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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.
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.
It's only inevitable when you cut down on regulatory authority to satisfy the whack job libertarian lobby. All forms of energy have possible downsides to them, and some of them can be catastrophic in nature, hardly seems fair to single out the nuclear energy industry when the oil industry has more or less led us to the brink of disaster and wants to keep leading into the abyss.
Sea level rise from global warming is expected to flood some densely populated areas. Increased temperatures will make some currently hospitable areas inhospitable, and turn land presently viable for agriculture worthless. These changes are likely to be irreversible for thousands of years at the very least, possibly indefinitely, and the problems occur globally, not just within the closest few kilometers of the power plants.
There is very little doubt that the cost of adapting to the consequences of our greenhouse gas emissions will vastly exceed even the worst outcome of nuclear accidents. Yes, that includes Chernobyl. You can't declare the entire world an exclusion zone when it's the global climate you're messing up.
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.