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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.
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.
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.
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
i guess that will double the deaths to, um, where's my calculator... zero
I'll take that as an admission you are only counting deaths from radiation sickness. Deaths which would occur within the first few hours, days, weeks or months of exposure.
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?
What you want is a Pebble Bed reactor. "A pebble-bed reactor thus can have all of its supporting machinery fail, and the reactor will not crack, melt, explode or spew hazardous wastes. It simply goes up to a designed "idle" temperature, and stays there. In that state, the reactor vessel radiates heat, but the vessel and fuel spheres remain intact and undamaged. The machinery can be repaired or the fuel can be removed. These safety features were tested (and filmed) with the German AVR reactor. All the control rods were removed, and the coolant flow was halted. Afterward, the fuel balls were sampled and examined for damage and there was none."
There are other issues to address with pebble bed designs (mostly to do with decommissioning), but it meets your requirement. It CANNOT melt down. Even if ALL systems fail and the operating personnel run away.
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'.
No, let's include all deaths directly linked to radiation exposure from nuclear generation *in all of history*.
Let's add the total death toll for ALL nuclear accidents EVER. Well that would be ... 86 (64 from chernobyl, which was mostly the result of politicians not telling workers what they were doing at the site, resulting in people walking into a uranium cloud which was still chain-reacting. Granted the accident was bad, but a lot of these deaths were perfectly preventable with minimal precautions). This includes all deaths worldwide that have been proven to have something to do with radiation from nuclear power plants. Obviously there is no shortage of statistically unverified (or outright falsified) "studies".
Let's take the number of people dying in oil production alone THIS year (it's only June, so ...) : 800
Even wind power does far worse than nuclear
Well we live in the age of reason, the age of enlightenment, so we let policy be decided by the scaremongering of popular celebrities. Isn't that what the 21st century is all about ? If we truly cared about loss of human life, we'd only have nuclear power.
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.
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...
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.
But that only occurs if you open up the closed system.
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.
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.)
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 ...