cracking, creating a high surface area of exposed reactive sites where the lattice is damanged, which contributes significantly to the hydrogen production. I may be all wrong about this--I'm a physicist, not a chemist--but that's what I've inferred from discusions of the phenomenon.
As such, unless we go with ceramic cladding or something equally clever, it seems unlikely to be a problem that is going to go away any time soon.
This is the fundamental problem with nuclear power: in a non-nuclear plant you would simply schedule periodic maintenance (once every five years would probably be sufficient given how slowly the damage builds up) and pull the old tubes out, stick new ones in, and refurb the old ones for insertion on the next maintenance cycle. With a nuclear plant you can't do that because the damned things are radioactive.
I really don't see why we aren't building these things underground. To my certain knowledge Russia had plutonium-producing reactors in caverns several hundred metres down during the Cold War. That's where we should be building nuclear power plants.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Actually no, as a Libertarian I don't think you get neuclear power at all. These things only get built with subsides and loan grantees, that we don't support. The free market does not build these.
Show me alternatives to oil that the free market has built without subsities and grants.
when the actual devices involved in both cases are made 99% of oil (solar panels, and that's not counting the massive amounts of coal needed to produce the silicon wafers)
And there's no infrastructure cost in coal/nuclear plants? Both I think contain quite a bit of metal and concrete.
You're comparing solar infrastructure costs and ignoring the infrastructure that exists in coal/oil/nuclear systems. They both have that cost. Solar panels are a 'one time' use of oil (I'm taking your word for it on that). Coal/Oil/nuclear plants use oil/ore as the fuel every day. So solar's are a one time cost but coal/oil continue over time; and had initial one time costs as well.
Once you include the cost to capture all the CO2 released by coal/oil, then the cost comparisons can be made equal. Likewise the costs of all the nuclear disasters. You can't cherry pick which costs you consider when comparing.
At current technological levels wind/solar is a disaster
I agree. We haven't spent nearly enough on R&D for this yet. We're going to need more.
As for the 'sheep'. Until you get the 'sheep' moving, you don't move the herd. So that's better than just standing around denying anything is wrong in the face of clear evidence that you're current path is unsustainable.
BR But hey....it's your head up your own as...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Since the meltdowns at Fukushima the frequencies of my erections and spontaneous sexual stimulation has decreased fifty percent. There can be no other reason for the sudden change but excessive radiation to my testicles and brain.