Report Condemns Japan's Response To Nuclear Accident

mdsolar sends this quote from an article at the NY Times: "From inspectors who abandoned the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as it succumbed to disaster to a delay in disclosing radiation leaks, Japan's response to the nuclear accident caused by the March tsunami fell tragically short, a government-appointed investigative panel said on Monday. ... In particular, an erroneous assumption that an emergency cooling system was working led to an hours-long delay in finding alternative ways to draw cooling water to the plant, the report said. All the while, the system was not working, and the uranium fuel rods at the cores were starting to melt."

Comments

In another era ...

[sirdude]

... there would have been less "soteigai" and more "seppuku".

Re:In another era ...

[buchner.johannes]

Comparisons with Chernobyl are varying. Prof. Kodoma estimated 10-40 times Chernobyl (video has transcript and CC).

Dunno

[MichaelSmith]

Once that plant started to melt down any work on site was going to be long and dangerous. The only way to protect the local people was to move them away. So its pretty clear that the local area was not evacuated fast enough, but I don't see that using a different approach in the first few hours would have helped. That plant was gone and about to melt down. It was destroyed by a big earthquake and at least two big waves.

Re:Dunno

[MichaelSmith]

Proper cooling (which would have meant functioning ICs OR venting+water injection)

But how could authorities have done that, given that most of the gear at the reactor site was trashed?

Re:Dunno

[Magada]

Unit 1 IC train A was shut down by operators to avoid excessive cooling which would have thermally stressed the metal of the RPV and shortened the life of an already old plant. Later, power to operate the valves that would have made it active again became unavailable.

At that point, the RPV should have been vented and water should have been added using fire engines. This was not done for a variety of reasons, such as that the evacuation was not over yet. When at last venting was attempted, it was found that a valve needed for venting ad failed closed, possibly because of excessive pressure. Attempts to open it manually met with failure.

So, eventually the reactor vented itself. Explosively.

The severe accident management guidelines did NOT, in fact, state that venting should only be performed post-evac. They were ignored in the event.

Even later in the accident sequence sufficient fresh water became unavailable for a while (the first reactor explosion damaged fire trucks, severed water lines and prompted a TOTAL evacuation of the site). A decision was made to delay salt-water cooling. This probably contributed to the melt-through in reactor 3.

Re:Dunno

[Hynee]

They fucked up by not having adequate backup power systems.

Everything in the generator hall was fine AFAIK except outside power was down and backup generators were trashed by the tsunami. And that was is, there were no better protected generators, no generators that could run from the heat of the reactor, and no plan to fly in working generators. Derp.

Re:Dunno

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sad when a post that starts out 'No, you stupid fuck.' is modded up. Are we on 4chan now? It seems like children are using their parent's uid now too.

Re:Dunno

[Ethanol-fueled]

Hell yeah, man.

These discussions would be painfully boring to read if it weren't for folks like you. I'll buy you a beer if you ever stop by San Diego. A good one, too, like Stone - not Bud Light and wine coolers, which is what all these thumb-sucking bedwetters drink.

Friended.

Re:Dunno

[Magada]

Thanks. It's just that I am tired of all the mealy-mouthed "oh but nuclear is SCIENCE and SCIENCE is doubleplusgood" harping.

Keep that beer in mind, I plan to come on over when your gov't starts showing signs of sanity.

Re:Dunno

[MightyYar]

I don't care for your style, but mostly because it is ineffective. The "stupid fuck" will just go into defensive mode, so you haven't changed his mind. Meanwhile, those of us in the people in the peanut gallery don't usually equate knowledgeable professionals with needless public profanity - so you aren't even convincing the peanut gallery like you would have otherwise.

Re:Dunno

[Magada]

Yes, you are correct, of course. I am just very, very angry. I think I am conveying that pretty effectively.

Any thoughts on what I have posted, just to keep this semi-on-topic?

Re:Dunno

[cyber-vandal]

I'm abusive on this site from time to time. It rarely gets a positive response, usually eliciting abuse, silence or hurt feelings comments. However I usually feel better about it, although my housemate saw me mid-abuse once and told me that I looked like a psycho, which has cut down on my bad behaviour somewhat.

Back on topic: yeah those Japanese really fucked up huh.

Re:Dunno

[Magada]

Let's not be racist about it. The plant was designed by General Electric (GE nowadays). Immelt, slimy toad that he is, jumped in the media fray VERY early on, to do damage control:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/56fb5f92-4e0e-11e0-a9fa-00144feab49a.html#axzz1hguiUtBH

He offered help! He should have started by offering excuses! A group of GE whistleblowers were pointing out design flaws in that exact type of plant in the 970s! Design flaws which played a role in the accident, moreover:

http://www.iwatchnews.org/2011/03/15/3520/reactors-heart-japanese-nuclear-crisis-raised-concerns-early-1972-memos-show

also, this:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/15/956586/-Whistleblower-Expose-of-GE-Inspection-Coverup-RARE-EU-Authored-US-BWR-Damage-Report-?via=tag

Re:Dunno

[Wonko the Sane]

Racist? I was trying to make a Final Fantasy 7 joke. Thanks for ruining it.

Re:Dunno

[Wonko the Sane]

I have no idea why it looked like the post I just replied to was a reply to an entirely different post that I made earlier.

Re:Dunno

[Ol Olsoc]

It's sad when a post that starts out 'No, you stupid fuck.' is modded up. Are we on 4chan now?

No you stupid ........ Oh, I just can't.

Re:Dunno

[PCM2]

The severe accident management guidelines did NOT, in fact, state that venting should only be performed post-evac. They were ignored in the event.

Judging by the news reports at the time, the Japanese government was intent on denying that this even was a "severe accident." I wonder if that was just media spin, or whether there was something about the Japanese cultural mindset that they just refused to believe things were getting out of control as fast as they did? And that's why the appropriate protocols weren't followed -- because they didn't believe this was a case that merited "severe accident management"?

Re:Dunno

[colinrichardday]

I wasn't raised in a barn; were you raised in a reality where social cohesion trumped facts?

Re:Dunno

[MightyYar]

I am just very, very angry. I think I am conveying that pretty effectively.

Yes, but none of us care how angry you are - we are mostly just trying to make sense of what really happened at Fukushima.

Any thoughts on what I have posted, just to keep this semi-on-topic?

The report does seem to agree with you, though you say:

Proper cooling (which would have meant functioning ICs OR venting+water injection) could have saved the day.

While the report allows that the valve malfunctions may or may not have been caused by a lack of cooling/venting prior. In any case, it is pretty clear that they were initially trying to save the plant and avoid radioactive steam release when they should have been trying to prevent a disaster, plant and steam be damned.

Re:Dunno

[antifoidulus]

There certainly was the motive to cover it up, probably the most embarrassing part of this whole fiasco for the Japanese government has been the fact that in February the whole site supposedly underwent an extensive safety evaluation by the government. The government obviously didn't report any problems and the plant was granted a 10 year extension to operate, as it was originally scheduled to shut down in March of 2011....

Re:Dunno

[siddesu]

The primary reason for the bad handling within the company (according to what I hear from an acquaintance of mine who works for TEPCO at Fukushima I) was plain panic and desire to cut as much cost as possible. The first reaction of TEPCO was to move out of the Fukushima plant. They apparently had evacuated all staff and families on Sunday already. Then they left subcontractors to deal with the disaster, while TEPCO staff was monitoring the shit happening from Tokyo via videoconferencing. They even had a glitch that caused delay in power re-supply sometime in mid-April, when a construction machine cut the optical cable that connected TEPCO staff with their human robots at the plant.

The real question is, why was all this allowed. Many reasons.

First, TEPCO is a very well connected and influential corporation. The nuclear power management body in Japan - JAEA - is staffed exclusively with people from the nuclear power industry, i.e. about half of their staff is from TEPCO itself. Those people advise the government on what to do. They also own stock or options of, receive pensions from and hold sinecure positions with their former corporate employer. No wonder they would be among the last to criticize it. Naturally, they influence what gets in the government media (NHK, mostly) about the accident. TEPCO is a large contributor to national politicians, and the local governments where TEPCO operates (including the affected areas) are also mostly in the pockets of the company. That is why both national and local politicians have worked with TEPCO to calm protesters from day one.

Despite that, there have been a few large demonstrations, but don't forget that the people in the affected areas are also victims of the earthquake - their houses, business and in many cases, family members are gone. They simply don't have the means to stage significant protests.

Second, TEPCO is a large advertiser. They wield a very large influence with a lot of private media. That is why you never see anything really bad about them in the newspapers or in the popular private TV channels. The culture preference against rocking the boat plays very nicely with the financial motivation of not angering TEPCO, so coverage is avoiding classifications as "disaster", "severe", etc. There was a lot of shock when the accident was classified at Chernobyl level, but overall the media has managed to project the message that this was an accident that is due to factors beyond human control, which has until recently, limited the interest in it on national level. We'll see if the report changes this.

Third, TEPCO is a company that also manages distribution of power. That is why if you are a large consumer in times of shortages, you keep your trap shut if you're smart. Just in case.

There is also the complex political situation in Japan. The LDP, the party that is directly responsible for giving the nuclear lobby a free ride, is the major opposition. They have not uttered a peep about the disaster yet, because they don't want their role advertised. Half the politicians in the party in power (DPJ) were members of the LDP at the time decisions about nuclear power in Japan were made. They also don't want to put forward the political responsibility issue. Third, the DPJ is in deep trouble anyways, and because of the way the political apparatus of Japan works, they handle the bureaucracy with a lot of difficulty. Maybe that is partly why they made the ultimately disastrous decision to let TEPCO handle the accident.

In short, it is a very complex and very unfortunate story.

Re:Dunno

[sjames]

I am not the AC above. I have to say that your choice to throw in the completely extraneous ", you stupid fuck" is poor form. It is perhaps a testament to the maturity of others here that you could be modded up in spite of that.

There's a time and a place for everything. While debate is in theory all about facts and reason, such inflammatory language nmakes people WANT you to be wrong and find excuses to draw that conclusion. It does you no favors.

Re:Dunno

[Sardaukar86]

Yes, you are correct, of course. I am just very, very angry. I think I am conveying that pretty effectively.

OT: This may be more about my reading comprehension than your post, but until I saw your response to Ethanol-fueled, I wasn't sure what the OP had done (specifically) to annoy you so greatly.

As such I was a bit surprised by your post especially as it contrasts with your normal writing style.

Re:Dunno

[RockDoctor]

probably the most embarrassing part of this whole fiasco for the Japanese government has been the fact that in February the whole site supposedly underwent an extensive safety evaluation by the government

I hadn't heard that before.

Why do you think it's unusual for a plant to pass a safety inspection shortly before undergoing catastrophic failure(s)? It's got to happen some times. The earthquake hadn't been predicted (with any credibility) before the event (there are no credible techniques for earthquake prediction better than "this is an earthquake-prone area"), and it wasn't in the habit of burning to the ground on a weekly basis, or throwing people to their deaths from the roof of the machine halls on alternate Fridays. So that would suggest that their routine safety procedures were within specification.
Whether there were problems with their "safety case", major emergency procedures etc is a much wider question. But the absence of a large body count in the workforce says they didn't do too badly on day-to-day safety.

Parallel case : not long after I started working, I flew out to a worksite passing over the Piper Alpha oil installation. A few days later, on 2nd July 1988, the Piper passed it's annual routine safety inspection ( I forget the inspector's name ... Richard [something] ... still in the business 6 years later). On 6th July, a gas leak (due to inadequate maintenance management) started to tear apart the platform. From my worksite, we could see the flames reflecting off the clouds as 167 of my colleagues burned to death (including a couple of friends).
The safety inspection only covered whether the maintenance management system was working as designed (which it was), not whether the maintenance management system was fit for the tasks it was meant to perform (which weren't even clearly defined, and which it failed at, abysmally).

Safety management is a lot more complex when you get close to it than it appears from a distance. The Law of Unintended Consequences has killed many people over the years. Fortunately, it looks as if the additional body count from the Fukushima fuck up isn't going to be that large, compared to the earthquake.

Re:Dunno

[chitokutai]

A couple of clarifications:

The reason for the poor handling of the situation is as you mention, an over-reliance on contract workers, but also because of a complete lack of preparation and training by those involved. The officials at TEPCO never prepared for a worst-case scenario, because they wanted to cut costs, and they stupidly believed that the worst-case scenario was impossible. Two points make this painfully obvious: 1) they didn't think a complete loss of power was even in the realm of possibility (despite only having two backup generators, both located below ground), and 2) they didn't even have instructions in their manuals for manually venting the RPV. NISA, despite being in charge of nuclear safety and TEPCO, were watching network TV to find out the details of the problem -- i.e. a huge transparency problem.

Also, the TEPCO as we knew it, and as you mentioned it, is finished. Most likely the company will be nationalized sometime next year, and although the same pieces of shit that got us in this situation will most likely keep their jobs, their influence over Japanese people is pretty much at an end. The media has regularly covered their incompetence and negligence since the March explosions, and even NHK has pretty solidly shown how criminal their actions were. Will anyone get put in jail? Probably not. But the TEPCO CEO has already been forced to quit, and TEPCO stocks will be in shambles for decades. In this sense, you could probably draw parallels to the clusterfuck that was BP and the Gulf oil spill. But again, it must be emphasized that no one seems concerned about TEPCO's influence on network TV at all anymore because there is a massive amount of anger directed at the company.

In terms of power consumption, there is already talk of allowing non-centralized power companies to start operating, and hopefully this is something we'll see in the next 10 years or so. I have a feeling that the government will want to keep people tied to TEPCO mostly because there will be billions paid out in compensation to victims of the disaster, and they can't afford to pay for everything. There will be a shift away from nuclear power, though. The general consensus is that most people don't have the stomach for it anymore, and based on many reports on TV, it's clear that Japan was essentially forced into using nuclear power in the first place. We will probably see more power sourced from LNG in the near future, and there are plans to build a plant of this type in Tokyo soon.

I'm not disagreeing with you at all, I just think that some of your information is a bit out of date. TEPCO is in ruins right now, and since we'll be dealing with radiation cleanup for decades, its negligence won't be so easily forgotten.

I know you mentioned that NHK is in the pocket of the government, and they are, but NHK has produced some of the best documentaries on the disaster, so I highly recommend checking them out if you haven't done so (sadly, I can only find links to English dubbed versions):

NHK Japan's Nuclear Crisis More video links

Re:Dunno

[siddesu]

There will be a shift away from nuclear power, though. The general consensus is that most people don't have the stomach for it anymore, and based on many reports on TV, it's clear that Japan was essentially forced into using nuclear power in the first place.

Yeah, it looks that is likely to happen. I, for one, hope that the likes of Toshiba can develop safer nuclear that can be deployed on a smaller scale so that nuclear industry does not rely on few "too big to fail" behemots with too much control (although that will probably remain a dream). I also hope that people in Japan will start thinking out of the box - maybe about solar farms on unused land like Mr. Son from Softbank does, maybe about harnessing geothermal and tidal energy, or, who knows, maybe about breakthrough in fusion power.

you mentioned that NHK is in the pocket of the government, and they are, but NHK has produced some of the best documentaries on the disaster,

They were pretty complacent in the beginning of the drama, IMHO. I was away from Japan for a few months in the summer. When I got back, they were, as you mentioned, already making some better journalist coverage on the issues. But it took them some time to get a spine. And large parts of the serious press -- especially Asahi shimbun -- still visibly shy away from covering big company troubles.

Japan has huge potential and it makes me really sad to see it being extinguished slowly by decades of utter lack of leadership and massive irresponsibility by the political elite and by the senior management of many large companies.

Re:Dunno

[Magada]

I am aware of that. It's perhaps a sign of immaturity on my part, although it does help me sleep better.

Re:Dunno

[Magada]

In theory at least, the safety of the entire plant was checked, as unit 1 was to receive an operating license extension.

Re:Dunno

[chitokutai]

NHK was an interesting case. I was watching NHK most of the time in the beginning as they always had the most up-to-date news, but I think the station's biggest failing was that it was trying too hard to stay calm according to policy. It certainly helped a lot of us keep our heads on when things were really scary, but it also had the detrimental effect of making viewers complacent, when (as we would learn later) things were way worse than they seemed. People closer to the plant should have been evacuated almost immediately, but since they were getting news primarily from NHK, they would probably have been less apt to leave the area.

At the same time, I never really believed that they were in the pocket of TEPCO - they just toed the official line of communication way too closely even when the government was in preemptive damage control mode.

I'm not really sure about the newspapers, to be honest. I got most of my news via Internet and TV, but one of my favorite news programs through all of this has been Houdou Station on TV Asahi. Furutachi has been massively critical of TEPCO and the government since day one, and the show has done some great reporting, especially on the radiation contamination.

Speaking of which, Houdou Station will be airing a 2-hour special on the 28th (9pm-11:10pm) covering the first 5 days of the disaster. I doubt it will tell us anything we didn't already know, but it should be worth watching.

Re:Dunno

[Magada]

Slashdot is badly borken these days. I just had a post disappear completely the other day. It said comment submitted, but it never showed up on the page.

Re:Dunno

[drinkypoo]

GE also fought to have the reactors installed on their current site at Fukushima Daiichi... in a place known to be unsafe for building for centuries.

Re:Dunno

[ewok85]

The government obviously didn't report any problems

I don't think the government performs any inspections - they rely on the power companies to organise it and they tell the government how it goes.

TEPCO has been publicly caught creating fraudulent reports since the 1980's on numerous occasions - why they were allowed to go on so long until this happened is disgusting.

Re:Dunno

[dj245]

I, for one, hope that the likes of Toshiba can develop safer nuclear that can be deployed on a smaller scale so that nuclear industry does not rely on few "too big to fail" behemots [sic] with too much control (although that will probably remain a dream).

Disclaimer- I am a Toshiba worker in the Power Systems Division - Steam turbines etc., but not nuclear. I hear the nuclear news but I am not a part of it.

On December 22, we recieved NRC approval for our AP1000 design. [Sorry this is a subscription news site with a very hefty subscription fee, but you can get a good idea from the article summary]. There was a little doubt about whether our new units, Vogtle 3 and 4 would be built, since some of the financing fell through and Toshiba had to take a bigger share of the project costs. Now, it looks like the plants will be built, although I will hedge my words by saying that many nuclear reactors got to 75%-99% completion but were never fueled and later dismantled. I saw in our company newsletter today that the condensers were being shipped from Korea. After Vogtle 3 and 4, we have plans to build 2 more units, although I can't remember the name. Those are in the preliminary design process (although the design will be exactly the same; "preliminary design" is a department specific term meaning the early stages of the project).

As for the small nuclear designs, we have tried for years to give a 4S reactor away to a small town in Alaska. The problem is that currently NRC treats reactors the same whether they are 1000MW or 50MW. Nobody wants to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance and permitting that is required for a measly 50MW. Personally, I think that is a good thing- I have visited dozens of power stations from 21MW to 950MW, and the larger the machine and more people they have on staff, the higher the knowledge level and experience. I would rather have hundreds of trained staff available for an emergency than a dozen or two guys. According to the Wiki page (I don't know much about 4S) the NRC should take some action next year and maybe these small reactors will move forward.

Toshiba made a huge investment into Nuclear power (Billions with an S) in the couple of years before Fukushima. That is the reason our stock price tumbled after the disaster- it wasn't just that we were associated with a nuclear disaster, we also had a huge investment which looked (back in April 2011) like it might be money down the tubes. Japan might put up a huff politically about nuclear power, but the truth is it is almost required. Japan has no coal, oil, or natural gas deposits worth mentioning. All fuel has to be imported from Australia (coal) and elsewhere. Of course they can keep importing fuel, but eventually that will be seen as "not green". Coal is seen as dirty and my personal belief is that natural gas, although it burns cleaner, has many other environmental problems and is not much better. Large generation plants are still required to smooth out the mountain and valleys of electrical production that wind and solar can produced. Hydro? After the earthquake many mothballed hydro stations in Japan were refurbished and put back online (it was lucky the dams had not been dismantled yet). After the electrical crunch they will probably be mothballed again because of the environmental impact. The trend for hydro in Japan is less, not more. Until someone comes along with a better idea, my opinion is that nuclear will always be part of Japan's electrical mix.

Re:Dunno

[khallow]

They apparently had evacuated all staff and families on Sunday already.

If you're not part of the solution, you shouldn't be there. I would have immediately moved out anyone who wouldn't be contributing as well.

Maybe that is partly why they made the ultimately disastrous decision to let TEPCO handle the accident.

Or maybe it's because the government decided to let the experts run things. For all the talk of the inexperience of managing a bad accident like this, TEPCO did have better crews than anything government could muster. Same thing happened in the US when that oil well, Deepwater Horizon blew. The government ended up depending on British Petroleum, the people who caused the blowout, because BP knew how to run the show.

I'm sure in each case that the accident response teams were closely supervised by government and their big decisions had to be justified to government officials.

Re:Dunno

[siddesu]

the government decided to let the experts run things.

The experts did an excellent job blowing up three reactors, as you can easily learn by reading the report in the TFA.

Re:Dunno

[colinrichardday]

Did they teach you that social cohesion trumped facts?

Re:Dunno

[colinrichardday]

No, I haven't. Is asking such a question an example of your so-called "manners"?

Re:Dunno

[khallow]

The experts did an excellent job blowing up three reactors, as you can easily learn by reading the report in the TFA.

That's irrelevant. The question is whether the government could have taken over and done better than TEPCO. I don't see that happening. When you make choices you have to consider what happens with the possible choices, not just glance a little at one option and choose the other blindly.

1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you imagine if 1% of cars would randomly blow up? How about 1% of airplanes have their engines fall off in flight? There wouldn't be cars or airplanes.

But, 1% of all nuclear power plants in the world have now experienced melt downs. Per wikipedia, 441 operating plants in the world.

echo 5/441 | bc -l .01133786848072562358

So, OVER 1% catastrophic failure. .I'm sure all the pro pro pro nuke industry apologists on /. will mod this to oblivion. Facts can be inconvenient.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[ustolemyname]

How many cars have you driven 24/6 for 60 years? Hell, few airplanes are in the air after 30 years.

On top of that, 0.4% of all cars get in accidents every year. Every year more people die in the US from traffic accidents then in every nuclear power incident ever.

Sources:
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1103.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_United_States#Total_number_of_vehicles

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[beelsebob]

I count 10 reactors that have melted down:

BORAX-i
EBR-i
The sodium reactor expiremnt
Stationary Low Power reactor No 1
SNAP8ER
Fermi 1
SNAP8DR
3 mile island
chernobyl
fukushima

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

Even with pessistimistic estimates for Chernobyl and Fukushima death rates nuclear power still kills less people per unit of energy than any other form of electrical generation.

If you want to complain about the safety of nuclear power tell us what you want to replace it with. Be honest and include the expected change in fatalities resulting from switching over to your alternative.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[fisted]

Cool straw-man, bro.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bringing in facts is inconvenient for everyone. Nuclear's chief rival is coal, and coal's catastrophic failure rate is around 100% (every single plant ends up polluting). It's not that 1% is good; it's that 1% is way better than the competition.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[stms]

A nuclear meltdown isn't necessarily explosive. To be honest it would surprise me if most cars had a lower than 1% failure rate especially among cars still running designed and manufactured before 1980 as most nuclear plants are. What I find most inconvenient about facts is how the media distorts them.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

To be fair, nuclear plant reactors tend to not cover as much distance in their lifetimes . . . that might contribute to their low traffic accident numbers.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Christian Smith]

And every coal mine has had tragic cave ins and deaths. Fossil fuel is causing potential global melt down.

Question is, how many of those melt downs resulted in deaths? How many compared to coal, oil and gas exploration and mining?

And we're not talking about a random blow up here. We're talking a >9 richter scale earth quake and biggest in memory tsunami, which killed infinitely more people than the melt down, and orders of magnitude more people than even Chernobyl.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Anonymous Coward]

um...

quote ...It found American and Delta/Northwest had the oldest fleets, at about 16 years on average. As of the end of 2008, a small percentage of the merged Delta/Northwest's planes dated back to the late 1960s.

U.S. fleets are among the oldest in the world, said Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at the Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia. /quote

http://articles.cnn.com/2010-02-01/travel/planes.age.dreamliner_1_plane-oldest-fleets-passengers?_s=PM:TRAVEL

The above is for passenger planes, freight is handled with dc-9s etc. and the most popular trainers are still ancient cesna 152s.

Haven't heard thousands of reports of engines falling off these old planes.

Nice try tho.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[ClioCJS]

is that really a strawman?

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[khallow]

He's talking about civil power plants. That drops it to the last three plants on the list and Windscale.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[khallow]

And land use. How much land is going to be devoted to the infrastructure in question.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[roman_mir]

IF any of the accidents and incidents with nuclear powerplants (and nuclear weapons) have caused as many deaths and injuries as CARS have (or alcohol or tobacco or other types of powerplants, like coal or hydro), then you'd have half a point.

Come back when nuclear powerplants start killing as many people as anything I have mentioned here.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[del_diablo]

Sure: Deaths per TWh
0.04 deaths per TWh for nuclear. Hydro is a bit more than twice that, wind is at 4 times as much, and Coal is at 42 times that again.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Citation needed"

Why? Seriously, why would you post something like that, when you have the world's information at your fingertips? Are you too lazy to look it up yourself? Why do people bother to post things like "citation needed"?

Here, let me google that for you.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

You are welcome.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

Hi, khallow. After defending Japan's response so much, I thought you would be no where to be found once this report came out. Yet here you are . . .

So, do you think this report is some kind of conspiracy or something? Why don't you just come out and say it instead of beating around the bush? You really think Green Peace paid off the government-appointed investigative panel with their cocaine money, or something, right?

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[ustolemyname]

My point exactly. If you want to use this example to state "we should not continue to operate 60 year old nuclear power plants," I would agree with you for the same reason I do not believe we should operate 60 year old aircraft (which we don't, because that would be stupid.) In fact, your citation only demonstrates a small percentage of aircraft are even their early 40's, which is in line with my "few aircraft are over 30 years old".

I apologize if my analogies and comparisons are a bit rough, but it started as an apples to oranges comparison.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

Now you're just being a douchebag.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Magada]

Are you counting deaths from cancer? How?

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Magada]

He's a nuke shill, no mistake about that. I doubt he's including the land permanently contaminated by Mayak, Fukushima and Chernobyl in his "land use" statistics.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

Random? What are you talking about? Are you using the word because a nuclear plant accident can seem random to people not paying attention?

A car that's improperly maintained can cause an accident that seems to happen "randomly." A driver that falls asleep behind the wheel can cause an accident that seems to happen "randomly". An unexpected weather event can cause an accident that seems to happen "randomly". Are you counting those as "cars randomly blowing up"? Because when they happen at a nuclear plant, you would use the same word.

Or are you talking about areas affected? Do you really want to try to compare how much (surface area * time) is wasted by car crashes, or how many people lose time or property because of them, compared to nuclear accidents? Or how much manpower is put into cleaning them up? How many fatalities?

To be perfectly honest, we put up with cars because cars are individually empowering. Nuclear power is not individually empowering, not when compared to other kinds of power generation, and it won't be until we have some sort of cold-fusion device that lets you live off the grid. Power generation is about trust. And nuclear power (right or wrong) is asking us to trust them to deal with scarily powerful forces.

You can mistrust them. That's fine. But, please don't scaremonger. Voice concerns, by all means, but don't scaremonger. Some of us do trust it, and in a vast majority of cases, that trust is not misplaced. Being a dick to people who are actually trustworthy and going out of their way to be of use to us is kind of a dick move.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Even with pessistimistic estimates for Chernobyl and Fukushima death rates nuclear power still kills less people per unit of energy than any other form of electrical generation.

Yes, and air has always been the safest way to travel, but yet the FAA is one of the strictest safety organisations in history. Meanwhile, cars kill hundreds of thousands every year, and manufacturers still fight over having to implement safety features.

We hold different technologies to different standards, for different reasons. For nuclear power, this reason involves the ability of nuclear accidents to render cities, towns and surrounding regions effectively uninhabitable for up to and over 50 years. A 1% failure rate under these circumstances is not very comforting, particularly in such a space poor country as Japan.

Would you build a nuclear plant in the suburbs or port regions of New York or Tokyo? If not, why not, and where else are you going to build them? In which regions of your country are you willing to risk that 1% failure rate over 100 years, that could render the areas within 30km of the plant uninhabitable for 50 years?

If you want to complain about the safety of nuclear power tell us what you want to replace it with. Be honest and include the expected change in fatalities resulting from switching over to your alternative.

You find me the small town willing to take the risks I've mentioned above first. I'm willing to bet you;ll have more difficulty with that than I will finding alternative energy sources.

We could of course, build nuclear plants in the middle of nowhere, but apparently that's unacceptable for some reason.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

How?

Before expecting an answer why not go to Google and type "how to estimate cancer deaths from radiation exposure", read the top entry and then see if you still have a question.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

Sorry but stating as fact some words from some guy named "BW" on the Internet seems below the very low standards of even Slashdot. At what point do we just start flinging feces at each other like a bunch of monkeys?

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[cheekyjohnson]

I would imagine it's because some people feel that they shouldn't have to look up everything that someone else says. If someone states something as a fact, then perhaps these people feel that they should be the ones to back it up.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

You could actually read his report, note the sources he cites and verify for yourself whether or not he accurately quoted them.

You did not do any of those things, however, so after initially assuming that you were asking for a citation in good faith I recognized the fact that you were slinging mud from the beginning rather than offering honest debate

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

If I recall correctly, he was saying solar power was far worse than nuclear contamination and fallout because it "takes up more land." Some nuke shills would do more justice to their side by keeping quiet . . .

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Ihmhi]

These data sets are not related. A better comparison might be how many nuclear power plants melted down vs., say, how many oil spills there were or how many coal mines caught fire.

I mean, that's like saying 10 out of 100,000 people are killed by guns and 20 out of 100,000 people are killed by raccoons, and therefore raccoons are more dangerous than guns.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[hamburger lady]

Can you imagine if 1% of cars would randomly blow up?

apparently you never lived through the 70's.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[khallow]

It isn't just defending the government which I like. Still sounds like a bunch of tough talk from people who've never run anything larger or riskier than a university lab.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[khallow]

I doubt he's including the land permanently contaminated by Mayak, Fukushima and Chernobyl in his "land use" statistics.

You'd be mistaken. The land use thing has been discussed before.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Ethanol-fueled]

At what point do we just start flinging feces at each other like a bunch of monkeys?

I'm waiting with mouth open and arms wide.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[MightyYar]

Can you imagine if 1% of cars would randomly blow up?

It's like you aren't aware of the millions killed by automobiles, let alone maimed.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Magada]

You do know, Google senpai, that there are several methods, none of which have been validated in proper epidemiological studies?

The Techa river cohort is just about all we had, pre-Fukushima.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16238437

Now, there will be the Fukushima schoolchildren to study. Their deaths from cancer and leukemia will further enlighten us, 50 years from now....
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/life_and_death/AJ2011110916955

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[HornWumpus]

There are many 60 year old light aircraft still being flown on a daily basis.

Those flying 60 year old planes are a lot like my old granddads axe though. On their 5th engine, 6th prop, 2nd windscreen, 3rd instrument cluster etc.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[thegarbz]

Can you imagine if 1% of cars would randomly blow up? How about 1% of airplanes have their engines fall off in flight?

What an arsebackwards comparison. 1% of planes would fall out of the sky if they were 50 years old. What about cars with no seatbelts, traction control, or any other of those lovely advances in technology that have happened over the last 40 years to make us safer?

As usual people people pick the facts that are most convenient to their argument and then completely ignore all other external influences.

Here's another fact. While 1% of nuclear reactors may have experienced catastrophic failure, they have killed less people per TWh generated than any other form of energy production taking into account the complete life cycle of the fuel.

But yes feel free to get all hysterical about a 40 year old reactor melting down, but don't blame the technology, blame the people who were supposed to maintain / shutdown these.

Oh an 100% of cars that got hit by the tsunami suffered catastrophic failure, in comparison the nuke plants did rather well. There's another inconvenient fact for you ;-)

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[eulernet]

What a short-sighted view !
How can you get modded insightful ?

Frankly, the problem is not the number of immediate deaths, it's the fact that the land is poisoned for a few millenia, and a lot of people will die in 100 years from this massive fuck-up (from eating contaminated food, and living in the neighbourhood).

It's easy to defend a rational point of view, when you are very FAR from the accident.
Let's suppose that a nuclear plant melts near your home.
Will you react as: no problem, I'm confident towards our engineers who have done their best, and there is nothing to worry.

Your emotions (you know, your human nature) will show that you are scared and you'll realize that if you want to have babies, they have 20% chances of being disabled (see Chernobyl), and that you have 80% of chances of dying from a cancer (from a long and painful way).

Ok, it's not your problem, so stop rationalizing here, it gives a false sense of security.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

As it stands right now the Fukishima death toll is currently 0 due to the reactor incident. The only remaining question how many future cancer deaths will be caused by the incident an as it stands currently the most pessimistic credible estimate is on the order of 1000. That's not enough to the ranking.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[khallow]

If I recall correctly, he was saying solar power was far worse than nuclear contamination and fallout because it "takes up more land."

Maybe I did say that. But googling around, here's where I talk about land use by nuclear in response to a common by you, Idou (which I quote below):

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.

It's not magical. Japan uses electricity infrastructure and obeys the laws of physics. They have to have base load power, whether provided by nuclear, coal, even geothermal, or some other source that can be smoothed out enough (such as sporadic power sources such as solar or wind combined with batteries or a complementary peaking source such as natural gas).

If they decided to discontinue nuclear power, then they need to replace it with something. Nuclear has several advantages that make it a very powerful alternative. Even with the occasional meltdown creating unusable blocks of land for a period of time, it still uses less land area than solar or wind per unit of power generated. That is, it has a very small footprint. Nor does it create dependence on foreign imports and generate air pollution comparable to fossil fuel plants. Finally, Japan could import it's power. Maybe string some lines over from Kamchatka or the Koreas? I don't think Japan wants to be so dependent on a foreign supplier.

In the long run, there could be all sorts of better technologies. Maybe fusion will work eventually and be competitive? Maybe offshore solar/wind and some sort of battery storage system? Orbital space-based solar power? Things like that. The thing is that there currently isn't a credible replacement for nuclear power aside from other technologies with their own serious drawbacks.

Japan needs something. Despite all the drawbacks, nuclear does work.

I didn't notice your reply to that particular message. I already mentioned that I was and still am invested in Duke Energy. I am not employed to shill by anyone and have no interest in nuclear power outside of my investment and my concern about the future of my society.

It's also worth noting that while Japan does import its nuclear fuel, it doesn't have to import it all the time. Something that doesn't have to be reimported for years to decades (depending on how recycling efforts work out) is a bit less vulnerable to trade disruptions than a commodity that has to be imported each day (such as fossil fuels) or even in real time (such as electricity).

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

Let's suppose that a nuclear plant melts near your home.

I spent eight years operating and maintaining the reactor that I slept less than 100 feet away from.

If you want to make things personal what's your experience in this area?

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Magada]

Where?

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

As it stands right now, everyone smoking, inhaling asbestos, and contracting HIV today has a 0 death count. Is this a reasonable supportive argument for smoking, using asbestos, or contracting HIV? Why is it a reasonable supportive argument for the Fukushima fallout discussion?

most pessimistic credible estimate is on the order of 1000.

Citation needed.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

Less than 0.04 per terawatt-hour.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[makomk]

The trouble is, some of the commonly-used sources are... misleading. They do things like report radioactive emissions from coal plants and pollution-related deaths based on unfiltered stacks that are illegal now.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[makomk]

Hydro is a bit more than twice that

Does this include deaths related from dam failures of hydroelectric dams that were designed largely for flood control as a result of a combination of shoddy construction and once-in-2000-years flooding? Including deaths that would have resulted anyway from the once-in-2000-years flood itself even without a dam? I have a feeling they do based on past experience...

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

Just to warn you, khallow will take you down a long, long thread. Then, towards the end, he will surprise you by a bunch of unsophisticated statements like nuclear has no foreign imports requirements for Japan (even though it has both Uranium import and waste export requirements). Or that there are no credible alternatives to nuclear, even when nuclear only accounts for like just 13% world electrical power production after 50 years. It really is a disappointment to find out after so much time that you have actually been debating with such a pro-nuke light weight . . .

Then he will pop up again weeks later as if the thread never took place. It is a big time sink . . . you have been warned . . .

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

Can we please have your credentials, fine sir?

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[BlueParrot]

Windscale was not civilian. It was designed to breed plutonium for Britain's nuclear weapons program. It didn't even have power generating facilities.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

He did do a followup article showing how those numbers have gone down over time as technology improves.

Of course to be fair if you're going to base safety comparisons on what is technologically possible now as opposed to the past you should be comparing "clean coal" and other new technologies to molten-salt reactors and other 4th generation technologies.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[rust627]

Funny, I haven't heard of that many deaths from solar power .........

I know as an advocate for nuclear power you will immediately come up with the "baseline power" argument. I am always amused by this argument.
"Solar cannot supply enough power for the baseline power demand so we must build more nuclear power plants to give us the reserve power for when demand spikes." is the argument.
And yes, it is perfectly True

But, when does demand spike ?
When do demand induced brown outs and blackouts occur ?

Hot, sunny days ...........

Imagine if our captains of industry suddenly started to put PV arrays on top of all their factories. Over a few short years they would recover the costs of installation in reduced power bills, and of course the additional advantage of being able to sell the power back in to the grid on times when the factory was shut down (you know, times like weekends and public holidays) even if this was sold at 50% or 60% of the cost of buying power, it is still 'money for nothing',

And the more factories covering their roofs in PV panels, the greater the demand, the greater production, and the more the costs will come down.

And finally there is also the advantage that is so often overlooked, PV's on the roof intercept solar energy directly preventing it striking that part of the roof, slowing down the heating of the roof, and thus delaying the need (and assisting in the operation of) air conditioning........

I am not saying solar energy is the only answer to all our power needs, I am suggesting that it is part of a much larger picture that we need to look at.

But there are a hell of a lot of roofs out there going to waste.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Ol Olsoc]

Can you imagine if 1% of cars would randomly blow up?

Man, that would be awesome! All joking aside, point well taken.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

Funny, I haven't heard of that many deaths from solar power .........

Then you haven't been listening.

There's no such thing as a riskless human activity. Every single possible thing a person can do has a death rate associated with it.

Most solar deaths occur during the construction and installation phase of the life cycle.

The number of deaths is low in absolute terms but since the amount of energy produced over the lifetype of a solar installation is so small compared to denser sources of power it makes each death more signifigant in terms of fatalities per unit of energy generated.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

still am invested in Duke Energy

Shilling for your minute equity investment, are you? How noble . . .

I am not employed to shill by anyone

Of course, because you would be fired for the quality of arguments you have been making.

My concern about the future of my society

Right, and Japan is not your society. Your biased spin is pissing off those of us who actually do have a vested interest in Japan and making the pro-nukes seem like a bunch of control freaks.

it doesn't have to import it all the time . . . less vulnerable to trade disruptions

Um, trade disruption due to all the pirates around Japan? Oh, and the nuclear waste you can just leave forever at the site, as we all saw during the Fukushima crisis. Brilliant . . .

Are we going to have another long thread just to have you spew out some nonsense towards the end again? For instance, if you are going to say that hydroelectric kills MILLIONS, you might as well get it out now so that we can address it early.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[khallow]

He's a nuke shill, no mistake about that.

Why would I be? A real, paid-for shill would pick their battles better and SEO any comments that have weak rebuttals. Khallow might sound unique but there's a lot of extraneous hits (apparently it's an uncommon, but common enough Asian surname). Slashdot is also crap for SEO due to the funky pages that Google actually finds. I've used Google before to attempt to find my older posts, but it's hard work.

When I just search "khallow" and "slashdot" I get more prominent hits from my posts on Kuro5hin.org (which are many years old and usually completely unrelated to nuclear power).

Moving on, the shill might even stage the whole thing, Ender's Game style. For example, if I really were a shill, then how about Idou, who's been a great foil for me? Or you? "He's a nuke shill" or the land use argument are softball pitches.

Finally, if I'm really some paid-for shill, then why all most of my OCD posts mostly on stuff irrelevant to nuclear power? I've ranted a lot about other things too, such as government funded science (I lean towards libertarian BTW) and NASA projects (my primary pet peeve these days).

Of course, you could just look at my post history and figure this stuff out for yourself.

What's particularly weird is being called a "shill" seems to only happen around nuclear power issues. When I support libertarian viewpoints, for example, I might be compared to a drooling idiot, but no one seems to think I'm drawing a paycheck from the Koch Brothers.

Fukushima brings to the front one of the most serious problems of today's societies. Namely, how do we handle risk and uncertainty (alternately, the dangers we know about and the dangers we don't). My view is that society is failing hard at this task. Fukushima and other nuclear accidents illustrate the problem in perhaps its purest form in real life.

My view is that Fukushima is viewed through the lens of the most prominent past accidents. There have been four meltdowns of civilian nuclear power plants over the past forty or so years. Of these, the first three (Windscale, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl) have been due primarily to human factors and bad design choices. Fukushima is the first accident that has an environmental factor, a huge earthquake and tsunami. as its primary cause.

But there's a lot of people just stampeding to the old ways of thinking. It's really tiresome. Think about this way, suppose the nuclear advocates, including me, are right. Then we will see more accidents like Fukushima (or acts of terrorism like 911, which even had a nuclear plant as a proposed target) and less due to bored engineers or broken down equipment. It's clear now that accidents won't go away, but their nature may well change.

I'd rather pay attention to what actually went wrong and why, than revert to some comfortable, but wrong story.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[currently_awake]

The cities bombed by American nuclear bombs are inhabited. Bikini atoll was nuked over and over, yet the life came back. When dealing with radio-isotopes the higher the level of radiation the shorter the half-life. Yes there will be radiation there for a long time, but not high enough to kill.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

He's a nuke shill, no mistake about that.

Why would I be?

Because you have some piss-ant little investment in Duke Energy, which apparently is more important than the safety and livelihood of entire nations. Nations of which you are completely ignorant of in regards to their language, culture, and energy profile, yet you think you know what is best in regards to their energy policies. You have a significant personal bias that is not aligned with those most at risk from this specific incident, and yet you argue as if you have altruistic motives. Seems pretty shill-like to me . . .

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[colinrichardday]

I spent eight years operating and maintaining the reactor that I slept less than 100 feet away from.

Say hi to Marge, Bart and Lisa for me.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[petermgreen]

Funny, I haven't heard of that many deaths from solar power .........

That is because the deaths solar power causes are pretty mundane. Stuff like falling off roofs and similar.

It's like car crashes vs train and plane crashes. Car crashes happen all the time but they are too mundane to be interesting so they aren't usualy mentioned beyond the local news and sometimes not even there. Train and plane crashes kill far fewer people but when one does happen it's big news.

But, when does demand spike ?

When the temperature outside gets furthest from the temperature people want inside. In some places that is hot days, in other places it is cold days.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

So what you're saying is that you don't like the results but can't point to any specific flaw in the methodology so you're just going to post angry anonymous tirades instead.

Got it.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[fisted]

unless 1% of all nuclear power plants *randomly blew up*, yes, it is IMO. Also, yes i do imagine way more than 1% of cars would malfunction...when hit by earthquake and tsunami. Or in the process of safety-evaluation conducted by incompetent and miscommunicating operators who'd accidentally use humans instead of dummies for their crash tests, to stick to the given car analogy.

Asked the other way around, which plant did actually blew up out of nothing, with no human errors involved? (Building a plant like Daiichi next to a coastline is a human error too, at least if it does not provide some extra safety measures like a core catcher, for instance)

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[ClioCJS]

One must also consider the variable of how many people are affected per failure to model the situation more accurately.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

For what it's worth I haven't made any anonymous posts to this article.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[zippthorne]

Yeah, hydro is great, but can you build new capacity? A lot of the sites where you could use hydro have already been built out. Many of the rest have already been excluded for environmental reasons. If we dam up every river remaining, to hell with the environmental concerns, how much additional hydro capacity could we build out?

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[voidphoenix]

Ok, that's just lame.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[eulernet]

I spent eight years operating and maintaining the reactor that I slept less than 100 feet away from.

If you want to make things personal what's your experience in this area?

And then ? I'm using a car since 30 years, and I'm no expert in cars.
Operating and maintaining a reactor doesn't mean that you are an expert in radioactivity.

And now, I even more doubt your partiality in defending nuclear plants.
You are the type of guys who refuse reality, just because it goes against their own interests.

BTW, Russia has always underestimated the human damages in Chernobyl.
You should also know that Ukraine was USSR's granary. Chernobyl has poisoned the land for decades, and the food produced there will continue to be consumed in this region.

My wife got her thyroid removed, because of Chernobyl's radiations, so please, think about the future generations, not your current job !

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[AmiMoJo]

There are plenty of aircraft in daily use that are over 30 years old. As long as they are properly maintained and updated with new safety equipment there is basically no limit on the lifetime of an aircraft. What tends to finish them off are things like increasing maintenance costs, parts being discontinued, fuel efficiency being too low compared to modern aircraft or accidents writing them off.

Nuclear reactors have a limited lifespan because the process makes the material of the reactor degrade. Because it is highly contaminated it can't easily be replaced or repaired. In fact in the US when a plant is decommissioned they tend to encase the reactor in a tomb on-site and leave it there, where as in other countries they actually have to remove it which in the UK takes 80 to 90 years to complete. They actually spend more time cleaning up than the reactor is in operation for.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[makomk]

Some or all of the newer nuclear technologies probably have their own safety problems; we generally don't seem to find out until they're actually tested and those ones haven't been. Look at pebble-bed reactors for example - absolute nightmare.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

Asking for substantial proof of claims being thrown out as fact is a requirement of meaningful public discourse.

Unfortunately, I know such a statement is futile, as I get the sense that Slashdot has been taken over by a bunch of 12 year-olds . . .

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

And now, I even more doubt your partiality in defending nuclear plants. You are the type of guys who refuse reality, just because it goes against their own interests.

Will you at least accept that what you disclosed in your post casts considerable doubt on your objectivity as well?

My wife got her thyroid removed, because of Chernobyl's radiations, so please, think about the future generations, not your current job !

That is truly tragic. I don't want anyone to be harmed by industrial accidents but the unfortunate fact is that every single method for generating electricity harms somebody. Fossil fuels kill people in mining accidents, fires and by air pollution. Wind and solar kill people in construction accidents. Nuclear accidents injure and kill people as well.

Knowing that any solution will inevitably involve accidents the only sensible course is to choose the solution that produces the most power with the fewest number of causalities. Right now that solution is nuclear power. That's not my opinion - it's what the data says.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

Anything involving solid fuel is a dead end as far as safely improvements go.

The molten salt reactor puts the fuel in liquid form and runs it at atmospheric pressure. The salts used to dissolve the fuels are chemically stable, unlike zirconium. They don't catch on fire and produce hydrogen gas at high temperatures. A molten salt reactor is so inherently safe that the shutdown procedure consists merely of turning off the power. The fuel drains by gravity to a storage tank where it harmlessly cools down and solidifies into an inert solid.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[khallow]

My apologies then. I thought otherwise.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[rubycodez]

get real, body count from hydroelectric dam failures goes into the hundreds of thousands. the Banqiao Reservoir Dam failure killed 171,000. Let's see you do similar analysis for percentage of hydro dam failures AND body count.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[rubycodez]

how many victims of nuclear reactor accidents will? may be zero for all we know, the known problems are cancers, most of those non-fatal

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[rubycodez]

the body count for "clean" hydro power goes into hundreds of thousands because of dam failures, look it up. Here's just ONE to get you started.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[pixelpusher220]

Nuclear does kill less people. The difference is in specifically how, operational vs failure scenario.

Nuclear has basically zero operational fatalities, coal has numerous operations fatalities.
- Nuclear has no gas emissions etc
- coal gas emissions cause many deaths over time not even counting CO2. Mercury etc into the environment and overall health effects.

Coal has very very few failure fatalities, nuclear has fairly high potential failure fatalities.
- when a coal plant explodes, you can walk right in the next day. Deaths basically limited to workers on site at the time.
- nuclear obviously the failure mode has no 'good' solutions. Depending on the disaster it could be massive. It also renders 100s of sq miles uninhabitable for decades.

We tolerate coal because the deaths are widely dispersed and very much separate from the actual plant.

Nuclear disasters have been mitigated somewhat by the massive amounts of redundancy built into the plants. This is specifically done because of the potential risks of failure; i.e. it simply isn't an option.

Also not I'm not defending nuclear at all. I personally wish we could get off of it but the reality is renewable sources won't be ready for grid scale for another 50-100 years or so. We need to start that process now for that to be realized though.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[pixelpusher220]

The issue with molten salts is the caustic nature...I don't know that we have materials yet that can withstand them in a closed system for 20+ years.

That said, the benefits you cite are quite promising.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[pixelpusher220]

Wind and solar kill people in construction accidents.

Which applies to pretty much anything built...ever.

Wind and solar simply don't have any operational impacts on human life. Every other power source, coal, oil, nuclear, have deaths from operational and failure scenarios. Nuclear waste being stored for 100s of years is going to cause problems or at least has the potential to be a source for deaths.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

I don't know that we have materials yet that can withstand them in a closed system for 20+ years.

Apparently they figure out how to solve that problem.

Take a look at figure 9 and figure 12.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[pixelpusher220]

Most solar deaths occur during the construction and installation phase of the life cycle.

Everything has construction 'deaths'. By that definition we shouldn't build 'roofs'.

posted this above to your similar comment as well. Just making sure this shill talking point is properly annotated :)

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[khallow]

Then, towards the end, he will surprise you by a bunch of unsophisticated statements like nuclear has no foreign imports requirements for Japan (even though it has both Uranium import and waste export requirements).

Idou, I find people who value "sophistication" over accuracy and correctness, to be rather tiresome. As to the imports, it's worth noting that vastly less infrastructure is needed to import and export (and the exporting part is optional!) nuclear plant fuel than fossil fuel or electricity infrastructure. In a strategic sense, there is far less risk from blockades and trade wars than with other means of importing energy.

Strategically, exporting used fuel rods is a far less urgent problem. They can always pile them up somewhere for a few decades (or as I mentioned before, get fuel rod reprocessing to work), if there are obstacles.

Or that there are no credible alternatives to nuclear, even when nuclear only accounts for like just 13% world electrical power production after 50 years.

What holds collectively doesn't necessarily hold for a small part. Googling around, I see that Japan has almost 30% of its power generation in nuclear power. That same linked chart shows that there's more than a third in additional generation capacity currently planned or under construction. So you're off by over a factor of two. I wonder why you even bothered to make this ingenuous, but easily defeated argument.

Now, replacing 30% of your country's electricity producing infrastructure is a bit complicated, especially given the desire to make it as independent of importation as possible. Let's look at those global statistics and see what the world uses which Japan could replace its nuclear power with.

First, the world generates two thirds (67%) of its power from fossil fuels, most from coal (40%) and most of the rest from natural gas (21%). Either one is dependent on imports. So right away we see the huge flaw with treating Japan like the rest of the world.

The last big item is hydroelectric power. I imagine there is some hydro power left in Japan, but I doubt it'll cover the gap. Note at this point, that fossil fuels, nuclear, and hydroelectric make up 97% of the world's generating capability. The logic that claims Japan can abandon nuclear power because the world only has 13% of its power generation in nuclear, ignores that virtually all of the rest of the power generated is by means that have serious risks for Japan (import risks from fossil fuels) or are already probably fairly well developed (hydro power).

Note that aside from hydro, renewables barely register. They make up a considerable portion of some European countries's power generation, but not the world in general. Solar and wind use a lot of real estate, a particular problem in Japan, and are intermittent power sources. If one wants to replace a base load (always on) power source like nuclear, you need either batteries or a reciprocating power source, that can be started and stopped quickly, like hydro or natural gas.

Geothermal power is a decent base load power source (it does have a non-renewable portion that depletes over time), but to get a lot of it, you need to drill pretty deep and pretty extensively or have the luck of being on a huge heat source like Iceland or Yellowstone.

So once again, I don't see ithe power sources that will replace nuclear power in Japan.

Then he will pop up again weeks later as if the thread never took place. It is a big time sink . . . you have been warned . . .

As opposed to you? In my defense, nothing happened to warrant a change of opinion.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

It is this kind of absurdity that really gives the pro-nukes a bad name . . .

The Banqiao dam was begun in April 1951 on the Ru River with the help of Soviet consultants as part of a project to control flooding and to generate electricity.

Since the dam failed due to flooding, how many people do you think would have died WITHOUT the dam!? Furthermore, hydroelectric capacity of a dam is directly correlated to the dam's ability to pass through water. A dam's ability to survive flooding also depends on its ability to pass through water. If anything, a MORE ambitious power generation design to the damn could have increased its survivability. Consequently, your argument is patently false.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[khallow]

Shilling for your minute equity investment, are you? How noble . . .

You were making a big deal of investing in nuclear power earlier. I just pointed out that yes, I do invest in nuclear power. Now you're claiming I'm shilling for at best some immeasurably microscopic increase in my investments?

Right, and Japan is not your society.

I don't recall caring about this non sequitur.

Your biased spin is pissing off those of us who actually do have a vested interest in Japan

There's a simple solution to this problem. Stop getting upset and listen. As I note in another reply, Japan has reasons for having nuclear power, namely land use and relative independence of their base load power from foreign suppliers. These reasons didn't go away just because a scary accident happened.

and making the pro-nukes seem like a bunch of control freaks.

Well, that might be a valid criticism, if I wanted to force you to actually do anything.

Um, trade disruption due to all the pirates around Japan? Oh, and the nuclear waste you can just leave forever at the site, as we all saw during the Fukushima crisis. Brilliant . . .

We already have an example of trade disruption from the Second World War. History probably won't repeat itself exactly, but historical problems have a way of reappearing over and over. And no trade disruption has ever been "forever" in duration.

Are we going to have another long thread just to have you spew out some nonsense towards the end again? For instance, if you are going to say that hydroelectric kills MILLIONS, you might as well get it out now so that we can address it early.

Nah, I think I'll let you handle that for now.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[pixelpusher220]

I dunno after reading and posting above this struck me as the perfect comical response :) whether intended as such I don't know

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[pixelpusher220]

The 'problem' with nuclear isn't the actual deaths but the potential deaths. Sure not every one is explosive, but when they are it ain't pretty. That's why they build the things so massively redundant. It simply can not fail. Period.

Now put something like that on a coastline prone to quakes and tsunamis. It's a bad risk to take yet was labeled 'safe' quite recently.

If humans were involved in the design, construction or operation, there will be things that fail.

Even if they built a sea wall high enough to stop the wave...it wouldn't have been enough because the land 'sank' 3 feet.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

killed infinitely more people than the melt down, and orders of magnitude more people than even Chernoby.

Here is a citation countering the above citation-less statement.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[pixelpusher220]

From www.moltensalt.org

This site is a reference for mainly energy-related, molten salt technologies, and will ultimately replace the web site: http://home.earthlink.net/~bhoglund/index.html

Oh goody, we're taking data from Earthlink.net accounts now? ;-) The data is from the 50s. That said Bruce Hoglund seems to be at least reasonably knowledgeable on the topic.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

If by "1950s" you mean 1977 then yes, it was from then but that should be expected because that's when the experiment was performed. The PDF is an official report from Oak Ridge National Laboratory so I don't see what that has to do with the webserver currently hosting the data.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

I never said that we should not perform actions that cause. On the contrary, I said that deaths are inevitable so we should minimize them by making choices that result in the fewest number of them.

If we didn't build roofs then far more people would die of exposure than die in roof construction accidents

Likewise with electrical power generation going without electricity would kill more people than generating it does.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[khallow]

Because you have some piss-ant little investment in Duke Energy, which apparently is more important than the safety and livelihood of entire nations. Nations of which you are completely ignorant of in regards to their language, culture, and energy profile, yet you think you know what is best in regards to their energy policies. You have a significant personal bias that is not aligned with those most at risk from this specific incident, and yet you argue as if you have altruistic motives. Seems pretty shill-like to me . . .

I remember the 80s. I remember a country that had the US collectively shaking in its boots. I remember books, movies, songs, and other media that screamed about the new peril from a resurgent, economically powerful Japan. You know the phrase, "if you can't beat them, join them"? Well, apparently, if you can't do either one, then you whine pathetically. That happened a lot in the US.

Japan was full of promise and energy for those who weren't scared by it. That time passed.

My take is that most of the problems that reared up then are still around today. These weaknesses are protected. The old nuclear plants are in some sense part of that old problem. Fukushima should have been in the process of being decommissioned when that earthquake struck. But the alternatives you claim exist did not nor did a recently canceled wave of nuclear plants. Thus, the lifespan of the reactors were extended.

I think the reason this happened was the same ultimate cause as what led to a two decade period of economic stagnation. A lot of people, and I include you in that number, have forgotten that planning for the future is not just about preventing bad things from happening. It's also about making good things happen.

Fukushima shows that even a well run nuclear plant can have a really bad accident. There is an obvious downside to any nuclear reactor, even if they can't achieve meltdown, they can still cause harm of some sort. But they do more than just be a potential accident. They generate electricity, the primary motive force of modern civilization. That's the good thing that happened and continues to happen. Maybe nuclear power should be phased out. But empty rhetoric doesn't generate power. Something has to replace nuclear first in order to phase it out.

I think it is irresponsible to just consider the harm and not the benefit. Or to glibly speak of alternatives to nuclear power without considering why those alternatives haven't already taken over. I see someone who cares more for themselves and their fears than what's to come of their country.

It's time to grow up.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

I find people who value "sophistication" over accuracy and correctness . . .

I was using sophistication to refer to a collective of characteristics, including accuracy and correctness.

You know what, I really do not feel like responding to another one of your long posts when you never responded to my last post a while back. Here, for your convenience I have re-posted it below:

Right, so if energy infrastructure investments are just as simple as the laws of physics, why are YOUR investments any different? Yet you (and many people like you) have decided not to invest in a country that you have also claimed has an overblown accident (i.e. a discounted investment . . . representing any easy gain). Explain that.

Alright, up until now my main beef with you was your insulting arrogance towards Japan and the Japanese people. However, it seems that even your pro-nuke basis has some glaring flaws. Just to point out a few:

Occasional meltdown creating unusable blocks of land for a period of time, it still uses less land area than solar or wind per unit of power generated.
Really?! Is this the same thing? Did you ever consider the worst part of fallout (besides the fact that it is a public hazard) is not knowing completely what areas are impacted? That nice, neat circle around the plant you see, complete BS. ALL dangerous areas cannot be economically mapped to the detail necessary (at ground level). And, guess what, they are constantly MOVING, usually to important places like waste treatment facilities. It is kind of hard to have a society if your waste disposal plants are now too radioactive to function normally (and are piling up radioactive waste miles long).

Nor does it create dependence on foreign imports
Right, because nuclear plants run on unicorn horns, something Japan is abundant in. Oh, and Japan has very stable geological features for nuclear waste, so no need for creating a dependence on foreign exports of waste. . . (I am being sarcastic)

The thing is that there currently isn't a credible replacement for nuclear power aside from other technologies with their own serious drawbacks.
Wow, really? This technology has been with us for over half a century and still only accounts for 13.5% of world power generation. Maybe every technology has serious drawbacks and different governments are weighing the costs and benefits carefully, just like you do with YOUR own investments. Their aggregate conclusion so far has been quite less extreme than yours and, accordingly, a significant majority are not using the technology to the level that "physics dictates." Maybe this issue is more complicated than a simple physics equation? But, again, back to my main point . . .Japan does not need you, someone not even willing to invest in it himself, to be telling it what it needs to do. ALL investments require consideration of the risks and the risk preferences of all those involved (both of which are unique to the risk environment and people involved), not just YOUR investments. I really am curious how your brain is dealing with that cognitive dissonance of yours . . .

Here is your chance to pick-up where you left off . . .

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

All I can say to that is I sincerely hope that Duke Energy regains its pre-Lehman shock highs so that you can sell out and stop the shilling. Your oversimplification and arrogance towards entire nations and cultures vastly beyond your comprehension is a giant time sink to address for those with legitimately aligned exposures to the situation.

Again, have you ever even been to Japan, because your ignorance of that country is quite explicit. Why not just shill within your own little, small world of Duke Energy?

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[khallow]

I was using sophistication to refer to a collective of characteristics, including accuracy and correctness.

You should try to be a "sophisticated" poster then. For example, when you use a word in a non-standard sense, such as you did with "unsophisticated", you should say at the time what you mean by it. I took it to mean "lack of sophistication" (eg, crude, poorly developed, etc) which is the usual meaning of the word.

Right, so if energy infrastructure investments are just as simple as the laws of physics, why are YOUR investments any different? Yet you (and many people like you) have decided not to invest in a country that you have also claimed has an overblown accident (i.e. a discounted investment . . . representing any easy gain). Explain that.

There are two reasons. First, Japan is another country. As someone who resides in the US, I have no experience with the peculiarities of the Japanese economy. I speak from experience with other markets where I didn't do proper diligence. As a result, I only invest in markets where I can do considerable research on the business's products, customers, and environment.

Second, I don't think Japan has recovered from the 1990-1991 recession. In other words, I find its stocks to still be overpriced in the absence of concrete and substantial reform of the Japanese economy.

Occasional meltdown creating unusable blocks of land for a period of time, it still uses less land area than solar or wind per unit of power generated.
Really?! Is this the same thing? Did you ever consider the worst part of fallout (besides the fact that it is a public hazard) is not knowing completely what areas are impacted? That nice, neat circle around the plant you see, complete BS. ALL dangerous areas cannot be economically mapped to the detail necessary (at ground level). And, guess what, they are constantly MOVING, usually to important places like waste treatment facilities. It is kind of hard to have a society if your waste disposal plants are now too radioactive to function normally (and are piling up radioactive waste miles long).

Chernobyl is a good counterexample. They mapped at the ground level concentrations of radioactive materials. It takes some time to make those maps, but there's nothing impossible about the task. And nuclear waste is not processed by normal waste disposal plants. To my understanding, the specialized plants which do handle them, also handle their own generation of radioactive waste.

As to land use, it's worth repeating that the contaminated land around Fukushima is not completely unusable forever. Currently, with modest prep work, it can be used for nuclear plants, wind and solar power, and other nuisance industries. Seems reasonable to me to just rezone it for industry and seal the worst contaminated parts.

Nor does it create dependence on foreign imports
Right, because nuclear plants run on unicorn horns, something Japan is abundant in. Oh, and Japan has very stable geological features for nuclear waste, so no need for creating a dependence on foreign exports of waste. . . (I am being sarcastic)

Let's first quote that fragment in context:

Nor does it create dependence on foreign imports and generate air pollution comparable to fossil fuel plants.

I wasn't saying that nuclear power didn't create some dependence on foreign imports, but rather that it didn't create a dependence comparable to fossil fuel power plants. Due to the somewhat poor choice of sentence structure, does make it seem that the "comparable to fossil fuel plants" only applied to the last bit about air pollution.

Googling around, I see that Japan conducts shipments of fuel rods and waste every few years. Further the mass of these shipments is on the order of a few tons. While yes, that is importing and exporting, it's far smaller by many orders of magnitude than the qu

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[khallow]

Your oversimplification and arrogance towards entire nations and cultures vastly beyond your comprehension is a giant time sink to address for those with legitimately aligned exposures to the situation.

While your oversimplification and arrogance towards technologies and risk situations you don't understand, is merely a bit annoying to me.

Again, have you ever even been to Japan, because your ignorance of that country is quite explicit. Why not just shill within your own little, small world of Duke Energy?

For those looking for an energy company to invest in, keep in mind that the "little, small world" of Duke Energy has more than three times the capitalization of TEPCO and a decent divident yield. If you live in the US, you can also invest small amounts via DRIP. BUY NOW!!!

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[rubycodez]

your reasoning is patently false. there would have been no huge body of water to be suddenly released without the dam, less would have died. the truth is a power generating structure failed, and almost 200,000 died. hydroelectric technology has therefore been far more dangerous than nuclear power. More people have been killed by hydro dam failures than all nuclear endeavors of man even including nuclear warfare, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Your nuclear-phobia is irrational in the extreme.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[khallow]

Last time I did that, I had some idiot, funnily enough another nuclear power antagonist, insult me for a few replies. Let me say that I have credentials as does most anyone, but that they are irrelevant aside from indicating some degree of technical and scientific aptitude, which isn't at issue here. As to experience with risk rather than just credentials, I have worked on high altitude. unmanned balloon-based aerospace projects which involve some risk management (in the traditional sense of first, second, and third party risk to self, customers, and innocents), studied disaster recovery efforts (as well as the public response to them), and have long engaged in trading on betting markets for forecasting purposes (particularly, the Foresight Exchange among which I remain the second highest player).

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Rutulian]

Coal has very very few failure fatalities, nuclear has fairly high potential failure fatalities.

No, not really. A high potential failure zone, but not fatalities. By your own admission, a coal plant may explode and kill all workers on site at the time (plus coal miner deaths when the mine collapses, btw). So what is that, several hundred? In a nuclear accident, the only likely fatalities will be anybody who is in the reactor containment room at the time, and maybe some people in the adjacent control room (likely, less than a dozen in total). The problem with nuclear is not the fatalities, it is the contamination zone that makes it unsafe to work/live in after an accident.

nuclear obviously the failure mode has no 'good' solutions.

There are actually quite a number of "good solutions." It shouldn't be a surprise to anybody that the first and second generation reactor designs from the 70s have problems, much like the first generation cars and airplanes from last century (somebody was mentioning cars and airplanes above). There are some very good new designs available, but they have to be developed. The problem is nobody is pursuing them because coal and natural gas are far far cheaper options.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

. . . I have credentials . . . irrelevant aside from indicating some degree of technical and scientific aptitude

Fair enough. Now take a look of the list of people you claim as "people who've never run anything larger or riskier than a university lab."

Here, let us just look at one, who is the Permanent Representative to the United Nations for Japan. Or, do you mean that only an individual from the nuclear industry (with the associated biases) is qualified to investigate such matters?

It is alright to lack specific credentials when discussing such matters, but to so easily dismiss the opinions of those who actually do have relevant credentials is simply a public demonstration of willful ignorance, nothing more.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[pixelpusher220]

If nuclear goes boom you're potential failure area pretty quickly becomes fatalities. Simply because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it isn't plausible.

Coal mine deaths are part of operational deaths. It's a planned activity.

Someone posted a link to a peer reviewed study showing 10+K deaths in the US due to Fukushima based on year to year deaths. Certainly makes you question just how effective our 'safeguards' are.

As far as 'good' solutions go. Fukushima was considered 'safe' prior to this disaster. Anything you say is 'safe' today will be proven unsafe at some point. Given corporate/political pressures to extend the lives of these plants, they will be run well past the point they should be shut down.

As you say, the 'good' solutions are massively expensive - expressly because of the risks involved in nuclear.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Rutulian]

If nuclear goes boom you're potential failure area pretty quickly becomes fatalities. Simply because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it isn't plausible.

It isn't plausible. It is physically impossible. A meltdown is the worst thing that can happen with a reactor of Fukushima's design, and it won't result in massive fatalities.

Coal mine deaths are part of operational deaths. It's a planned activity.

Interesting. I would expect the collapse of a coal mine to be a "failure," not an operational expectation. Perhaps we don't hold coal mine operators to a high enough safety standard.

As far as 'good' solutions go. Fukushima was considered 'safe' prior to this disaster.

For relative degrees of "safe." It has been well-known for a long time what the potential failure points of light water reactors are. Nobody ever claimed it was impossible for Fukushima to melt down. It was acknowledged as a disaster possibility, and massively redundant safety mechanisms were put in place as a result. Yes, even redundant safety systems can fail, as was evidenced in this case. That is why it is better to build a passively safe reactor that cannot melt down. The worst-case disaster scenarios then change completely. Prototype designs have been available for quite some time, but none have been pushed into commercial use yet.

As you say, the 'good' solutions are massively expensive - expressly because of the risks involved in nuclear.

Not sure about that. If that is true, the safer designs should be cheaper, because they are safer and pose less risk. No, the reason it is expensive is because it is complicated technology that is highly regulated (rightly so). And the newer designs also require some R&D costs that an older established design doesn't have. For coal, the principle is relatively simple, has been around for over a century, the fuel is cheaply mined and readily available (ie: no expensive fuel processing is required), and the environmental regulations are few (far fewer than should be).

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[pixelpusher220]

That is why it is better to build a passively safe reactor that cannot melt down.

Nice concept and I agree. Now back to the reality of our situation today...

As you say, the 'good' solutions are massively expensive - expressly because of the risks involved in nuclear.

Not sure about that. If that is true, the safer designs should be cheaper, because they are safer and pose less risk. No, the reason it is expensive is because it is complicated technology that is highly regulated (rightly so).

Ask yourself *why* it is highly regulated? Perhaps because of the risks of it not being 'safe'?

Nuclear simply always will have massive risks. It gave us bombs for the cold war and energy to boot. It helps offset global warming...at least somewhat. But the risks are always there waiting for something unplanned to expose them.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Rutulian]

Nice concept and I agree. Now back to the reality of our situation today...

Why do you think that is not the reality of today? Like I said, prototype designs exist. Experimental reactors have been built. This is not a fantasy. It can be done. The reality of today is that a new commercial power plant reactor has not been built in the US for over three decades. That is why the designs are from three decades ago.

Ask yourself *why* it is highly regulated? Perhaps because of the risks of it not being 'safe'?

Actually, it is mostly due to fears of proliferation and terrorism, not because they are viewed as unsafe. Monitoring radioactive releases is not unreasonable and overly costly. Coal plants should be held to the same standard, but they aren't.

Nuclear simply always will have massive risks.

There are no conceivable massive risks in a reactor that cannot melt down. The mild to moderate risks only amount to environmental releases that can be monitored and controlled, as they should be with all power plants.

It gave us bombs for the cold war and energy to boot.

A bomb is as much like a reactor as gasoline is like whiskey. In other words, not at all.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[pixelpusher220]

Why do you think that is not the reality of today

Because, just maybe, the VAST bulk of today's plant aren't passive cooled? What ifs are great, but the here and now is not passively cooled reactors.

Actually, it is mostly due to fears of proliferation and terrorism

Sources? My understanding is that breeder reactors are the sort used for proliferation...and we precisely didn't use them for that reason. As for terrorism, that wasn't a serious concern when most of these were being built.

They cost a lot because it would be B.A.D. if they were allowed to be as shoddy as regular coal plants. The fact that they are so well engineered has made a generation of people think it's safe. Much like the Space Shuttles were thought to be quite safe until just a few years ago....

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Rutulian]

Because, just maybe, the VAST bulk of today's plant aren't passive cooled? What ifs are great, but the here and now is not passively cooled reactors.

None are passively cooled. What exactly are we talking about? You are not getting any argument from me that light water reactors have safety concerns. Nuclear can be done safely. That's my only argument. The technology exists. It just has to be used.

Sources? My understanding is that breeder reactors are the sort used for proliferation...and we precisely didn't use them for that reason. As for terrorism, that wasn't a serious concern when most of these were being built.

The primary concern is that all fissile and radioactive material is tracked, securely handled, and accounted for. This includes fuel that enters the reactor, waste that leaves the reactor, any material (like sources) used in the reactor, isotopes produced by the reactor during operation (dissolved gases, mostly), and anything else that shows up on a Geiger counter in the reactor building, even if it is a natural source of radiation (like the cement walls). Some of it is to ensure safe operation of the reactor, yes. For example, regular fuel rod inspection and monitoring for cesium isotopes is to ensure the fuel cladding is intact. But the majority is for access control, record keeping, and auditing. Dirty bombs are one concern, but there are others as well.

They cost a lot because it would be B.A.D. if they were allowed to be as shoddy as regular coal plants.

Yes, light water reactors are over-engineered with redundant safety systems. That is a part of the cost. I already said that. The regulations are good, I'm not arguing otherwise. I'm just saying that, because of the regulations, the cost to operate a nuclear plant must be entirely internalized. Coal will always be cheaper because it is allowed the externalize a significant amount of its environmental, accident recovery, and cleanup cost. It is not held to the same standard. If clean coal or cap and trade start being seriously discussed, the cost of coal will increase to meet these new regulations, and then everybody will probably switch to natural gas.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

You should try to be a "sophisticated" poster then . . .

Of course, because "poorly developed" arguments tend to be both accurate and correct!? Have I scared you out of the nuclear debate and into some kind of strange, quasi-English debate?

First, Japan is another country

Exactly. If you are not qualified enough to invest neglible amounts in Japan, you are certainly not qualified to debate the energy policy they use there. I thought we had gone over this before already . . .

I find its stocks to still be overpriced

Spoken like another self-proclaimed stock expert . . . Have you forgotten that we are talking about JREITS here? ORIX is still well below the initial 311 crash. You are claiming the Japanese market is stupid and overacting to the nuclear accident. Your argument should be that real estate is UNDER PRICED to be consistent with your theories on the disaster. Yet here we are . . . floating around the cognitive dissonance of your confused mind.

Chernobyl is a good counterexample. They mapped at the ground level concentrations of radioactive materials.

Where do you get this misinformation!? The recent accounts of Chernobyl I have come across are that you literally have to check radiation for every step to really know what you are being exposed to. One step you are in the clear and the next step you are in a hot spot because that shrub species you are now standing next to happens to biologically concentrate a specific radioactive isotope. Please present the proof that even a non-negligle number of the current ground level hot spots in Chernobyl are mapped . . .

And nuclear waste is not processed by normal waste disposal plants.

I think that was my point. Yet normal water waste disposal plants are having to deal with nuclear waste from the fallout and the "washout" . . . Are you arguing for my side now? Regular waste water is becoming radioactive waste. There is no infrastructure existent in the entire world for dealing with the shear amount of radioactive contamination and normal infrastructure is being crushed by the burden.

Seems reasonable to me to just rezone it for industry.

OK, but to be fair, let's include YOUR house in the rezoning . . . we will compensate you with what I got: 0 JPY. You can now sell your house for cents on the dollar to some happy nuclear company so that they can tear it down and continue to reap from the misery they originally caused others. (You do realize that with that comment of yours, you have now clearly moved into "asshat" territory?)

it's far smaller by many orders of magnitude than the quantities of coal

Again, what, are we worried about here, pirates? Any economic analysis of foreign dependency will look at the pricing power of the foreign suppliers which is directly correlated to level of industry competition. Do you honestly believe that the uranium industry is more competitive than the petroleum and coal industries!? By your logic, Japan should run on anti-matter, since it comes in a really small package. This is nonsense . . .

Japan has almost 30% of its power generation in nuclear

Wrong, again. Currently 6/54 reactors are actually operating (3 more will shutdown this January), so that is closer to 3% today and less than 2% within a month from now . . .

requires a level of importing that apparently Japan doesn't want to rely on

I think making blanket statements about what Japan "wants" is pretty meaningless. Sure, there are people who have invested in nuclear, just like you, and will be dedicated salesmen until the bitter end. The actual reality is that Japan

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

The benefits of dams are numerous: they provide water for drinking, navigation, and agricultural irrigation. Dams also provide hydroelectric power and create lakes for fishing and recreation. Most important, dams save lives by preventing or reducing floods.

Dams were invented way before electricity. It is a very ancient technology. Perhaps if you spent some time understanding more some of the basic technologies like dams before getting into advance technologies like nuclear reactors, you would have some perspective instead of trying to make such misconstrued comparisons.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

While your oversimplification and arrogance towards technologies and risk situations you don't understand, is merely a bit annoying to me.

How many nuclear reactors have melted down within 100 miles of your home? If it is less than three, I have you beat. It is human nature to not truly comprehend a risk until the worst case scenario has actually taken place. Owning stock in an energy firm is meaningless compared to actually living through the consequences of the uncovered risks those firms take. You are all talk, understand nothing about these risks, and are willfully ignorant to those who have "understood" at great personal cost. You live in a little, sheltered world where your view seems obvious to you, until a black swan comes by and slaughters you like a Thanksgiving turkey.

keep in mind that the "little, small world" of Duke Energy has more than three times the capitalization of TEPCO

Nice. Not only did you manage to completely mess up that calculation, but you are comparing the post-accident TEPCO mktcap, which is now less than 1/20 of what it was pre-accident. Finally, is bragging about a company having higher mktcap part of some kind of backwards valuation-based strategy where you buy high and sell low? Anyway, I suppose it is your own money if you want to lose it, that is your choice.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

Ok, dipshit now run the numbers for coal, natural gas, wind and solar

If we replaced all Euope's nuclear power with solar power how many more people would die than currently get cancer?

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Wonko the Sane]

...says the Anonymous Coward who considers accusing people who disagree with him of wanting people to die of cancer to be a honest debate tactic.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[khallow]

Of course, because "poorly developed" arguments tend to be both accurate and correct!?

I was just correcting your error.

I find its stocks to still be overpriced

Spoken like another self-proclaimed stock expert . . . Have you forgotten that we are talking about JREITS here? ORIX is still well below the initial 311 crash. You are claiming the Japanese market is stupid and overacting to the nuclear accident. Your argument should be that real estate is UNDER PRICED to be consistent with your theories on the disaster. Yet here we are . . . floating around the cognitive dissonance of your confused mind.

I find Japanese real estate to be overpriced too.

Seems reasonable to me to just rezone it for industry.

OK, but to be fair, let's include YOUR house in the rezoning . . . we will compensate you with what I got: 0 JPY. You can now sell your house for cents on the dollar to some happy nuclear company so that they can tear it down and continue to reap from the misery they originally caused others. (You do realize that with that comment of yours, you have now clearly moved into "asshat" territory?)

I gather Japan does like the rest of the developed world have legal remedies for awarding fines and damages for when things like Fukushiima happen.

Again, what, are we worried about here, pirates? Any economic analysis of foreign dependency will look at the pricing power of the foreign suppliers which is directly correlated to level of industry competition. Do you honestly believe that the uranium industry is more competitive than the petroleum and coal industries!? By your logic, Japan should run on anti-matter, since it comes in a really small package. This is nonsense .

If China should chose to blockade Japan, then having a high percentage in nuclear power generation rather than coal means that Japan is less vulnerable to the blockade. Blockades of Japan have occurred before in living memory. It's not foolish to consider the risk of them happening again.

requires a level of importing that apparently Japan doesn't want to rely on

I think making blanket statements about what Japan "wants" is pretty meaningless. Sure, there are people who have invested in nuclear, just like you, and will be dedicated salesmen until the bitter end. The actual reality is that Japan will probably be technically nuke free by Spring, with official news slowly coming out on just how bad things are. Nuclear is turning out to be the worst investment in Japanese history, and yet people like you continue on, completely oblivious to the gravity of the situation.

I wasn't aware of this. That's a pretty sad spectacle, if things really turn out as you claim.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[khallow]

How many nuclear reactors have melted down within 100 miles of your home? If it is less than three, I have you beat. It is human nature to not truly comprehend a risk until the worst case scenario has actually taken place. Owning stock in an energy firm is meaningless compared to actually living through the consequences of the uncovered risks those firms take. You are all talk, understand nothing about these risks, and are willfully ignorant to those who have "understood" at great personal cost. You live in a little, sheltered world where your view seems obvious to you, until a black swan comes by and slaughters you like a Thanksgiving turkey.

It appears that this "black swan" has yet to slaughter you. As I see it, I would welcome such things because my minor increase in risk is balanced by considerable benefit to society.

Nice. Not only did you manage to completely mess up that calculation, but you are comparing the post-accident TEPCO mktcap, which is now less than 1/20 of what it was pre-accident. Finally, is bragging about a company having higher mktcap part of some kind of backwards valuation-based strategy where you buy high and sell low? Anyway, I suppose it is your own money if you want to lose it, that is your choice.

So you saw what I did there? Make stupid accusations on the internet and you might just get mocked. Sure I have some sympathy for people who suffer, but when you use that suffering as an excuse to harm your society, well, your credit line gets revoked with me.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[khallow]

Fair enough. Now take a look of the list of people you claim as "people who've never run anything larger or riskier than a university lab."

Ok. I looked. Who doesn't fit my description? You only mention by name, Yukio Takasu, who as a former representative to the UN and current professor, isn't currently running anything significant and engineering related. Now maybe there's someone on that list who has actual experience with a nuclear plant or other large, risky project, but I don't see it from the meager information provided.

It is alright to lack specific credentials when discussing such matters, but to so easily dismiss the opinions of those who actually do have relevant credentials is simply a public demonstration of willful ignorance, nothing more.

What relevant credentials? I see lawyers (Toshio Takano, Yoko Hayashi), academicians (Yotaro Hatamura, Kazuo Oike, Yukio Takasu, Yasuro Tanaka, Yasuro Tanaka, Seiji Abe), politicians and/or regulators (Shizuko Kakinuma, Yukio Takasu, Michio Furukawa), and a "writer, critic" (Kunio Yanagida). Only one of those people, the technical advisor, Masao Fuchigami actually appears to have any association with business and it's a construction business. He might have experience managing the building of nuclear reactors. If so that puts him above any of the members in actual knowledge, credentialed or not, from the little information I've been given.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

I was just correcting your error.

What error? You are the one trying to state that unsophisticated ("poorly developed") arguments can be accurate and correct. Would one not measure the sophistication of an argument using criteria including accuracy and correctness? You love taking the indefensible positions, don't you?

I find Japanese real estate to be overpriced too.

Overall Japan land prices have not only been crashing since the accident (see ORIX), land in Fukushima and the surrounding prefectures appears to no longer be marketable (even the liquid "mansion" apartments. My friend has one 10 minutes from my house, and even though he was offered 30% above the price he paid before the accident, he cannot even sell it now with a 15% discount from what he paid . . . after 8 months being on the market).

If you think land prices are overpriced post-accident, you must be admitting that the reaction to the fallout so far is too optimistic and is not "nuclear hysteria". So you have had a change of heart?

I gather Japan does like the rest of the developed world have legal remedies for awarding fines and damages for when things like Fukushiima happen.

Fines for what damages? According to you and your ilk there are no damages from Fukushima and everyone is just caught up in "nuclear hysteria." Besides, did you not see the estimate of proper compensation of the victims would at least be 10 Trillion USD!? Japan would cease to exist if it actually took proper responsibility for the accident. This is the uncoverable risk of nuclear power, destroyer of nations.

Blockades of Japan have occurred before in living memory. It's not foolish to consider the risk of them happening again.

Chinese blockades, eh? Seriously? You might be aware of this, but the U.S. has purposedly placed enough troops in both South Korea and Japan so that if China were ever to even build up its navy in a threatening way (much less form a blockade . . .), there would be domestic political support for WWIII. At which point, you get your foundest wish, and the entire world goes nuclear (though, for just a short amount of time).

Besides, China is not stupid. The proper way to form a blockade these days is to monopolize something (like rare earths, or even Uranium), and then at some point say you are not going to sell anymore. Nukes made market power the weapon of choice for trade disputes.

I wasn't aware of this. That's a pretty sad spectacle, if things really turn out as you claim.

I would think a pro-nukie like yourself would be aware of this fact. There are already lawsuits and local government demands to start immediate decomissions of at least a dozen reactors. And all that was BEFORE this damning report came out. Strange how reality works, isn't it? Perhaps perceptions can be swayed in the short-term, but eventually everyone is going to have to deal with it. Even those intent on denial until the bitter end.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

It appears that this "black swan" has yet to slaughter you. As I see it, I would welcome such things because my minor increase in risk is balanced by considerable benefit to society.

How is having to give up a 450K USD house and 160K USD/ year job NOT slaughter!? I am sure the turkey is most confident of its arrangement the day before it is slaughtered for Thanksgiving. You just don't know when Thanksgiving is coming, turkey.

So you saw what I did there? Make stupid accusations on the internet and you might just get mocked. Sure I have some sympathy for people who suffer, but when you use that suffering as an excuse to harm your society, well, your credit line gets revoked with me.

Very cryptic . . . are you saying that "harm your society" is the closing down of nuclear plants, the very thing that is causing these people to suffer in the first place!? I am afraid this is another ass-hat comment from you. One more, and I will have to start referring to you as "ass-hat turkey."

Seriously, are you even debating at this point? Why do I feel like I am watching a monkey fling his own feces at a zoo's observation window? This is seizure invoking juvenility. Again . . . we go down the long rabbit hole of a thread, and towards the end you forget to take your medication or something. Come on!

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

isn't currently running anything significant and engineering related

So you are saying we need . . . some one from the nuke industry, right? This is not an engineering failure report, this is a governance failure report. The engineers do what management tells them or they get walking. This is an investigation of management's decisions.

What relevant credentials?

Again, see the above. The engineering aspect of this accident is actually quite simple and what could be modeled by the engineers already has been (though, the accuracy of those models will take, at least, decades to confirm). The decisions by management, however, have just started to become scrutinized. This a governance issue, as the crisis had already reached the limits of engineering within days after the earthquake.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[khallow]

How is having to give up a 450K USD house and 160K USD/ year job NOT slaughter!? I am sure the turkey is most confident of its arrangement the day before it is slaughtered for Thanksgiving. You just don't know when Thanksgiving is coming, turkey.

You'll get compensated and you can work elsewhere.

are you saying that "harm your society" is the closing down of nuclear plants, the very thing that is causing these people to suffer in the first place!?

There are many things that both help and harm us. For example, any mode of transportation. Merely being harmed by something doesn't mean that it doesn't have benefits that outweigh the harm to you and to others, especially when that harm is compensated for.

Seriously, are you even debating at this point? Why do I feel like I am watching a monkey fling his own feces at a zoo's observation window? This is seizure invoking juvenility. Again . . . we go down the long rabbit hole of a thread, and towards the end you forget to take your medication or something. Come on!

Why are you asking me? You should be asking yourself what you are doing.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[khallow]

Because there is a LONG line (10 Trillion USD line, in fact)

Why do you think that? Primary cost of damages is loss of real estate and displacement of people. Even as a foreigner, you'll have a concrete claim (a house and loss of job). I see estimates of those damages around 60 billion. Which more than two orders of magnitude less than your claimed amount.

Merely being benefited by something doesn't mean that it doesn't have harm that outweighs the benefit to you and to others.

I didn't make that fallacy. While you've repeatedly made the fallacy I warned you about.

As a final note, now that we have a demonstration of a nuclear plant hit by a tsunami beyond specs (actually a second example) and yet another demonstration of the dangers of obsolete nuclear plant designs. Japan may well throw away 40 GW or so of base load generating capacity in nuclear power, but that's a rather big asset to just toss. It seems to me a better idea just to learn from mistake and make nuclear plants even safer rather than just drop nuclear power altogether.

Re:1% of all nuke plants have melted down now.

[Idou]

Even as a foreigner, you'll have a concrete claim

A couple of schools next to my house have sent invoices for millions of dollars in "decontamination" fees (which usually consists of washing the radioactive contamination down the drain to the water treatment plant with high power hoses . . . with minimal results). Guess how much they have received so far? I think the schools would get paid before I would, and personally, I do not feel comfortable trying to compete for money that could help reduce the exposure to the kids in my neighborhood. Irregardless, the money is just not there and probably will not be fore decades, if that.

I see estimates [newsonjapan.com] of those damages around 60 billion

Even YOUR link says 250 Billion. Plus, that is back in June. Everything about this disaster gets bigger as time goes by and more reality slowly seeps out. Besides, I think a professor at the most prestigous university in Japan carries more weight than "some private think tank." Finally the 20km radius buy-up is complete BS. The contamination is way higher in many areas outside of that arbitrary circle around the plant. There are non-contiguous hot spots all over Kanto. But, by all means, keep up your claims of this all being "nuclear hysteria" on the victims' part. I am sure the industry is depending on your ilk to keep costs down by blaming the victims. After all my family and I have been through, go ahead and continue your hard work to minimize the situation to fuck us over some more. I am sure your Duke Energy investment is certainly worth it . . .

rather big asset to just toss

Funny, but I would expect most Japanese citizens at this point no longer look at those as big assets but as big ticking bombs. Fukushima Dai-ichi will inevitably cost astronomically more than its book value was at the time of the accident. But here we are talking all about Japan, while your precouis US nuke industry is facing significant hardship. How are you going to convince Japan to stay with nukes, when your own country's nuclear industry is floundering?

Re:Pro-mistakes advocates.

[ustolemyname]

Absolutely agree with this report. Incompetence and high risk activities do not belong together. That goes from building a dam to driving a car, all of which have had their share of preventable accidents.

As a nuclear advocate, I find the nytimes summary of the report indicates it is a little too weak and toothless, as they say, "the interim report seems to leave ultimate responsibility for the disaster ambiguous."

Not only that, but the report states that a "quicker response" would have helped, as opposed to the obvious "design flaws in the redundant cooling systems should have been fixed previously." Most everything that should have been done to prevent this should have been done decades before.

Re:Pro-mistakes advocates.

[Idou]

Alright, then. So do you support nukes in China?
Here is a little reminder of the different approaches the two countries have on things.

Perhaps you might want to clarify just which countries you are pro-nuke for . . .

Re:Hindsight is 20/20

[Code Yanker]

This is insightful. Not sure why you got modded down but I was just thinking the exact same thing.

Re:Hindsight is 20/20

[Wonko the Sane]

I'm sure the regulators are doing everything they can to ignore any of their own actions that contributed to the problem but regardless there's enough of the blame that belongs with the company that I've started pronouncing TEPCO as "Shinra".

Re:Pro-mistakes advocates.

[ustolemyname]

Fukushima was. The tsunami took out the diesel generators which were used for backup cooling. Having redundant systems (note: redundant does not mean more of the same system) and placing them further inland would have made this controllable.

As for "was I there when the accident happened," I believe that amounts to an argument for believing the world didn't exist until I was born.

Re:Pro-mistakes advocates.

[ustolemyname]

I thought it was obvious. I'm pro nuke for whoever is willing to be responsible and own up to the risks involved. Take the US, for example. Three Mile Island is the worst accident they've had, and it killed a shocking 0 people.

I think, when things go wrong, people should be held accountable for their mistakes (see: wall street meltdown. Didn't happen there, either). Here I think the issue is with Tokyo Electric, and some people should be canned, some fined personally, and the company as a whole held responsible. People in charge of regulating and overseeing nuclear power in Japan should also be held accountable, as the potential for disaster was not exactly news.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fl20040523x2.html

Re:Pro-mistakes advocates.

[ustolemyname]

Foresight. Article from 2004: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fl20040523x2.html

It's not as if this particular reactor was on anybody's list of "this is safe."

Not news

[siddesu]

Anyone in Japan who has followed the developments would have told you so much. I was hopeful until the Sunday after the quake, when it became plainly obvious that the government and TEPCO are lying about the extent of the damage. It was obvious that a meltdown has occurred at the time of the first explosion, but nobody with even a textbook understanding of how a reactor works would have had any doubts after unit 3 sent large concrete blocks 150 meters up in the air.

Yet, the Japanese government and TEPCO "admitted the possibility" of meltdowns in the beginning of May, and admitted meltdowns have actually occurred in late July. All this was done while the nuclear industry was faking support for nuclear energy all over Japan, and officials in Japan alongside with power company officials were twisting arms, legs and other limbs to avoid responsibility.

I won't even discuss the irresponsible dispatch of highly radioactive water on barges and into the ocean and the venting of radioactive steam in the air, which continued for weeks, etc. Now, when the cooling of the reactors has allegedly finished, TEPCO has few hundred tons of highly radioactive sludge in containers on site, waiting for the next quake and tsunami to wash them over the landscape. These will, supposedly, be "dealt with" in the distant future.

What is really surprising is not only the abysmal response of TEPCO. Nuclear industry in Japan has forever been plagued by accidents. What is un-fucking-believable s the continuing complacency of the government about it. There have been no investigations, no arrests, nothing.

A government panel, composed mostly of "old boys" (former execs from the nuclear industry, who now serve as "regulators" on taxpayer dime and whose job is to excuse the fuckups of their former colleagues) estimated that Fukushima will increase cost of nuclear power by 20%. Independent experts estimated that actual increase will be more like 3-4 times the current cost. Guess what -- TEPCO already wants the price of electricity to rise by about 20% from next year -- that is just to cope with the immediate cost of the Fukushima cleanup and compensations. The independent experts may yet turn out to be right about a fourfold cost increase.

Considering the size of the accident and the level of criminal complacency and negligence that lead to it, the report doesn't even come to "damning". It is more like a strongly-worded letter. What is needed in this case is some good ole criminal prosecution, some long terms in the PMITA prison for the TEPCO board members and plant managers, and restructuring the company so that investors who cheered the bad safety practices are heavily punished. A cleanup of the regulatory bodies won't be a bad thing as well.

But it is Japan, so none of these are very likely to happen. Instead, we'll have another accident in a few years.

Re:Not news

[lanner]

But it is Japan, so none of these are very likely to happen. Instead, we'll have another accident in a few years.

And thus it is very much deserved, should the people of that country fail to exert more power than the minority politicians and interested industry shareholders.

Re:Not news

[AmiMoJo]

I was hopeful until the Sunday after the quake, when it became plainly obvious that the government and TEPCO are lying about the extent of the damage.

If you listened to what they were saying it was more a case of not engaging in speculation and sticking to the facts they were certain of. Naturally everyone wanted more and it seemed highly probable that there had been a partial melt-down, but they waited for definitive evidence. I'm not saying it was the right thing to do but it wasn't deliberate lying either, just extreme conservatism.

All this was done while the nuclear industry was faking support for nuclear energy all over Japan, and officials in Japan alongside with power company officials were twisting arms, legs and other limbs to avoid responsibility.

You didn't notice all the anti-nuclear protests and the government keeping 80% of reactors shut down for safety checks even while there was a major power shortage and many industries had to shut down temporarily? Nuclear has always been unpopular in Japan but since there are few fossil resources here it was pretty much the only option. Now the technology exists to abandon it and people are calling for that, it's just unfortunate that the on-going political crisis is preventing more progress being made.

What is really surprising is not only the abysmal response of TEPCO. Nuclear industry in Japan has forever been plagued by accidents. What is un-fucking-believable s the continuing complacency of the government about it. There have been no investigations, no arrests, nothing.

This very report is the first step to assigning blame. Notice how shortly after the plant achieved cold shutdown the shit started to hit the fan. Priorities and all that. Unfortunately getting convictions for corporate failures is very difficult in Japan, as it is in many other countries. The UK also has a long history of nuclear accidents but even when there are deaths directly due to mismanagement (e.g. recent rail accidents) it is extremely hard hold individuals responsible. Again, I'm not saying it is right, just that it is the normal way these things work everywhere.

TEPCO won't pay the full cost, the government will cover most of it. Again, nothing new there, in the UK the operator only needs 140m Pounds of insurance, where as a Fukushima style incident would cost at least tens of billions, probably more. The entire US nuclear industry only has $10bn of insurance. That is just the reality of nuclear power economics: no company would run it if it wasn't heavily subsidised and protected by the government.

There will be more accidents in future, but that is the nature of nuclear power, or rather of the way every country in the world runs it.

Re:Not news

[AmiMoJo]

Actually I am watching NHK right now and the government is talking about possible nationalisation of TEPCO to prevent it from collapsing. Aside from it being a major problem for the economy if it did fail (similar to bank failures TEPCO is loaded with debt that would default) they want to ensure that people are compensated properly by TEPCO.

Re:Not news

[khallow]

I was hopeful until the Sunday after the quake, when it became plainly obvious that the government and TEPCO are lying about the extent of the damage. It was obvious that a meltdown has occurred at the time of the first explosion, but nobody with even a textbook understanding of how a reactor works would have had any doubts after unit 3 sent large concrete blocks 150 meters up in the air.

The obvious rebuttal is that the zinc cladding reacts with water at temperatures cooler than what are needed to melt the fuel rods.

What is really surprising is not only the abysmal response of TEPCO. Nuclear industry in Japan has forever been plagued by accidents. What is un-fucking-believable s the continuing complacency of the government about it. There have been no investigations, no arrests, nothing.

What evidence of wrongdoing is there? Merely having a bad accident, particularly one that comes from specifications being grossly exceeded, is not a sign of crime.

But it is Japan, so none of these are very likely to happen. Instead, we'll have another accident in a few years.

I notice that the sort of accidents Japan's nuclear plants normally have aren't particularly serious. Merely having another accident isn't that big a deal. Another Fukushima-level accident would be a big deal, but history indicates those are pretty infrequent. My suggestion is to phase out the old designs rather than worry about why accidents don't always result in criminal charges.

Re:Not news

[siddesu]

The obvious rebuttal is that the zinc cladding reacts with water at temperatures cooler than what are needed to melt the fuel rods.

We're not talking trace amounts of hydrogen here, we're talking an amount that blew off the concrete enclosure completely and sent it flying. You need to update on the March news. You want to rebut? Please calculate the amount of energy needed to produce that much hydrogen. What do your calculations show? Come on, surprise us, show us the numbers. For a genius of your calibre it should be easy.

What evidence of wrongdoing is there?

You are really behind on the news. Again, read more, write less. You could start with the report in TFA.

normally have aren't particularly serious

You're a fat, ignorant troll. The Japanese nuclear companies think nothing of disclosure regulations and have attempted to cover most accidents, especially those in which there was a radiation leak. That is as serious as the lack of information from Iran regarding their nuclear program, or USSR hiding Chernobyl for weeks. I am not going to look through every random idiot's posting history, but from your tone I am somehow sure you're very, very hard on Iran every time the subject comes up here.

to phase out the old designs rather than worry about why accidents don't always result in criminal charges.

Do you have any clue why those "old designs" are not being phased out, but used until they cause trouble? Also, what about the private property that was destroyed by accident? Are you also in favor of having newer locks locks on houses instead of persecuting the thieves? Go troll somewhere else.

Re:Not news

[siddesu]

I'm not saying it was the right thing to do but it wasn't deliberate lying either, just extreme conservatism.

Well, I guess you can put it this way as well. IMHO, the best way to lie is to tell only part of the truth, and that is what happened in the weeks after the accident on a national scale.

all the anti-nuclear protests and the government keeping 80% of reactors shut down for safety checks even while there was a major power shortage and many industries had to shut down temporarily

Yes, I noticed them. The protests were (and are) genuine, but a lot less than what would have happened had the issues been covered properly -- in sufficient detail and earlier. People in Tokyo were lining up for hours outside of the train and metro stations in March. Kind of like people in Kiev and Minsk were marching for the Mayday parades on May 1st 1986.

As for the government reaction, spare me. Long-term complacency, pressure to "calm down" the seriousness of the accident in the aftermath, populist attempts to plug the disappearing electoral support and short-term desperate emergency measures after every accident are obviously the sane way to develop safe nuclear power in the long term.

Notice how shortly after the plant achieved cold shutdown the shit started to hit the fan. Priorities and all that.

There is no shit hitting the fan yet, not for the culprits anyways. We'll see how far things will get, but considering past history of industrial accidents, the cost will be borne by the government (i.e. the taxpayers), not by the guilty.

That is just the reality of nuclear power economics: no company would run it if it wasn't heavily subsidised and protected by the government.

Aside from it being a major problem for the economy if it did fail (similar to bank failures TEPCO is loaded with debt that would default) they want to ensure that people are compensated properly by TEPCO.

And this is exactly the problem with nuclear. Nuclear power has always been vastly more expensive than the figures shown by the nuclear lobby. Who knows where we would have been if all that money had been spent on better alternatives. Instead, we now have to pay for TEPCO's cleanup. This is why companies should not be allowed to operate on a scale where their assets would be insufficient to compensate for the damages they can cause.

There will be more accidents in future, but that is the nature of nuclear power,

This is the nature of the kind of nuclear power that has developed with heavy government involvement, mostly as a side effect of the nuclear weapons programs. That is why costs are never an issue, "security" (and coverups) are the norm, and openness and transparency are the last priorities on the list.

Re:Not news

[khallow]

We're not talking trace amounts of hydrogen here, we're talking an amount that blew off the concrete enclosure completely and sent it flying. You need to update on the March news. You want to rebut? Please calculate the amount of energy needed to produce that much hydrogen. What do your calculations show? Come on, surprise us, show us the numbers. For a genius of your calibre it should be easy.

To start off with, the zirconium and steam reaction is exothermic, hence the energy required is already in the system. No need to run those numbers. As to speed of the reaction, it's superheated steam at high pressure. I don't know the surface area of exposed zirconium, I don't know the rate of reaction per unit surface area for a given temperature and pressure. There were also other materials in the reactor, steel and uranium, for example, that oxidize exothermically when exposed to hot steam. So I can't run those numbers.

But I do know that the fuel rods melt at 3000 C, and from what I gather, at the time of the hydrogen explosions the bottom of the reactor core was still covered in water, which I find inconsistent with the claim in this thread that the reactor core was melting at that time.

You are really behind on the news. Again, read more, write less. You could start with the report in TFA.

The report apparently describes a bunch of mistakes. By "wrongdoing", I don't mean making mistakes (of which the report found quite a few, some which probably significantly made things worse), I mean committing crimes. The original poster complained of there being "no investigations, no arrests, nothing". The report is obviously an investigation, but not one which has found evidence of criminal acts. And if no criminal acts have occurred, then no arrests should occur.

You're a fat, ignorant troll. The Japanese nuclear companies think nothing of disclosure regulations and have attempted to cover most accidents, especially those in which there was a radiation leak.

So past accidents are serious only because the plant operators didn't fully disclose the circumstances of the accident? Or are these accidents somehow serious in their own right?

That is as serious as the lack of information from Iran regarding their nuclear program, or USSR hiding Chernobyl for weeks. I am not going to look through every random idiot's posting history, but from your tone I am somehow sure you're very, very hard on Iran every time the subject comes up here.

I don't buy it. While there apparently have been several cases of radiation leakage that may or may not have been properly reported. It is very foolish to confuse the act of not reporting or hiding a problem with the severity of the problem that's not being reported or hidden.

To be blunt, none of the previous nuclear accidents in Japan created a measurable danger for society and you should be ashamed for making such a bogus comparison. Fukushima is in a class by itself, and as I see it, it turns out to be not much of an issue aside from a very expensive legal resolution of property and modest radiation exposure to the public.

Now let's compare that to Chernobyl. Not only did the USSR hide significant radiation exposure from hundreds of thousands of people near the plant, their deception also put at risk tens of millions of people outside of the USSR's borders. No such danger existed at Fukushima nor was a cover up of similar degree ever attempted. You are making a big point of when TEPCO and the Japanese government admitted to a meltdown. But even if those accusations have some merit (which obviously I'm not convinced they do), you still have to answer to the fact that the harm caused is far smaller than that caused by Chernobyl.

Then we get to Iran. The dynamics are completely difference and the stakes are much higher. After Fukushima, there are at least two countries which have decided to phase out nuclear plants.

Re:Pro-mistakes advocates.

[ustolemyname]

This is an argument against cars.
"People are fucking incompetent. And, yea, there will always be incompetent people. And, yea, they will screw things up. And, yea, that's why you shouldn't let them drive a 2 ton kinetic weapon that won't run into something without constant action/supervision by some incompetent people."

As an example of competence, I point you to the USA. Only three people have died from nuclear power in the US, back in 1961. For comparison, that many people die from car accidents in the US every hour.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents

Re:Pro-mistakes advocates.

[Idou]

I think, when things go wrong, people should be held accountable for their mistakes.

Right, so the U.S. taking 7 and half years to admit an actual meltdown at 3M proves they are worthy? Who got fired for that mistake?

Here I think the issue is with Tokyo Electric, and some people should be canned, some fined personally, and the company as a whole held responsible.

The problem is that even if that did happen, which it will not, it would come no where close to preventing future accidents. This is the banking bailout issue all over again but with global health implications.

Again, I think you are one of the more reasonable pro-nukes here, but I still feel like statements like "willing to be responsible and own up to the risks involved" has very little to do with the realities of today. Especially when taking in account that the majority of future nukes will be in India and China, with little to none international oversight.

Alternate cooling

[currently_awake]

Why don't nuclear power plants use steam engines to run the cooling pumps? They would run till it cooled, don't need any fuel or electricity, work underwater and can be thermally activated when the reactor gets too hot without any intervention.

Re:Alternate cooling

[MichaelSmith]

Yeah a thermosyphon, like the solar hot water system I used to own. IIRC one of the units in Japan could be cooled that way but they didn't use it for some reason.

cowards

[LifesABeach]

those who have no honor, no respect for community, no regard for actions taken; we now have name for them, "Fukushima Daiichi."

Re:Pro-mistakes advocates.

[antifoidulus]

That has to be the stupidest thing I have ever seen, the guy somehow evaluates the behavior of an entire populace based on what a couple of jackasses were doing? The way the Japanese were filling up the plane is the way you would find most people in most countries filling up the plane. Guess what, you can find idiots in Japan too, that would pretty much invalidate his whole point.

Re:Pro-mistakes advocates.

[Wonko the Sane]

Flash to reality:

Reality: If you can name an alternative way to produce as much electricity as is currently produced by nuclear power and will result in less people being killed in the process name it.

Speaking as a TKECF shareholder, I wish ya'll...

[Stradenko]

...would just shuttup about it. Everything's fine now. Remember BP? They were worse. Please move along.

Re:Pro-mistakes advocates.

[Idou]

Guess what, you can find idiots in Japan

On the streets, perhaps, but as aircraft personnel? Are you serious!? Not sure where you are writing from, but from where I come from, aviation is a highly regulated industry, and rightfully so. Those pictures represent more than a couple of idiots, but a failure of various systematic controls and lack of basic equipment.

Are you seriously implying fascist, communist China has better overall controls than free, democratic Japan? Right . . . now NOTHING on Slashdot could possibly surprise me . . . we might has well be pelting each other with our own feces at this point.

1% of all governments have melted down now.

[Ostracus]

If you want to complain about the safety of nuclear power tell us what you want to replace it with. Be honest and include the expected change in fatalities resulting from switching over to your alternative.

Replace it with the hot air from congress. Safest source known to man.

Re:Pro-mistakes advocates.

[hcs_$reboot]

This article from 2004 is indeed very informative. For those who cannot read it entirely, here are the most Fukushima-related parts:

Japan's deadly game of nuclear roulette

Japan sits on top of four tectonic plates, at the edge of the subduction zone, and is in one of the most tectonically active regions of the world.
The 52 reactors in Japan are located in an area the size of California, many within 150 km of each other and almost all built along the coast where seawater is available to cool them.
However, many of those reactors have been negligently sited on active faults, particularly in the subduction zone along the Pacific coast, where major earthquakes of magnitude 7-8 or more on the Richter scale occur frequently.

"I think the situation right now is very scary," says Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismologist and professor at Kobe University. "It's like a kamikaze terrorist wrapped in bombs just waiting to explode."
Last summer, I visited Hamaoka nuclear power plant in Shizuoka Prefecture. Because Hamaoka sits directly over the subduction zone near the junction of two plates, and is overdue for a major earthquake, it is considered to be the most dangerous nuclear power plant in Japan.
When the geologic evidence was presented confirming the extreme danger at Hamaoka, the attending media were obviously shocked.

On July 7 last year, the same day of my visit to Hamaoka, Ishibashi warned of the danger of an earthquake-induced nuclear disaster (...). He said: "The seismic designs of nuclear facilities are based on standards that are too old from the viewpoint of modern seismology and are insufficient. The authorities must admit the possibility that an earthquake-nuclear disaster could happen and weigh the risks objectively."
After visiting the center a few kilometers from Hamaoka, I realized that Japan has no real nuclear-disaster plan in the event that an earthquake damaged a reactor's water-cooling system and triggered a reactor meltdown.
Additionally, there is an extreme danger of an earthquake causing a loss of water coolant in the pools where spent fuel rods are kept.

When I asked ERC officials how they planned to evacuate millions of people from Shizuoka Prefecture and beyond after a Kobe-magnitude earthquake (Kobe is on the same subduction zone as Hamaoka) destroyed communication lines, roads, railroads, drinking-water supplies and sewage lines, they had no answer.
Yoichi Kikuchi, a Japanese nuclear engineer who also became a whistle-blower, has told me personally of many safety problems at Japan's nuclear power plants, such as cracks in pipes in the cooling system from vibrations in the reactor. He said the electric companies are "gambling in a dangerous game to increase profits and decrease government oversight."

It is not a question of whether or not a nuclear disaster will occur in Japan; it is a question of when it will occur.

It is time to make the changeover from nuclear fuel to fossil fuels in order to save future generations and the economy of Japan.

Re:Pro-mistakes advocates.

[antifoidulus]

Um, China has the same regulations, as does the US, as does Japan. I can almost guarantee in every one of those places you can find people doing something that breaks regulations. The real issues are the degree to which violations are systemic and regulations that almost completely ensure that there are enough checks that if someone does something stupid, it will be caught before people get hurt. Again, if the guy can prove that such violations are systemic then he has some proof, but a photo of a couple of jackasses proves nothing more than there are jackasses on the planet, hardly newsworthy.

75 years of uranium

[mdsolar]

With about 75 years of uranium left at the current consumption rate, bringing on China gets us to less than 40 years. So, a plant built now will run out of fuel before it is payed off. The sooner China comes on line, to sooner we'll be done with nuclear power.

Re:75 years of uranium

[LingNoi]

China is busy building liquid fluoride thorium reactors which don't require uranium. Nuclear isn't anywhere near done, however solid fuel reactors probably are.

Re:75 years of uranium

[mdsolar]

Those reactors don't work well and even the unused fuel is difficult to clean up so we'll see how that goes.

Re:75 years of uranium

[Wonko the Sane]

Can you explain what you mean by "don't work well" and "difficult to clean up"?

Re:75 years of uranium

[mdsolar]

"Post-operation examination of pieces of a control-rod thimble, heat-exchanger tubes, and pump bowl parts revealed the ubiquity of the cracking and emphasized its importance to the MSR concept. The crack growth was rapid enough to become a problem over the planned thirty-year life of a follow-on thorium breeder reactor."

"The ensuing decontamination and decommissioning project was called "the most technically challenging" activity assigned to Bechtel Jacobs under its environmental management contract with the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Operations organization. In 2003, the MSRE cleanup project was estimated at about $130 million...."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment#Results

Re:75 years of uranium

[Wonko the Sane]

I assume that you also read the followup study of factors affecting the corrosion rates and you know what they learned about controlling that corrosion, right?

Re:75 years of uranium

[mdsolar]

They didn't do anything. The experiment ended because it failed. Proposed post-failure bandages are just chitter-chatter.

Re:75 years of uranium

[Wonko the Sane]

The historical revisionism is strong with this one.

Re:75 years of uranium

[mdsolar]

You do understand that the experiment was shut down without even using thorium as a fuel right? Wishful thinking seems to be your main thought pattern.

Re:75 years of uranium

[Wonko the Sane]

I'm tired of this.

You're lying. Anyone who is actually interested in the technology will do their own research and see how you're lying so there's no need for me to continue this conversation

Re:75 years of uranium

[mdsolar]

You can go and look it up. Silly to claim I'm lying when the info is right there.

Re:Pro-mistakes advocates.

[Idou]

China has the same regulations, as does the US, as does Japan.

I find that a fascinating statement, given that the Chinese government does not even pretend that there is free domestic media. How can we even begin to verify your claims when the Chinese government actually prevents any kind of independent confirmation of ANYTHING that occurs within the country? The only independent information that does leak out, does not look promising . . .

a photo of a couple of jackasses proves nothing more than there are jackasses on the planet, hardly newsworthy.

I assure you that such a picture would be very newsworthy if it occurred at an airport in either the U.S. or Japan. Again, just dismissing the issue as a bunch of jackasses is a weak argument when considering the context is an airport. Are Chinese nuclear plants operated by the same jackasses?

Re:Pro-mistakes advocates.

[drinkypoo]

They knew this when they built the reactor, the objection was raised and GE fought for the particular site, with the aid of the US Government. Why they fought so hard to place the reactor in such an awful place we will probably never know but it probably has something to do with real estate investment. The alternative, that someone came back from the future with a plan to destroy Japan, is slightly less credible.

Re:Pro-mistakes advocates.

[antifoidulus]

Um, the EU DOES have a free media, and last time I have checked, not a single airline in China is currently banned from EU skies, while a number of other countries who also lack free media have been banned. This shows that overall the system in China is relatively safe and that more than likely the jackasses in the picture are just that, jackasses. I'm not defending China by any means, but if you are going to level an accusation such as that, it damn well better be more compelling than "I have seen jackasses in country A, but none in b, therefore there must be only jackasses in country A and none in B"

Re:Pro-mistakes advocates.

[Idou]

EU DOES have a free media, and last time I have checked, not a single airline in China is currently banned from EU skies

I find this statement extremely naive. Either the EU accepts siphoning fuel by mouth or the Chinese government has a different set of operational standards for flights to the EU region, and they have (shock) tricked the EU aviation authority.

Besides, the EU is only concerned about safety within their own airspace. They control what happens at their airports and flights from China have already made it thousands of miles before they hit EU airspace, so the overall probability of an accident in EU airspace can be minimized, while the monetary impact of a ban on such a large nation is extremely high.

I guess the short of it is if you must fly Air China, be sure you are flying from an EU airport . . .

. . . if you are going to level an accusation such as that . . .

I purposely did not bring up the reports of tainted baby milk formula, lead tainted toys, plastic in rice, etc . . . because I thought it was pretty much universally accepted that China had low QA standards at this point. Obviously I was not expecting to run across someone who is apparently stuck on the Chinese version of the Internet and would be mortally shocked by my post. . .

It's Worse Than That--They Lied

[BrendaEM]

I have read US reports and findings that that type of reactor will melt down about the time that they now admit that did.
Did they think that their reactor was magical?

Sitting at home in your livingroom and one trip to wikipedia, you had all the information you needed to know when the reactor's melted down. The buildings exploded from the hydrogen produced from the breakdown of the cladding of the fuel and radiolysys, both of which show that the fuel was melting. Do you actually think that the engineers did not know this?

I think that it is easier to accept that they made mistakes, rather than admit that they lied.

Re:It's Worse Than That--They Lied

[dotbot]

Yes, I think that corruption is the real point here. In my view, safety of nuclear power is ultimately determined by the extent of corruption within the country that is operating/regulating the power stations. In countries with a culture of openness, nuclear power will be much safer: those certifying safety will be able to make better judgements and have greter authority. So I don't see that the question of nuclear power is black and white - I endorse nuclear power only in those countries that can be trusted. Whilst the industry has a trust issue, I would hope that people see that individual countries set their own standards.

Since Fukushima, we now see that TEPCO just didn't want to know about safety issues. There was no way that they were going to shut down a working power station. Chernobyl was brought online before a key safety requirement was satisfied and efforts to resolve that ultimately led to the disaster. Three Mile Island is fundamentally different: caused by sloppy training/operation, a faulty component, HCI confusion due to design and, whilst a disaster, ultimately far less serious. (I am from none of the countries that these disasters occurred in.)

Re:Pro-mistakes advocates.

[Wonko the Sane]

If I am hearing you correctly you are cool with an even larger number of people dying of lung disease, construction accidents and exposure to toxic chemicals caused by alternatives to nuclear power because those kinds of deaths are less scary.

Re:Pro-mistakes advocates.

[Wonko the Sane]

Hint: perhaps you should say, "Yep. That's the truth. What can be done about it?"

I didn't bring that up because it makes your case even worse. Nuclear power as it exists today is safer than any form of alternative energy. There certainly are risks however. Nuclear power can be made at least two orders of magnitude safer than existing plants (LFTR) so if we allow for the possibility of technological improvement (if your analysis allows for it for wind/solar/etc then it's only fair to do the same for nuclear) then there's absolutely no comparison.