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."

Comments

Re:Meltdowns are impossible?

[nedlohs]

That German AVR reactor is also the most heabily beta-contaminated reactor site on the planet. And it contaminated both the soil and groundwater, and better yet in the form or radioactive dust.

Melting down is not the only possible problem...

Re:Cliche but nuclear is far safer than anything e

[Paul Fernhout]

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