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Fukushima: Myth of Safety, Reality of Geoscience
An anonymous reader writes "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' has published a special Fukushima issue with interesting/deep/new pieces written by leading experts on the nuclear disaster in Japan. Fukushima: The myth of safety, the reality of geoscience, which shows that in the decades after the nuclear plant was built, the authorities discovered historical records that showed Fukushima was vulnerable to a giant tsunami, but they did nothing to protect the plant. But there's a globalized twist to the issue: The Bulletin has also translated these lengthy expert analyses of the disaster into Japanese. As Bulletin editor Mindy Kay Bricker explains: 'Those in genuine need of erudite analysis are, of course, those directly affected by the Fukushima disaster, the Japanese population. Stellar coverage by Western news outlets might win awards, but what is the point if those who most deserve the information never benefit from reading it?'"
This confirms it.
No nuclear power plants can handle a tsunami.
All of them must be shut down.
Sadly it's quite possible that this will be completely ignored in Japan because it was not written by a Japanese organization and will simply be seen as outsiders criticizing Japan.
Experts? They don't know anything. Everyone knows the definitive word is with the armchair commentators here on Slashdot!
If you're going to run a nuclear reactor, you are definitely going to make all of the money back from building it, and a mountain of profits over the lifetime of the plant. Ignoring things like historical Tsunamis, and not making the plants prepared to deal with that situation is gross negligence, and the company should be punished. Making their plants resistant to the effects of a Tsunami would have been bad for the bottom line for a year or two, but I'm sure now the investment seems trivial.
I'm not against nuclear power. I'm just against weakly regulated nuclear power. Private companies have proven over and over again, that they do not take public safety as a serious issue, until it's too late. Nuclear power is one industry that should have regulators breathing down their necks at every step of the way.
This isn't a reason to be worried about nuclear power. This shows that bad things can happen when political decisions override science engineering or when bad engineers don't do a good job.. At the end of the day, what you want can't override nature. Nature doesn't care about politics. This is true with many different technologies
At this point, more people die from coal related problems every year than nuclear power. One interesting metric to compare power types is to look at deaths per a terawatt hour. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html. By this metric, nuclear power is one of the safest forms of power out there. The primary reasons that nuclear power stands out to people is because a) it associated with nuclear weapons which makes it scary b) it is a more advanced technology which makes it seem more risky and unnatural c) when something does go wrong is goes wrong in a spectacular fashion. This last is probably the most important- humans react to how much they hear about disasters not how likely they are to impact them. This is why people are afraid of airplane crashes and shark attacks more than car crashes and heart attacks.
Unfortunately, few people are likely to pay attention to this. We are already seeing the fallout as Germany and other European countries turn away from nuclear power. France right now is being surprisingly calm in continuing to use it. Unfortunately, there's some indications that this issue is also making people more worried about fusion power. There's been a long-running problem with scientifically ignorant environmentalists who don't understand the difference between fission and fusion. A lot of them have tried to protest fusion research in the past and Greenpeace has an anti-fusion stance. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/22/fusion_greenpeace_no/. The whole situation sucks.
... too stupid to read English journals, or analyze their own disasters rigorously and tell their population.
Seriously, is this "Mindy Kay Bricker" person coming off like a racist to anybody else?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Tokyo is being evacuated also. Well, just small parts of it for now but who knows how bad it could get because it's still leaking massive amounts of radiation (much like how the BP oil well is still leaking oil into the Gulf; why no news coverage?).
As always, both Tepco and the Japanese government have massively downplayed the actual severity of this thing. It's worse than Chernobyl. Much, much worse.
It's funny to keep seeing all these "engineers" and Internet morons say this thing is safe and other bullshit since this started. Anyone could tell that the official reports were downplaying the severity because all of the real hard numbers we got went against what they were saying. I am pro nuclear power but Japan needs to take off the mask already and start working on real solutions because this is really bad. Maybe ask for help.
from stellar analysis, when media fear-moungering and political lip service and ass-covering causes societies to up and ditch a viable energy solution? Germany? France? The US?
When was the most recent Nuclear Reactor built inside the US? We're certainly not using 1970's design plans anymore and the media, and populace, are wanting heads on a pike for a technology that isn't even being implemented. This country, and so many others, are screwed due to reactionary fear-mongering.
Stellar coverage and analysis? On tech. sites like this one, sure. But to reach 50% of the voting population, or at least the rational portion of it? That just isn't going to happen. Providing solutions and improving livelihoods doesn't sell news anymore. Fear, doubt and uncertainty does.
I take it you don't know what FUD means. There is no uncertainty or doubt in this case because it's already happened. All the claims of "we never though it would happen" mean is that some people have very limited imaginations, especially when their pockets can be lined with the results of willful ignorance.
SNPP needs to be shut down or at least sector 7g.
And still zero deaths attributable from the disaster due to radiation.
Did you know that in March--the same month as Fukishima--that a worker at an aging US power plant, scheduled to be closed and currently down for maintenance, was killed in an explosion? But it wasn't a nuclear plant (it was coal) so no one cared. The company's been fined, but no government is committing to shutting down 100% of its coal plants.
And yeah, it's still too early to detect any increase in cancer rates, but by the six-month mark, Chernobyl had killed about 300 people via acute radiation sickness, so I don't see how anyone can claim this either IS worse than Chernobyl or WILL BE worse. 300 versus zero.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
And why are people really mad at him/her.... ;-)
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
It isn't so much whether the plants themselves can be designed to be safe, sited in safe areas, built safely or operated safely; it's whether we can trust the people who are involved not to take kickbacks or falsify records because they're too lazy to x-ray all the pipe welds or be bullied by politicians or miss what turn out to be obvious problems. And the it's not so much the body count after an accident as the resultant loss in credibility of the systems themselves. Not many of us want to live next to a nuclar plant for very good reasons: the consequences of a problem are devastating and the people running them keep lying to us.
Other power generation facilities lie about things too but they don't require that everyone living within 40 miles of them abandon everything and run... and not come back for a century or two.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Very well written article indeed. Unfortunately many erroneous conclusions drawn by commenters, For instance one person states nuclear power is so insanely expensive--not true right now the world nuclear power cost is 2.3 cents per Kwt Hour, lower than coal, lower than natural gas. Now it is true that capital expense is in fact much higher than other types of plants. So the first lesson is to be sure you are clear on exactly what aspect you are talking about--which unfortunately is missing quite a bit here on the old slash dot pages. Mostly emotional hype. Certainly not as well thought out as the article itself. Nor researched either.
for years.
Use modern reactors, and the government should build and operate them. remove profit gained from skimping on safety and EOL procedures.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
..that nuclear reactors are complex systems, and therefore subject to chaotic behavior.. further, the culture of security does not breed increased response to threats, quite the opposite. Long periods of stable energy and profits lead predictably to cozy relationships with regulators and "asleep at the wheel" operators.. industry-wide! This was someone with no political axe in hand, simply advanced training in physics..
very well argued, much better than I did.
metageek
That's an advantage for nuclear, not a disadvantage. What you say about safety is true for all power plants. Coal plants, wind turbines, and hydroelectric dams can be built and operated dangerously. They're distributed so the number of people killed/injured from a single incident is smaller. But if you assume the same level of corruption in all industries, the number of people killed by those technologies will be about the same or higher per unit of energy generated.
So how is this an advantage for nuclear? Because nuclear's power generation is so concentrated, it's much easier to enforce stricter building codes, maintenance schedules, and inspections for the same amount of energy generated. Instead of amassing a small army to monitor 10,000 wind turbines being built, inspected, and maintained over 1000 km^2 of land, you can have a dozen inspectors do the same at a single nuclear plant. The statistics bear this out. Historically, nuclear is the safest power generation technology we've invented. Safer than coal, safer than solar, safer than hydro, safer than wind.
it's whether we can trust the people
You had me at "whether we can trust ... people"
I wish everyone was of the quality of the gung ho bravery of the stereotypical NASA astronaut, with the intellect of the Rhode scholar... and raised in the mid-west and having a sort of a innocent bafflement of evil or corruption or falsehood. And from what anyone can tell, the Japanese have a far superior sense of morality than any other modern people (low crime rates, no looting... all the cash and valuables found that has been turned in), but even within their population we obviously have corruption (as we have seen its unfortunate effects).
So the issue is that anything that involves enough capital and/or is sufficiently complex that involves lots of people (such as nuclear power) will be subject to the effects of corruption, period. Nuclear power may be safe... but because (corruptable, imperfect) people are involved... whatever safety gains there are become nullified, even reversed.
The Admin and the Engineer
Sadly that's the entire history of the civilian nuclear industry.
Almost every time something has been put forward which will improve safety (eg. thorium reactor project) or deal with nuclear waste (eg. synrock) it has been vehemently opposed for political reasons. Saying that safety can be improved is seen as a criticism that the status quo is not good enough, and there is a lot of money riding on maintaining the existing gravy train. Due to this and the massive capital costs involved with doing anything new with nuclear at all the civilian nuclear industry in the USA is effectively dead but on expensive life support. Even the AP1000 came in via Toshiba and the Japanese taxpayer - all signs of local innovation are just a blood transfusion from a now dead donor. To see any advances in civilian nuclear power you are going to have to look overseas or hope for some military inspired developments (eg. modified submarine reactors).
Nuclear is scarier in the same way that people are more afraid of airplane crashes then car crashes. It's the big spectacular events that scare us the most, even if they are extremely rare. Nuclear also has a real public relations problem. You can't tour a plant. You might even get detained by police for taking a picture of one. The whole issue of what to do with the waste hasn't been worked out (sure it's mostly politics but the fact is it hasn't been taken care of). The average person doesn't have a Geiger counter so it's impossible to know if they are leaking radiation or not. It also doesn't help that in most countries environmental regulation is handled by one department and nuclear power is handled by a separate often very secretive branch. If nuke plants held once a month community tours with free BBQ hamburgers and let people buy a subsidized Geiger counter on their way out through the gift shop things might be different.
But for every drooling Space Retard story, there's no "Myth of Space Elevators, reality of materials science" angle. Why?
Notice that nowhere in the article does it substantially deviate from the Japanese governments report to the IAEA. Reactor 1 and 2 sustained serious damage during the quake itself and were well on their way to meltdown before the tsunami struck. It is questionable that TEPCO could have provided an adequate response to prevent a meltdown if there had been no tsunami (the tsunami alert meant most on-site staff evacuated to high ground rather than triage the reactor, and the tsunami further damaged equipment that may have been usable to help deal with the situation). Reactors 3 on the other hand had a higher probability of preventable meltdown due to easier access and better maintenance over the life of the reactor due to experience from building and operating reactor 1, which is well known for have such poor equipment access that pipes were frequently only examined for maintenance issues from the near side only.
A small army to monitor vs a dozen inspectors?
I'll take wind all day. We need the jobs! =P
You can buy Geiger counters (you should be looking for dosimeters though) on eBay. They're not exactly cheap (around $500) but they're not unattainable.
Interesting..
<cynicism>
So you're saying:
</cynicism>
I think you're on to some interesting political points there!
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
There were warnings in 2001 that earthquakes were due in that specific part of Japan. There was a long history of tsunami on that coastline, and the extent and height of past tsunami had been mapped and modeled in great detail. Scientifically-speaking, how much more clear did the evidence have to be that the tsunami defenses at Fukishimi weren't adequate, if they couldn't even handle the historical tsunami, let alone basic principles like adding a safety factor just in case of a worse event?
This is not unique. You had geologists warning for years that New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen -- that the first big hurricane would probably breach levees and that it would be an evacuation nightmare. Yet we still had people like Bush and even the head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, saying everyone was surprised that the levees were breached. Uh, no, not anyone who had been paying attention since at least the 1960s.
And then we have the residents and politicians in l'Aquila in Italy putting seismologists on trial for telling people the truth -- that we can't predict big earthquakes, and that a bunch of smaller ones isn't necessarily an indication that a big one is imminent. The seismologists get blamed, even though this is a known and well-studied, high-risk earthquake area.
The problem here isn't the science, it is communication of the science. Geologists can tell you in excruciating and horrifying detail what to expect in a particular part of the world from natural hazards like earthquakes, tsunami, floods, and volcanoes. Individual events? Probably not predictable (although volcanic eruption prediction is getting quite good well in advance, if there is sufficient monitoring). But we can tell you years before a major event that, yes, this building is inadequate and will probably collapse during the next big quake, and that if there are people in it, many of them will die. Why were so many people killed in l'Aquila? It wasn't so much because of the intensity of the earthquake, but that so many of the buildings were not up to the standards needed for such an earthquake-prone area. It was "only" a Richter magnitude 5.8, moment magnitude 6.3, but the building standards sucked. Cities have experienced far worse and suffered less. Geologists can tell you that, yes, tsunami this big are very rare on this coast and haven't happened to a given height in 200 years, but they are expected to happen again eventually. The problem is getting across to people what this means, and that being complacent about the risk, even if it is very rare, is grossly irresponsible. You prepare *now* for something that is inevitable. It takes a long period of investment and education, but you commit to dealing with the problem and you *work* on it.
If you're going to fault people, you should fault the geologists for not voicing their concerns even more strongly than they do already, sure. We can be louder. But it's the politicians and others that don't respond to those concerns for *decades*, despite the risks being well-known, and despite public safety being part of their job, that are the ones that should be accused of negligence. The scientists have delivered the message. For people in power who ignore the message I have some mix of sympathy and contempt, because there are so many lives that could have been saved if people just took a moment out of their busy days to think about the long-term, rare risks, and actually do something about them instead of thinking "Oh, it's not going to happen tomorrow." Japan deserves a lot of respect for having such a sophisticated earthquake mitigation and warning system. It's the best in the world. Yet even there people did not heed the warnings that could have made this disaster avoidable if they had been acted upon. For all the progress in these sciences, we still need to work on the communication and making the connections to broader society, or a lot of this work is going to waste.
Same thing is true for hydroelectric plants too. If you do not care about safety they can kill even more people than nuclear power. The worst single hydro accident was a dam bursting killing somewhere between 26,000 and 230,000 people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
For every thousand people wringing their hands about all of the "coulda shoulda woulda(s)", there seems to be only a voice or two that really comprehends the size of either the quake or the Tsunami. Yes, TEPCO and the government regulators should have paid attention to what other researchers were saying about the likelihood of a big tsunami hitting the Tokai plain, including the area where Fukushima Daiichi, etc. were located.
I lived in three of the areas hardest hit: Ishinomaki, Northeast Sendai, and Fukushima. Damages further north and south on the coast are equally indescribable. To put it in perspective though..... Let's say California got pitched the same distance to the west that Japan did in the mega quake. There would now be an eight foot moat around anything west of the fault line. Any building lower than about 30 feet (the highest tsunami readings were nearly double that) not made of pretty much stone, brick, or cement would be gone. Assume you'd built a ten meter sea wall -- and then not only does the seawall get smacked by the quake, but the quake takes out all the backup systems designed to shut your big old project down safely -- and the roads required to get new backup equipment in place. In fact, pretty much all you can do is spray water on a hot spot.
You'd have as much luck avoiding a disastrous ending as you would n putting out a forest fire with the results of that 32 oz big gulp soda you drank an hour before the fire broke loose.
Any questions?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
..as the pro-technology biases of people using the internet. Evil: Any action taken based on unquestioned belief. Beliefs don't matter: actions do. So, everyone got together and decided to believe that a typical tsunami wouldn't occur anymore because they had already built a nuclear plant there, and the alternative would mean not using it. Now that we have no viable alternative to cheap petroleum for running our technology, everyone has chosen to believe that we will somehow change the human species into something that gives a shit about safety over profits. lol
I don't care to live next to a large industrial facility, but if I had to I would readily pick a nuclear plant over almost any other industrial operation. Coal plants would be at or near the bottom of my list. With a nuclear plant there is a (almost, but not quite) negligible chance that I would have to evacuate and never go back home, while with a coal plant I would dread every day that I lived there.
You can only use "I don't want to live next to a nuclear plant" as an argument against nuclear if you would be happy living next to a coal plant, given that's the alternative right now. I'm sure some people would still claim they would rather live next to a coal plant, but give coal the same media exposure as nuclear and I bet most people wouldn't be so sure.
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