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Organized Crime Cleaning Up With Nuclear Waste
mdsolar writes "The Mafia has been involved with waste disposal for forever but they seem to be getting very interested in nuclear waste disposal these days. In Europe they scuttle ships containing nuclear waste in the sea. Now in Japan, their Asian counterparts are angling for disposal contracts resulting from the Fukushima nuclear disaster."
So, when this starts happening in the US, I'm guessing Yucca mountain will sound a lot more appealing to all those naysayers. Just a guess, though.
...they keep pulling me back in...to the emergency room for more blood transfusions.
RAD +1!
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
The biggest problem with nuclear power is exemplified by a headline I saw when the earthquake happened: "NUCLEAR REACTOR BLOWS UP! 10000 DEAD!". In very small letters underneath: "Earthquake was the biggest in Japan history".
Now that we finally have a free market solution to this problem, I'm sure that there's nothing to worry about and everything will be fine.
Never mind the fact that the 10000 dead was the earthquake, not the reactor. Sensationalist media is the biggest contributor to stupidity in this world.
This is one region Somali pirates were helping with. By scaring ships out of their coast, where a ton of the waste was being dumped, local fisheries had better catches and better business.
i thought the free market fairy took care of all problems, and government regulation is for freedom-destroying control freaks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I think that if one aspect of the nuclear power cycle is a criminal enterprise, then perhaps the whole thing is.
Just like the banksters.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
From the first article linked, there is a single informant that claims nuclear material was aboard a scuttled ship. The article as linked provides no further information, but mere allegation is sufficient for mdsolar to blame nuclear power.
In the actual article, one will note that there is no actual speculation about the Yakuza having any ill-intent. Indeed, it seems to be a general article about how the Yakuza win contracts in construction and cleanup. And after a massive earthquake and tsunami, there's lots of cleanup to be done.
As an interesting aside, he article claims that the Yakuza get 3% of the total construction in Japan. I see no reason to suspect that wouldn't include projects related to all forms of energy. I trust mdsolar would agree with my "Japanese solar power in bed with organized crime" headline.
There are legitimate gripes about nuclear power. Indeed, the numbers I've seen suggest operating costs that aren't substantially below any other forms of energy. But the sort of fear campaign spread by mdsolar (someone who himself stands to profit from such fears, see his profile for links) is unacceptable.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
I still think we should be working harder on getting fusion working, as that solves a lot of the actual technical issues of fission (such as what to do with waste that will outlast humanity even if it stays contained).
As for the scuttling of ships carrying nuke waste, those pose all kinds of threats. Not just the immediate ones of pollution, etc, but they also constitute a source of extremely deadly material that will kill either through radiation or toxicity, parked in fairly accessible locations right off the coast of a nation with no meaningful government and a lot of warring factions all looking for an edge. Ohhhhhkay. Not good.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This is actually par for the course when it comes to Japanese organized crime syndicates. The Yakuza have always been quick responders to natural disasters and their cleanup efforts. Japanese criminal syndicates aren't entirely illicit operations and run a lot of legitimate businesses as well, and are heavily involved in the construction industry in particular. Being generally faster and more efficient than the bureaucracy-laden government, (and not restricted by those silly "laws") whenever there's a major natural disaster, the Yakuza have always been some of the first on the scene to distribute food and medical supplies, and do cleanup and reconstruction for really low rates. They gain goodwill in the community and an opportunity to expand their power base, and the government saves money and hassle in the cleanup effort. Heck, half of Kobe was rebuilt by Yakuza after the great Hanshin quake. The whole thing is an open secret really.
That they're doing this now is really to be expected, and not as alarming or terrible as the article would seem to suggest. This has been going on with criminal groups in Japan for generations, and isn't likely to stop any time soon.
Never mind the fact that the 10000 dead was the earthquake, not the reactor. Sensationalist media is the biggest contributor to stupidity in this world.
The earthquake itself didn't kill that many people - the resultant tsunami did.
#DeleteChrome
scuttling ships full of dangerous waste is pretty terrible even if it's not radioactive.
There's no shortage of non nuclear mutagens which aren't radioactive and they'll fuck you up just as badly, there's no shortage of industrial wastes which don't have any half life at all.
it's more disgusting that this appears to only really be getting attention when the word nuclear is attached.
Considering the time scale required to construct a large nuclear power plant the problems of scope creep and short term fads are going to be a problem unless serious long term adult supervision is applied. TMI is a classic example - it started with the best containment vessels of the time (which saved the day) but by the time construction had finished standards had slipped and it had control systems and sensors that would not have passed inspection in a fertilizer works (not an exaggeration - those things blow up too). For a while after TMI nuclear power was taken seriously again in the running plants, but attempts at applying adult supervision from the direction of government devolved into departmental empire building. By 1986 things were not pretty in the USA nuclear industry either but some degree of professionalism had been preserved after the scare of TMI, and was revived by the example of a real disaster. Fast forward to today and there have been so many generations of management since then that the problems of the past are put down to stupid Russians or idiots in the 1970s - the disaster in Japan could have happened in any of a dozen places given such a trigger of a sudden loss of cooling - too many people think that problems will never happen so many corners were cut thus increasing exposure to potential problems.
With the current situation of subsidised faux-commercial civilian nuclear power and very long construction times the odds of getting highly professional management for the entire time until commissioning instead of a well connected horse judge or two is very low. Running such a project is full of pork and prestige which tends to squeeze out the merely competant for those that are seen to deserve a reward. Because so much capital is at stake and expectations are high it generates a situation where the lies, evasions and shortcuts seen in Japan maintain the prestige of the position in the short term unless something goes wrong to expose how badly things are run, so such lies become the default. It's about the size of the project and the perceived commercial gains after careful cooking of the financial books - research reactors don't seem to suffer from it due to clear goals and not being as desirable as a nepotistic reward.
We've had it very clearly demonstrated to us since the 1970s that big reactors that require active cooling are bad news for many reasons. Smaller reactors have the promise of greater safety and significantly shorter construction times - they have the potential to get built while the initial goal is still in sight and are not seen as such a big deal so may not attract the flies that will instead go to corrupt other pots of honey.
That will not work. What will happen is people will slow down on hiring 'brown people'. Too risky.
The national registry get 3 out of every 100 people wrong. Flags them as illegal. So that's 3 out of 100 people that can't get work.
Having the companies do more then check ID puts too much of a burden on the employer.
Here is the fix:
Stop caring about it. Now everyone competes at the same wage. No one can undercut wages because they aren't hiring Illegal that can't turn them in.
The response to that solution will tell you who is racist.
Also assuming only brown people come here illegally is a sure sign of stupidity and racism.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yes, yeas it isd.
We almost ahd it, but the people started lying about Yucca mtn and the politicians are to afraid to tell those people to STFU and let the scientists and engineers who are experts in this fields do their job.
Hell. most people don't know what nuclear waste consists of, how it is moved, what it is stored in, or how much(little) there is.
At this point, they should be run buy the government. Take away bonus and people using it to get rich, and you take away the incentive to cheat. Private industry has failed up here. Cut them out.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Also assuming only brown people come here illegally is a sure sign of stupidity and racism.
And short memory. The entire furor died down back when they caught that hot russian spy woman and everyone realized that white people like them could be accused of being illegal too, and realized white Americans don't really carry around anything that proves their citizenship. Now everyone's forgotten about that, and the calls for people to carry their papers are coming back too.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I've seen such sensationalist headlines with my own eyes
this is a slashdot comment about CNN headline from one of the earliest entries about fukushima
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2036214&cid=35478190
It's disgusting; CNN.com's current main page headline is "Japan's reactor problems mount; death toll rises."
WTF?
which was a reply to another post saying that summary makes it look like the deaths are the direct result of fukushima (which it did).
iamrmani was one of several people reporting updates on the Fukushima Nuclear plant that has been struggling following last Friday's disaster. A third explosion (Japanese) has been reported, along with other earlier information. MSNBC has a story about similiar reactors in the US. We also ran into a story which predicts that there won't be significant radiation. But already Japan is facing rolling blackouts, electricity rationing, evacuating the area around the plant, and thousands dead already.
example of article
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/blast-at-japan-nuclear-plant-death-toll-rises/145722-2.html
Half the population has an IQ LOWER than 100. Just sayin...
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is facing a great battle." - Philo of Alexandria -
It's a pretty common newspaper tactic, there's a reason the front of the newspaper often looks like it was designed by someone who just found out that you can change the font size.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
The fact that it has a half life as old as the universe demonstrates that it is very very very mildly radioactive - any less radioactive and it would be considered stable. The "depleted" term is a giveaway.
The main risk is that it is a heavy metal, like lead, and can bioacumulate. We just need to bury it somewhere with no liquid water and it will be fine.
Mod parent up.
I'm always surprised at how energetic the pro-nuke zealots are on /.
That's probably because of the amount of misinformation coming from many of the anti-nuclear zealots.
The fact is nuclear energy has some nasty-ass waste AND IT SUCKS.
Fair comment as far as it goes. The pro-nuclear argument is that despite this, the alternatives are worse.
Yes I know there are other designs that don't make the 4.5-billion-year stuff.
The '4.5-billion-year stuff' was made before the earth formed, not by us, and in any case is only mildly radioactive.
That folks say renewables will "never" work is also irritating.
Who seriously say that though?
I don't think I've ever seen anyone argue against renewables forming part of the mix. Hydroelectric power is great for load balancing, and in the right circumstances wind, solar and geothermal power can all work well. The point at issue whether a 100% renewable solution could work, and while it would be wrong to say 'never', I think it is fair to say that with current technology the sums don't add up.
By this I don't necessarily mean that it is physically impossible. It's a matter of cost versus benefit: even if you only look at the environmental and/or safety impact then nuclear wins most of the time.
More importantly, whatever happened to innovation?
I agree with you about R&D, and if someone were to come up with a 100% replacement for nuclear power and fossil fuels that was genuinely safer and less environmentally damaging then I suspect that most of the 'pro-nuclear zealots' you refer to would vanish overnight. Pro-nuclear sentiment is very rarely grounded in any form of ideology, other than (as was once famously noted) being 'pro-arithmetic'.
You people are un-fucking-believable, not matter how bad nuclear power gets you just don't get that humans can't yet be trusted to manage it safely. Nuclear accidents, oh well it won't happen again. Corruption? Mafia dumping the shit in the sea? I swear the only thing that would stop the nuclear zealots here would be all out nuclear war.
Americas politicians are corrupt and can't be trusted to manage nuclear power.
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