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Japan Re-Opens Some Towns Near Fukushima
JSBiff writes "Bloomberg, among others, is reporting that the Japanese government has partially lifted the Fukushima evacuation order, allowing residents to return to five towns previously in the evacuation zone. Additionally, a key milestone has been reached in achieving a full 'cold shutdown' of the damaged reactors — the temperature of all three reactors has dropped below 100 deg. C. It's a shame these people were unable to return home for six months. For people who lived closer to the plant, they might never be allowed to return home. Now, the question is: will residents actually want to return, other than to maybe retrieve stuff they left behind?"
Having read the article, it seems the summary is completely inaccurate, as the five towns in question were not evacuated. The government is just lifting a "be prepared for evacuation" warning.
Was this one called Shima?
Man those people are so Fukushima'd.
I seriously doubt anyone will want to return, at least not for a long time yet. The risk of further pollution during the cleanup is likely going to be seen as high, the damage to houses through abandonment will make it uneconomic for those hardest-hit, it may be safe but infrastructure rebuilding has focused on other areas, completely abandoned towns in Britain and America (and they were this way during the housing boom) show that a bad reputation beats excessive demand any day, and those who are the most mobile are in the most need of jobs that don't exist in the fringe areas.
Given that similar tsunamis hit the area every 500 years or so, it seems likely that it'll have recovered completely and have yet more critical generators along the direct line of attack before the next strike, along with the obligatory denial that anyone could have predicted a periodic event would be periodic.
The cleanup itself - well, that depends on the isotopes present in the soil. Which the scientists know and we don't. If they're relatively short-lived, waiting them out will be quicker and cheaper than replacing the topsoil. Very long-lived isotopes, depending on their mass and depth, are the problem. It's one thing to scrape a bit off the surface, it's another to lower ground level by 10-20' over a 50 mile radius. Since we know that radioisotopes enter the food chain via plant life, one could imagine a decontamination method that involved establishing a forest of trees with exceptionally deep tap roots and high water circulation. It wouldn't eliminate all the contaminants, but it would lock up some. And since it would also lock up CO2, it would lower Japan's greenhouse gas footprint at the same time. It would also be quicker than the Chernobyl approach, which will take a few hundred million years to complete. Decontamination via biomass would likely only take a few hundred years to complete.
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 hardly took any time at all. I guess all the posts telling us "nothing to see here...Nuclear, yay!" were right all along.
Clean, safe and too cheap to meter.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are habitable and heavily populated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagasaki
What should worry people MORE than the radiation is the subsidence of the land in the disaster area, making it extremely vulnerable to the NEXT tsunami.
Atomic fear is delectable and I, too, masturbate in sweet anguish while contemplating it. (fapfapfap)
As for the fuckteen thousand people killed outright by the OCEAN, they don't count because the ocean is much less radioactive.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I heard the radiation hazard has gone away now because they've signed ACTA.
Such disasters can render areas uninhabitable for thousands of years.
The isotope responsible for almost all of the long term contamination is Cs-137, with a half life of about 30 years. So every century, the activity level drops by a factor of 10. IIRC, the most heavily contaminated area discovered (very close to the reactors) was giving a dose rate of 500 mSv/yr, so even that should be down to below background levels in 3 centuries, with most of the currently excluded area safe long before then.
Now, that's still a heck of a long time - but it's not the thousands of years you mention, and it means that large scale use of nuclear power for centuries will not result in ever-increasing amounts of land lost due to contamination from accidents.
It's worth noting for comparison that hydroelectric power is appalling for rendering large areas uninhabitable, even when it works as planned.
So the really big question is how long the primary evacuation zone is going to be left open. At this point it looks like it won't be that terribly long, maybe 50 years or so. However, Japan's history of negative attitudes about nuclear power (for quite understandable reasons) makes it likely that the zone will stay for longer than necessary. Even when we people are let in, it is likely that few people will actively want to return for a while. Since Japan is so small and has such population density issues this could have a much more disproportionate than Chernobyl did on the USSR even though that was by many metrics a much worse accident.
However, none of this is a good reason to be that fearful of nuclear power. It still seems clear that nuclear power is far safer and more reliable than most other forms of power including coal, gas and oil. By number of deaths per a terrawatt hour nuclear power is one of the safest. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html. Nuclear power simply seems worse because radioactivity is so scary and because when disasters occur they are rare and spectacular rather than routine. To see how irrational the various anti-nuke fears are one needs to only look at how groups like Greenpeace protest anything remotely nuclear such as fusion power even though it shares none of the risks of fission power. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/press/releases/ITERprojectFrance/.
It's not being ignored. It's accounted for.
1) The vast majority of the region around Chernobyl will probably be safe within a few hundred years. The area immediately around Fukushima will probably be considered contaminated for 50-100 years. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were continuously inhabited, with very little to no negative effect on post-bombing residents. This is nuclear science 101. If radioactive isotopes are extremely dangerous, that means they have short half-lives, and thus are only around for hours or days. If contaminants last for thousands of years as you allude, that means they have long half-lives, and thus are not very radioactive nor dangerous enough to render the area uninhabitable.
It's the radioactive contaminants with medium half-lives which are most dangerous. Their half-lives are long for them to stick around for years/decades, but short enough that they're still dangerously radioactive. These typically have half-lives of 10-30 years, meaning their contamination will only last a few decades to a century. Very few, rare isotopes match your criteria of long half-lives but high radioactivity (it happens when the decay chain of a long half-life isotope results in a bunch of short half-life isotopes in quick succession).
2) As I outlined in the previous Fukushima topic, hydro and wind render more land area uninhabitable per MWh of energy generated than nuclear. Solar technically only renders the land shaded rather than uninhabitable, but if the panels/reflectors are installed on the ground, then it's uninhabitable. And unlike nuclear which only renders land uninhabitable when there's an accident, the renewable technologies render land uninhabitable as a consequence of their normal operation.
If, as you state, you wish to minimize the "chunks of earth removed from human habitation for many generations," nuclear is the power source which has the smallest footprint per unit of energy generated.
Such disasters can render areas uninhabitable for thousands of years.
Don't you need a mechanism by which this would occur first? Cesium 137, for example, has a half-life of around 30 years. in a thousand years, it'll have halved about 30 times which is over a billion reduction in concentration. A lot of the other stuff that made up the radiation leakage from Fukushima has half-lives in the tens of days, they already are considerably reduced.
OTOH, plutonium 239, if it was put into the environment, would have a half-life of 24,000 years. If any land around Fukushima is uninhabitable because of that isotope, then a few thousand years won't dent it much.
So what's the isotope that's going to keep Fukushima uninhabitable for thousands of years? Also how big is this uninhabitable area? Sounds like the worst affected areas are only a portion of the current exclusion zone.
My point for bringing this up is the hyperbole that surrounds the Fukushima accident and clean up. We need to cut through that and realistically figure out what happened.
It isn't the direct deaths that are the problem, it is the long term impacts to the environment that remove chunks of the earth from human habitation for many generations.
Humans do other things with land than just live on it. This sounds to me ideal for industry and, of course, more nuclear reactors. If they have another meltdown, then it won't matter as much due to the exclusion zone around the Fukushima site.
Actually, the level of radioactivity released in a nuclear blast is comparatively small. That's because nuclear reactors have a lot more junk in them (the total amount of fission that occurs in a normal reactor over its lifespan orders of magnitude more than a fission bomb), and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nukes were not that large. Nuclear blasts also spread the radioactive material out a lot more making it not as concentrated. I do think that the fears of nuclear power are wildly exaggerated but at the same time I don't think that pointing to the modern day habitability of these two cities is good evidence.
Now S.T.A.L.K.E.R. can get a real sequel, with differently looking new areas!
There will be a lot of elderly people who worked for forty years to earn their home and won't care about a bit of radiation. That is, if they even cared enough to leave in the first place.
It's worth noting for comparison that hydroelectric power is appalling for rendering large areas uninhabitable, even when it works as planned.
And that is why there are few new hydro schemes in the west. Finding areas that are both geologically and politically suitable for turning into giant hydroelectric reservoirs is extremely difficult.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
To clarify my previous post it was reffering to "conventional hydro" (as was it's parent afaict). "Run of the river" hydro doesn't have this problem but that has the same problem that wind and solar have.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
More like: "the molten corium has burrowed deep enough to be cooled by groundwater and we are only reading 90 degrees at the twisted, melted reactor because the radioactive steam coming from below ground is dissipating the heat"
If there is steam, then the bottom of the corium isn't below boiling point and hence, the reactor isn't in cold shutdown. Also, why so hysterical? Sure corium has leaked from the central vessel (pressure vessel? I forget the proper term), but it's still in the building and it's not going anywhere. Your scenario didn't happen.
Mind putting your money where your mouth is? Cause the market has really taken a dump on JREITs. If you look carefully, things are actually much worse now than they were when the Japan East cost was being submerged by mega-tsunami. One would tend to think this is a reaction to radioactive fallout.
Either the people with money know something you do not, or people like you are just coming out here spouting BS on how overblown things are while not taking any meaningful economic positions behind their claims. If you are right, you stand to make a fortune in JREITs. What percentage of your savings have you invested?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
I talk to a lot of people here, and everyone seems to say the same thing. "It sucks, but what can we do?" People don't know what is and isn't safe. Different government agencies give different, and more often than not, contradictory reports. People aren't necessarily afraid of the radiation. They're afraid because they don't know what to believe. They don't evac because one report says they're safe, but then they think they should because another one says they're not.
Talking to people here about the alternatives to nuclear power, and what is feasible, I find that they all seem to agree. They'd like to see it go away, but they understand that there's only one way to get rid of it right now, and that would put Japan back in the stone age. Having said that, it seems that the market for household solar panels has increased dramatically for those who have houses and can afford it, but the majority of people here live in apartment buildings or condos. With most people living in the cities, they know there's no way they're going to get rid of nuclear power anytime soon, unless some magical new energy source appears that can produce enough power for everyone while taking up very little land.
Fossil fuels aren't causing desertification. If anything, global warming would INCREASE water, not decrease it, since heat drives the water cycle. Just like when you step on the gas in a car, there is more heat in the cylinders and ultimately more power, not less.
Now if you said hurricanes, that would make more sense.
The worst risk is when the fuel runs out.
Mass starvation and deaths due to disease from lack of sanitation and lack of medicine could kill billions.
Hundreds of millions would die from cholera alone, hundreds of millions would die from lack of diabetes medicines alone. Hundreds of millions would die from starvation alone.
If all the lights go out forever, we could very well have over half of the Earth's population dead in a decade.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
It is not clear what global warming may cause exactly. The system is too big, too complex for us to fully understand and model.
One of the interesting effects may be that Europe - at a fairly high latitude but still having a moderate climate - may actually cool down considerably, if the Gulf Stream stops bringing warm tropical waters to the area. A totally opposite effect than the name "global warming" or "greenhouse effect" suggest.
Some areas will get wetter, other areas may get dryer. Large parts of China and Australia have been suffering serious droughts over the last years, which is attributed to climate change. More typhoons/hurricanes are expected too, and besides strong winds they tend to bring a lot of rain indeed. The big issue with climate change is that while we know it's happening, we don't really know what the results will be. Weather patterns are expected to become more extreme, that's bad. Climate zones are shifting fast, faster than nature can keep up with, and that's bad too.
And then of course that little issue of oil running out, probably within a few decades, i.e. well within my lifetime. Coal we have enough of to last a lot longer, but that's even dirtier a fuel than oil. So indeed for that reason alone we should look at alternatives, preferably renewables but nuclear is I think also a good option for at least part of our energy needs. It definitely has it's problems, particularly the waste problem hasn't been solved yet. And anyway putting all your eggs in one basket is a bad idea no matter what, and now we're dependent on oil based fuels for nearly all our energy needs and that alone should be reason enough to look at alternatives.
And raise you a Nikkei vs Orix graph. YTD Nikkei is down 18% and Orix is down TWICE that. How do YOU explain real estate disproportionately undervalued to the equity market YTD?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
We are dealing with quasi-capitalism here, where governments "assume" the downside risks for both large banks and nuclear plant operators. It took the government 3 months to even admit full meltdowns at the 3 reactors. There is new information coming out everyday regarding levels of fallout in areas even further Southwest from Tokyo (which contradict earlier information from the government). Fallout maps to the level of detail necessary to value the impact to real estate do not yet exist, and maps of any detail for Saitama and Chiba have only been released recently. And let us not forget, fallout of this level in areas of this population density is unprecedented. This is an out of lab experiment, the results of which will take years to come out.
Finally, there is increasing doubt in the credibility of the officials in charge. Don't believe me? Take a look at this "development" from a couple of days ago. Would you trust these people when they say things are safe?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
A Melt-through has been acknowledged by TEPCO (see The Guardian 8th June article). While I don't think I was being hysterical, that would actually be a pretty reasonable response to the event. 1) primary containment - pressure vessel failed 2) secondary containment (toroidal pool) failed 3) building breached by explosions This IS worse case scenario. Plutonium 40km from site, contaminated water, food and soil. And there is radiation still being released with no viable plan to contain it. I'm sorry but cold shutdown implies there is still a functioning reactor to shut down.... Just smoke and mirrors...
"So is there a problem here?" .
"why would one think that school milk is radioactive"
Nice . . . I don't think you recognize who was in the video nor the history behind the issue being discussed. But I must be new here (which I am not) for thinking differently and trying to have a serious discussion about Fukushima with you . I blame myself . .
Move along folks, nothing to see here . . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
I'm sorry but cold shutdown implies there is still a functioning reactor to shut down....
As I said, no it doesn't.
While I don't think I was being hysterical, that would actually be a pretty reasonable response to the event. 1) primary containment - pressure vessel failed 2) secondary containment (toroidal pool) failed 3) building breached by explosions
Secondary containment didn't fail (though the hydrogen explosion probably did create some breaches in containment). Radioactive water did (and I gather continues to) leak from one or more of the reactors. But no corium escaped secondary confinement.
A worst case scenario would be a molten core boiling away in the ground with no attempt made to cool it off, you know, the China Syndrome thing.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are habitable and heavily populated.
And how the fuck does that matter in a discussion about a power plant that has released 100 times the amount of Cesium 137 of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined?
Look up the definition of cold shutdown. It doesn't matter if reactor containment is breached.
Not in this case. Here, "cold shutdown" has been redefined somewhat, to "below boiling if we can keep cooling water going in." Normally, in a cold shutdown, you can take the lid off the reactor, look inside, and replace fuel rods. They're a long way from that point.
More like: "the molten corium has burrowed deep enough to be cooled by groundwater and we are only reading 90 degrees at the twisted, melted reactor because the radioactive steam coming from below ground is dissipating the heat"
But not that bad, either. These reactors were built on bedrock. That placed them lower than would have been desirable for flood protection, but if they leak, they leak sideways, not down. There's been plenty of sideways leakage, but by now most of that water is being collected. There's now a cleaning plant in place to run the water through zeolites and catch the radioactive salts and solids. (Water itself doesn't become radioactive from exposure to gamma radiation; the longest lived radioactive isotope of oxygen has a half-life of 122 seconds.)
Now they have to figure out how to do the tough job - safely dismantling the radioactive mess in the melted core into small bits for disposal. That may take decades.
The cores are under 100C but only as long as they spray extra amounts of water on them from above?
I think the idea of cold shutdown is the reactor is shut down and even if left alone it wouldn't overheat. But this doesn't sound like the case here.
Normally you'd shove the control rods in and slow the reactions until not enough heat is generated to overheat even without special cooling (perhaps just immersed). But the cores are too melted for that I presume. They're going to have to chip the slag into smaller pieces and physically separate them before they really start producing less heat.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
If you assume the LNT (theory A) the cumulative effects of the dose at Fukushima on the surrounding population might be a 0.1% increase in cancer deaths over what would be expected. Given that there are 100,000 people in the vicinity, that might be 100 extra deaths (pulling numbers out of my backside here, but they are plausible to within an order of magnitude). The trouble is that a sample size of 100,000 isn't enough to reliably demonstrate a 0.1% increase in cancer rates, in the same way that tossing a coin 100,000 times isn't enough to reliably demonstrate that a coin comes up heads 50.1% of the time rather than 50. There's no way in the world we'll ever get this kind of data from human studies absent global nuclear war, in which case we'll have more important things to worry about. The only plausible way you might useful data would be a very, very large scale animal study, probably costing many millions of dollars.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
http://demotivation.me/cics33cqbyndpic.html
Very true. It has nothing to do neither with "cold", nor with "shutdown" according to wikipedia a shutdown is a specified state, with no fuel movements, and all elements in a state clearly defined in the spec or manual. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_(nuclear_reactor) The actual situation in the 1,2,3 reactors is of course light years away from that. Even the location of the fuel is unknown, it's temperature, movements, cooling. Nothing is known else than the fact that the pierced and empty container which was one called reactor is slowly reaching lower temp and pressure. how can it be otherwise ? could a pierced container not equalize pressure ? In fact, they speak about reactors, but there are not any "reactors" any more, as most of the fuel is in the ground. Therefore, measuring the temperature of a nearly empty pierced steel container makes absolutely no sense.
aaaaaaa
>> that would put Japan back in the stone age. Wrong. that would put Japan back in the oil age. which it did not even left. For now, Japan is lighting with candles, and making strong energy savings, that were really needed. But has there to be a catastrophic failure like this to stop playing with fire ? Seriously, after some explosions and a better technology emerging, steam machines were shelved. How much Fukushimas and Tchernobyls are there left before we definitely shelve this dangerous and obsolete fire ?
aaaaaaa
until the second and third generation of bean counters and suits inevitably cut back on maintenence and zero out equipment upgrades. Then - as has happened at nearly every plant - as the plant nears the end of its DESIGN life, they file extension after extension after extension to squeeze out a few more pennies in profits -- and more importantly to delay the expensive decommissioning until after the deployment of their personal golden parachutes.
You see, for example:
Solar panels. Put on roof.
Wind turbines. Put in Farmland.
Now, please try building a nuclear power plant on your roof or in a farmed field and see if Bessie the Cow is still able to eat the grass...
This sounds to me ideal for industry and, of course, more nuclear reactors. If they have another meltdown, then it won't matter as much due to the exclusion zone around the Fukushima site.
Er, I'm no expert, but the very fact that the specific reactor was damaged from an earthquake, doesn't mean that the area is (geologically) unsafe for future reactors?
No, the system is not too big or complex for us to understand well enough to make decisions.
The markets are far more complex (in that they have self-directed "free willed" machines that can create situations that can't be predicted) but we still make decisions about what to invest in, when to pull out and so on.
We understand climate well enough to know what to do.
How will the human race ever evolve to the next unless we expose people to mutation-causing radiation?
it depends ont he area where you lvie, but in japan it should be around ~2 mV per year from natural radiation ; 4 if you count all sources including medicals (which don't interest us). There are about 8.8K hours in a year so the average from natural radiation here is ~ 0.2 micro SV per hour in average. If the mountain you are speaking of is granitic/volcanic, that can even go up to much more ~0.8 Micro Sv per hour (I speaks from experience here being force to measure my old home basement near the amcif central in France). So what you did measure do not seem too far off from natural radiation. A bit on the high side for Japan, but much much lower than many area of the world.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
And that count only the *natural* radiation. Furthermore IAEA guidance are only that, and they are about additional dose *above* the natural radiation, that is occupational, or medicinal dose. So you cannot compare them to natural radiation background. Seeing that the average WORLDWIDE natural background is about 2.5 mSv per year about a maximum of 1 mSv per year total would put quite nearly all japan and most of the world outside the maximum range.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
How do you like them apples?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
You are fine investing in your own continent, but you do not understand the overall risks enough to invest in Japan. Perfectly understandable.
However, what I find hard to understand is why you then feel like you know what the best energy policy is for Japan and what the true impact of the Fukushima accident to Japan will be. You do not even understand the risk enough to invest in the country, but that does not stop you from making arrogant claims on what the Japanese should invest in and how the Japanese people should react to the Fukushima accident. Curious how you live with such cognitive dissonance.
Perhaps the debate on this subject would not be so noisy if people limited their opinions within areas that they were actually willing to expose themselves to?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!