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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.
What I am most angry about is that all the promises of "cheap" go right out the window with the observed accident rate and costs. None of the numerous promises about reactor safety even remotely resemble the truth. To me the whole nuclear industry is a scheme to transfer huge amounts of money into certain pockets.
That they cause a lot of deaths and a completely unsolved long-term waste storage problem, which will increase cost even further (but for future generation and who cares about them) is just the icing on the cake.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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?
Is people losing their homes, farms and businesses to a nuclear exclusion zone for the next 300 years not bad enough?
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.
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.