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Fukushima's Fallout Worse Than Thought
gbrumfiel writes "A new study posted for open peer-review suggests that the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi released far more radiation than the Japanese government initially estimated. The study [PDF] uses global radioisotope and meteorological data to calculate the size of the release from the plant. Nature News reports that, contrary to official claims, the model shows that fuel being stored in a pool at unit 4 released a significant amount of cesium-137, a long-lived contaminant that has spread across the countryside. It also says that some Xenon-133 may have been released early on in the accident, suggesting that the plant was already damaged before it was hit by a tsunami. Overall, it estimates that Fukushima released about twice as much cesium-137 as the government claims and half as much as Chernobyl."
See, once again we see proof of what happens when government gets in the way with all their environmental regulations, regulations, inspections, etc. If this company had just been left to the free market, clearly they would have made a better effort to maintain their reactors and improve safety features. Once we abolish the EPA, NRC, Dept. of Energy, etc. we won't have to worry about something like this happening in the U.S.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
nuclear plant operators downplaying, obscuring, lying etc. I am genuinely shocked!1!!
*Implying that regulations prevented the disaster.
We have to keep doing what we are doing, or EVERYONE WILL DIE!!!!@!@!11
Truth is, if regulations had not been so severe, they would have been able to move that spent fuel to a safer location, or, God forbid, reuse it in a breeder reactor to generate energy while disposing of the long term radioactive waste. Instead, extremely heavy regulations made the situation WORSE because they forced the plant to store spent fuel in an insanely dangerous manner--they simply couldn't afford the cost of complying with disposal regulations.
I accidentally 93MB of .rar files
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
English and American English spellings are different.
Exactly. Better to have a company lie to us than the government since nobody trusts companies, but too many people trust the government way to fully.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
thats rather significant http://xkcd.com/radiation/
You raise an interesting point. So who exactly are you supposed to trust to provide you with accurate information? I suppose you could go and do it yourself, but then I would have to trust you. And I don't. This means I have to do it myself, also I have to do everything else in the world otherwise it's untrustworthy. That means you're going to have to trust me. Too bad for you.
All this sounds rather impractical. How about we set up groups of people we trust to this for us. Maybe be we voted for or something. A bit like a government or watchdog or something.
You a regulation of some sort that gives the companies incentive to create safer nuclear power station. From a purely profit perspective, the chance for a big accident are too small to warrant good safety. You need at least something to make that risk tangible enough so that companies automatically choose safer designs.
It's true that the field is over-regulated, or more accurately - that the wrong regulations are in place. There are strict specific rules on reactor safety - some of them might improve safety, some of them are nonsensical, and most of them are not based on scientific evidence or reason. There's nothing to give an incentive for the creation of new safer designs, the use of Thorium reactors, and there's nothing to give an incentive to shut down century-old plants like Fukushima Daiichi that are totally unsafe. Another negative consequence of the current rules it that the construction of a nuclear power plant is too expensive.
So, yes, at a first glance it does seem that if the government got out of the way, things would be much better, in fact it might be so, but that doesn't mean that some regulation isn't beneficial or even required. And yeah, I don't see why I should trust companies driven by increasing their profits should be trusted more than the government. The government is fucking it all up, remove the government, and the companies will start fucking it all up. So, instead of blanket statements calling for less regulation, let's voice our opinion on how the regulation should change.
I, for one, want my regulatory organs to use science when rewarding and penalizing installations for their environmental impacts.
The problem with the free market is it's driven by money.
The problem with government officials is they're driven by money.
I'm going to be 100km away from that plant next year with my whole family. If, over the course of the few weeks holiday I become your radioactive giant IT guy / overlord. I expect you all to welcome me.
I'm not too sure what I'll do with all your base; but thems will belongs to us.
I'll also use my power to right wrongs.
Actually, in a free market world it's pretty easy: If a company causes more damage than it can pay back, all of its officers and employees are enslaved until they earn enough money to pay back the damages. We could even chain the doors shut to keep them from running away.
Oh wait, they wanted big mommy government to save them by allowing them to just walk away from their debts and declare the area a superfund site so everyone else can pay to fix their shit when they screw up something bigger than they are? Tough tits.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Because packing up and shipping radioactive material is far cheaper then having it sit in a pool of water next to where it was extracted right? Companies always do the correct and far more expensive thing.
I dont know about japan, but in the US regulators make them keep the fuel because congress cant get their shit together to open up the storage facility.
You have the power to change government.
How do you change a company that you're not directly doing business with, like a nuclear power company? I don't buy anything from Goldman Sachs, so how do I affect them?
The market model is incomplete.
You are welcome on my lawn.
In terms of Cesium-137 maybe, but it's the uranium and plutonium around Chernobyl that are really dangerous.
Hmm, looking at the numbers...
From the pool of old fuel rods (NOT the reactors), we have 5kg of Cesium.
Plus a lot of Xenon. The Xenon release has a half life of ~126 hours. So, March 11 to today...
That leaves 0.000000000000074 of the original amount left. Or about 1MBq....
Oddly enough, most of this release seems to have happened as a side-effect of a complete lack of reprocessing of spent fuel rods, since they'd have been shipped off for reprocessing if that had been legal....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
What a crap. The blind confidence on that godess called 'free market' is driving USA to the pit.
Mankind will always have herdish behavior and ultimately free market fails to prevent common people to avoid dangerous situations. What to say about big companies.
Government control agencies, if not highly bribed, are the only means to enforce some minimum standards of security to competitive markets like energy, where companies will always happily embrace some degree of risk for the profit's sake.
Once you abolish that said agencies you will have wild competition, corporate secrecy with no obligation to report any issues to the public.
You won't even know what is gonna hit you.
I have read reports about child labour during the industrial revolution in the area my father came from (the north-east of the Netherlands), before it was abolished. Twelve hour working days, seven days a week, of hard, dangerous work for kids who should be at school, in factories run by people who said they were giving kids enough time to play by giving them one or two 15 minute breaks per day. When I was a kid in the 1960s factories in the area still dumped their waste in nearby canals, one of which ran in front of my grandmother's house. It was covered with a thick, dirty-white layer of foam which smelled like a kitchen sink that hasn't been cleaned for months. My father remembered how boys would set the canal on fire when he was young.
These things weren't stopped by market forces. These things were stopped by goverment regulations, but not until inspections became effective. You just have to look outside of the western world, at the oil mess in the Niger delta, the way batteries and ship wrecks are processed in India, to understand that without a stable goverment and regulations that are being enforced conditions similar to those during the industrial revolution still occur. Western companies behave reasonably well in western countries because they have to.
If you abolish regulations and inspections what you get is not responsible corporations, you get a world where greed is far more important than your salary, your working conditions, your kids' schooling. I don't believe for a moment the west is immune to falling back. It's human nature.
They cry "get off my back" when they're making a profit. But they come whining for subsidies when their gambling fails.
Or, in a nutshell, privatize profits, socialize losses.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
U around Chernobyl might be polluting as heavy metal, but they are not dangerous per see to live "beside" as long as you do not ingest them. Heck, you can hold U 235 in your hand as long as you got a latex glove. Pu it depends on the isotope as Pu has a "relatively short" life comapred to U (Pu 239 has got a 24000 years half life). More problematic would be much shorter half life element, but still in the decades and century amount, like Cs 137. Because those are much more radioactive than U and Pu, but still long enough half life to be there for a long time. Much less a problem are isotopes which are highly radioactive, with minutes to a year of half life : by now they have gone thru so many half lives that not much is left (for 1 year half life , 20 years mean 1/(2^20)=less than 1 atoms left out of 1 million initially). So yeah, Cs is a big problem, bigger than U (heck some of which is released in the atmosphere by coal power) and Pu. The other one are more heavy metal pollution than radioactively dangerous , relatively speaking.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Fukushima met or exceeded all government safety regulations. It also survived an earthquake that ranks in the top 5 in the world. Being hit by one of the worst tsunami's on the world right afterwards tho... The tsunami afterwards knocked out the diesel powered system for regulating cooling.
So, taking your sarcastic point: Sure! Lets take what didn't work, and add more of it! Because adding more of what didn't work will make it work!
In all honesty: There will always be unforeseen events. This disaster was caused by two major issues that by themselves causes massive damages and massive loss of life. Having both happen at the same time would be disaster no matter what regulation is in place.
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
Ideally, the free press will tell us the truth. We shouldn't trust our governments or the big companies. Unfortunately, they've become the big companies they ought to be reporting on.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
That's incorrect. Once you've piled up enough risk that an accident would end your career (which is what you care about, not the company), then you don't expend more money on avoiding additional risk. This "all in" behavior is not only painfully obvious, it's also empirically demonstrable. It's the same mechanism that renders harsher punishment for extraordinary crimes moot.
The market will at best work to deflect the risk, not avoid it. Without oversight, these risks would be ignored completely, because their magnitude makes them career killers no matter what you do.
Thanks in part to the Robert's Court, if I had a hundreds of million dollars to support politicians, I have the same power over our government as Wall Street and the Koch brothers.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Since part of my job is risk management, allow me to explain how this game works. It's very unethical and very inhuman, so if you have a tender stomach, you might want to stop reading now.
Risk management is about assessing and evaluating risk, then taking measures... or not taking measures. What matters is money. How much does it cost to mitigate or neutralize the risk? How likely is the incident going to happen? How much will it cost if it happens?
An alert reader will notice that there's nothing about the effect of an incident in that question. What about the environmental damage, the damage to human life, the long term effect? How about making an area inhabitable for centuries? All that is summed up under "how much does the incident cost".
And here's where government comes into play and how government dictates just what a company will do with the risk. If they act as they do far too often today, by not holding a company accountable for their actions, the sensible thing for a company is to carry the risk. Or rather, ignore it, since it will be carried by government and population. Again, the sensible thing to do from a risk assessment point is to simply forgo any and all safety and security measures beyond what's necessary to protect the company assets. Unless of course you may expect a bailout if your plant gets too hot to operate, then even that doesn't matter anymore.
Companies do not care about safety beyond what is necessary to protect their assets. They would rather install a full blown security camera and tripwire system to keep you from stealing a single pencil than to invest a hundred bucks to change their smoke filters to keep their chimney from blowing a few metric tons of SOx into the surroundings unless you force them to.
And remember when trying to "force" a company that fines are nothing but a risk assessment factor. If it's cheaper to pay the fine than to heed the law, fines will be paid. If risk, fine and expenses are high enough, creating a shell daughter company that will carry the risk and be promptly sunk in case of an incident is also an option.
Laws are, to a company, just part of their risk management and cost calculation. Unless it's cheaper to follow the law than to break it, it will be ignored.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A free market is not anarchy, a government is required to enforce contracts and provide for tort suits under a court system.
If a company causes environmental damage, they can be sued the crap out of by those it effects. A jury can force the company to pay a lot more than some regulatory fines written by lobbyists that right now get taken into account as the cost of business by the people making the decisions. This actually provides a greater incentive not to cause problems, since companies right now can use regulatory loopholes and be immune in court, whereas a court system can find them liable for all sorts of things when statutes are taken out of the picture.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
As a Professional in Risk Analysis and Management of various tangible and intangible assets, the person or people controlling the purse strings never see the risk right in front of them. I fight on a daily basis to try to keep my clients informed of the clusterfuck hovering above them and it's hard work, if it wasn't for regulation I'd be out of a job because most companies wouldn't give a shit and not just because of trying to keep expenses low but because they're idiots. I spend so much time covering my ass and ensuring that everything I do or say is properly noted and recorded to ensure they don't blame me when the shit hits the fan that it makes up most of my overhead. The market will solve the problem by killing itself and anything around it in the process and it's not just because of greed, it's because people are idiots. The people in charge of these things in the corporate structure are usually just idiots and the people writing the regulation are usually just lazy or living in academic fantasy land or are in no way, shape or form divorced from conflicts of interest.
Which government regulation did this company violate to cause this accident? None.
If the government would have approved new plants this one could have been safely decommissioned and replaced by something much safer. So in this case it was actually government regulations which kept a horribly out of date reactor online well after its original EOL.
These numbers aren't a big change from estimates 5 months ago.
42% of Chernobyl's Cs emission, but much lower land deposition - only 21% of total Cs emissions hit land.
And this is from 3 or 4 separate failures at old ill-prepared sites following a once-in-a-thousand-year quake which hit a chain of volcanic islands which are plagued by quakes.
Emission per failure is nearly a full order of magnitude below Chernobyl.
Total land deposition is also nearly a full order of magnitude below Chernobyl.
The lesson is to improve your game, not loose your cool.
-- Mike Greaves
"..after you apply the risk factor to the potential costs of a disaster."
But private corporation seldom do that, and when they do it's always weighed against the impact on my bonus THAT qtr.
The long history of corporation show that they will poison people, leave the countryside a barren waste land, and level mountains. Based on the history of corporation, I would wager that without regulation they would have dumped the nuclear waste about 50 miles off the coast.
I'm not anti corporation, but why people scream about getting rid of regulation and ignore the history of corporate activity.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Do you trust Consumer Reports?
Under a free market, such ratings and standards organizations would thrive to a much greater extent than they do today, and you could trust them because each organization would always point out the faults in others, forcing them all to be on their best behavior and totally open.
congress cant get their shit together to open up the storage facility.
Not to defend Congress, but we know that isn't the issue. No one wants the waste. Its not Congress, but the states. Yucca, we know now, is a political farse; all the science was bent to serve the politics.
The Admin and the Engineer
We do have good disaster plans. We also have better designs than those plants were using, but most places can't upgrade them because of regulations, politics, fear mongering, FUD, and idiocy.
If they had really understood what happened during the accident, they would have made a very different "first guess" for the emissions. In fact, their first guess would have been that contaminated air was leaking from the reactor buildings before active venting started. Why?
Because of the hydrogen explosions. Containments are vented through the "smoke" stacks. If there had been no leak of the containment prior, during or after the venting, no hydrogen could have accumulated in the reactor buildings, because it would have left through the stacks. It didn't. Some of the hydrogen accumulated in the reactor buildings or they could not have exploded. This hydrogen came straight from the reactors and was as inextricably mixed with Xenon-133 as the proverbial piss in the water of the swimming pool.
No surprise there at all. It is astonishing that the authors of the paper didn't come to that simple conclusion, namely, that their first guess was naive and their "discovery" was not all that interesting to begin with and hardly worth mentioning.
Remove the government created corporate veil, and you can pursue individual shareholders, ensuring that no-one gets away scot-free.
People tend to equate free markets with corporate rule, but the fact is that corporations can't exist without the government. Only companies can. And the owners of companies are liable for any and all damage they cause.
From the wiki:
"The superior neutron economy of a fast neutron reactor makes it possible to build a reactor that, after its initial fuel charge of plutonium, requires only natural (or even depleted) uranium feedstock as input to its fuel cycle."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
You have the power to change government.
No, only the leaders. Through many leader changes government organizations generally stay the same, no matter who is in power, and seek only to protect their existence and to grow.
How do you change a company
You sue them and/or give them bad publicitly and effect direct change. See: Greenpeace.
It's far more effective than trying to work through multiple layers to change an organization that will NEVER change in any significant way without disbanding - where companies can and do change all the time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You don't know what you are talking about. You are anthropomorphizing a system of economic interaction.
You are further confusing "free markets" with "fascism", because it is the boards of directors of corporations that want limits on torts.
That is not free market economics. That is fascism/socialism for the rich. People who want free markets are 100% against bailouts, or they don't know what they are talking about.
Which is why the corporate form should be abolished, as it would be under a free market (the corporate veil and the inability to sue shareholders is a protection afforded to corporations by the government).
This is the tragedy of the commons to the fullest. Until a way is found to make companies not to behave like this, all the 99% protests are completely meaningless. Corporations will find a way on how to shift risk & responsability & costs on to general population to gain short term profits.
And keep in mind- when we are talking about financial institutions like banks, the "commons" is our future. They will screw up long term prosperity of the entire world for short term profit. That is why crises happen every ~10 years.
Question is, how do we change this?
--Coder
Nice, blame the victims.
This is TEPCO's fault, and their government enabled them. The government should have stepped back long ago and allowed them the freedom to replace that crappy plant with a newer model that would use up their spent fuel. That alone would have cut the severity of this disaster by 75%!
So what? They stay in the fuel.
Very stupid to put a gold mine of energy into Yucca mountain, we've only extracted less than 15% of the energy from that wrongly called "spent fuel". We can get the rest of the energy and as a side effect transform the stuff into short lived isotopes.
Yucca mountain is junk engineering, a bad application of science
Nonsense.
Bankruptcyt==> company changes its name, moves corporate headquarters, sheds all liability - continues as before. Previous corporate shell abandoned. Public gets finger.
It's been an energy and mining and manufacturing industry strategy since the 19th century.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Over what time frame? A banana per femtosecond would kill just about anyone. But a banana a day is fine, just fine.
OK, I'm thinking. I'm thinking "regulatory capture", and "political action committees", and "unlimited campaign contributions". Yep, got it.
OK, that can't actually happen in our current reality. Because the nuclear power plants are owned by the same companies that own the government, and they are permitted, nay, encouraged to write legislation to prevent this. You try to stop this, and all you'll get is a horse's head in your bed and an IRS audit.
I sure do. The government enlists private corporations to build and run nuclear power plants by using taxpayer dollars (since nuclear fission plants are not economically viable in a free market, but the government wants them for war and science purposes) and the private corporations purchase legislation that allows them to obviate risk. It's all very, very clear.
In a well regulated free market, terrestrial fission plants would not exist, because there aren't enough customers willing to pay for the decommissioning costs they would have to charge up front. In a laissez-faire market, of course, the plants would never be decommissioned, because there's no profit in it. The people who built them would just design them to fail after they died, and in the absence of regulation that would work... for them.
You are making the assumption that nuclear power plants would nut be profitable under free market conditions. You further make the assumptions that materials inside of nuclear power plants are not valuable, and would not make up the cost of decommissioning, and likely turn a profit.
But you are right on about everything else. We can't do anything with fascism. We have to ditch this fascist economics system or we will all be doomed. You seem to indicate a preference for socialist policy, but your assumptions for such policies are unsound. We could, of course, find out fairly quickly if they are true or not by at least temporarily lifting the ban on new nuclear plant development and nixing all subsidies on the industry.
Good grief yes. Deregulators drive me crazy. As if regulations didn't exist precisely because someone screwed up big enough to make us say: 'ok, now we have to regulate that so we don't have someone do that again.' As soon as you deregulate, you get 'that' again, whatever that was.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Do you see how this works?
Why, yes, in fact, I do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_litigation
Empirical fact: lawsuit risk did not stop BP from making poor decisions that resulted in environmental catastrophe.
And then there's there is the fact that the fundamental error in judgement was made by the people most at risk: engineers on the rig, some of whom died in the explosion and fire. They made decisions based on hope, not policy, and died as a result.
Yet for some reason anti-scientific, anti-empirical idiots endlessly repeat the refrain that it "just makes sense" that "the market will take care of it." As someone above noted: people are idiots. And in the modern world, idiots can do a huge amount of damage. Public oversight is the only way of reducing some risks, however imperfect it may be.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Dude, there are almost no breeder reactors out there because they are very difficult to operate. There are currently no breeder reactors in Japan, that actually do any productive work. The one in Monju is still being tested after extensive repairs (it had a sodium leak and fire more than 15 years ago).
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
We'd also need to remove all subsidies on all forms of energy production, and force the producers to pay for the externalities (such as pollution, and the cost of adapting our infrastructure to global warming). At that point nuclear power starts looking like a bargain.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
You had me until "do so fairly". it will most assuredly NOT do so "fairly". it will do so in a way which maximizes benefit to the capital source in charge of the project. "Fair" doesn't even enter into the discussion, and that is why we are not all small government libertarians.
If you can store it somewhere that would kill everyone around it, but those people don't purchase your product and don't have the legal ability/capital available to prove the case and prosecute you, then the problem is solved from a perspective that is absolutely fine from the point of view of the "free market". but it definitely is not "fair". "Fair" is determined by people, not economic forces.
The main problem here (outside of stupid regulations) is regulatory capture. I don't see how to avoid stupid regulations, but regulators should, after they retire, be forbidden to work for, or accept any remuneration from, any entity that they have previously regulated. And if they run for office, they should be forbidden from accepting any campaign contributions from those entities.
That's not perfect. In fact it's nearly minimal. But it would improve things.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I'm not saying you're wrong, because you aren't. But that's not the problem. The problem is that the managers and boards of directors, who are liable under law, are rarely held to their liability. The stockholders generally never have either knowledge or control of what the corporation is doing. They are, officially, the owners, but unless they hold more than 20% of the stock in the corporation it's reasonable that they not be held liable. And if they do hold that much of the stock, then they aren't as invulnerable as you assert...in theory. In practice they are held liable even less often than are the managers.
What's extremely interesting is that many managers who make company killing decisions are then immediately hired at higher rates into a better job. One has to wonder why.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
From the Wikipedia link: "many claims are expected to be met administratively from the fund set up for that purpose under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990"
The Oil Pollution Act set up funds to prevent civil liability for spills. It capped BP's maximum liability for the spill at $75M. So I ask, what lawsuit risk? The government already set up a system such that BP knew exactly what it was liable for - a total risk of $75M.
But we need those regulators, right? I mean, they obviously kept the spill from happening, or at least knew it was going to occur... U.S. exempted BP's Gulf of Mexico drilling from environmental impact study
No, the reality is regulatory capture. The only people with enough expertise to oversee something as complex as oil drilling are largely people who have worked in the industry, who have friends in the industry, and often benefit financially from the very companies they have to regulate. BP gets a pass, regardless of how many regulations are on the books, because the guy that's regulating went to college and worked for 15 years with the guy he's trying to regulate.
But really, keep calling people that disagree with you anti-science, or anti-evidence. It makes it easy to tell you're being partisan instead of rational.
Go to China and you will see places were people weren't evacuated and got cancer because solar panels were build there.