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Endoscopic Exam of Fukushima Reactor
mdsolar writes with this excerpt from the Sydney Morning Herald: "Radiation-blurred images taken inside one of Japan's tsunami-hit nuclear reactors show steam, unidentified parts and rusty metal surfaces scarred by 10 months of exposure to heat and humidity. The photos — the first inside-look since the disaster — showed none of the reactor's melted fuel or its cooling water but confirmed stable temperatures and showed no major ruptures caused by the earthquake last March, said Junichi Matsumoto, spokesman for plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company." Here's a video.
It's more a lack of confirmation than an actual problem.
It's like saying "Well, this telescope is aimed at the night sky, but it's not in focus so we can't see Jupiter" rather than "OMG, the planet Jupiter is missing from the Heavens!"
Sorry, I ran out of car analogies.
More to the point, what does this mean for the layman?
Was the fuel consumed in the disaster? Did the containment vessel melt and the fuel escape? What are the possibilities, for those whose science courses are quite a few years back? :)
Der Spiegel has some video, the commentary is all in German, but at least it's better than still pictures...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
It could all be at a pile near the bottom of the reactor vessel and it simply can't be seen yet. If there was a meltdown, this is the most likely case. Then they need to look inside the containment vessel (which the reactor vessel is inside) and check the reactor vessel from below to see if there was any escape. Don't know if they've done this.
"He said it would take more time and better technology to get to the melted fuel, most of which had fallen into an area the endoscope could not reach."
The current tools simply can't go where the fuel is, so they can't yet inspect it. They've confirmed there are no major breaches and are now looking over the information they've been able to gather to see what everything looks like inside. The fuel comment was a regret about the limitations of the tools they have to use, not so much a cause for alarm about anything being amiss.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Re What are the possibilities?
http://fairewinds.com/content/cancer-risk-young-children-near-fukushima-daiichi-underestimated
January 17, 2012 Arnie Gundersen - energy advisor with 39-years of nuclear power engineering experience -(Bachelor's and Master's Degrees in nuclear engineering)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Trying to figure out if the small white speckles are gamma rays or neutrons hitting the CCD. Beta probably wont penetrate that far through the camera body and alpha certainly won't.
The bright white, fast moving streaks are drops of water, probably from core spray inlets (similar to a shower) which has been flowing since the incident.
Chernobyl photography (exclusively film) was similarly damaged by radiation. Taking those photos eventually killed the photographers.
The fuel isn't visible because it slagged into corium at the bottom (or below) the pressure vessel. The camera can in from the top and there is a big collection of crap in the way. It may be years before the slagged fuel is sighted.
It's more a lack of confirmation than an actual problem.
It's like saying "Well, this telescope is aimed at the night sky, but it's not in focus so we can't see Jupiter" rather than "OMG, the planet Jupiter is missing from the Heavens!"
Sorry, I ran out of car analogies.
"Dude! Where's my car?" is probably all the analogy you need.
Putting any statement from one of the clowns from Tepco is just one step UNDER reporting a batboy headlinefrom weekly world news. Those guys are professionnal liers with ENORMOUS interest in asserting that no damage was done by the quake and all was fault of what they claim was a highly unprobably strong tsunami. If any rpoof arise from damage by the quake it would compromise all safety claims made toward japanese nuclear program.
In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite. Japanese requirements for seismic safety at that site were that it should be capable of withstanding an earthquake of about 7.75. The earthquake which hit the nuclear power plant was a 9. The best outcome for TEPCO in this scenario would be to simply be able to say "we met all safety requirements, but the quake was massively larger than anyone expected and so now we're doing everything we can to help". Instead, the plant actually withstood the quake and, what's more, actually shut itself down automatically during the quake. What happened next is what screws TEPCO (rightfully so).
As for those claiming that nuclear is safe because even with this accident everything is fine... just read a little more about all the food and radiation scandals going on. And realise that it's not over yet... For the comparison with Chernobyl... at least the Russian evacuated cities and got the plant under cocoon in less than 9 month, here the japanese are still in denial and only accept to acknowledge problems when they are cought red faced. Seriously, read a little more with carefull distance and neutrality on the topic from a wider panel of sources including ex-skf blog and fukushima diary...
Two people who were working at the nuclear power plant actually received more radiation than the "lowest one-year dose clearly linked to higher cancer risk" (http://xkcd.com/radiation/). Modeling and estimates say that between 100 and 1000 will have a somewhat shortened lifespan as a result of this disaster, but those are quite likely erring on the very high side considering that actual measurements of radiation in plants and soil within the exclusion zone have thus far been much lower than what existing models would suggest should be there. Most of what's actually been observed has been stuff that's very difficult for humans or animals to really get exposed to unless they're sitting there eating fist-fulls of dirt (due to the fact that the radioactive materials in question bond strongly to the stuff in the soil and thus aren't readily absorbed by plants of animals in normal contact with said soil).
This was a 40 year old power plant with known safety issues that neither the owners or the regulators took seriously. It was a 40 year old plant that got hit by an earthquake nobody involved in safety for the plant saw coming. It was a 40 year old plant that survived all of that and was only finally brought down by terrible design issues that led to small explosions and a fairly small release of radiation that may or may not result in a small number of people with slightly shorter lifespans. If that's the worst you've got against nuclear power plants, you should be dropping to your knees and praising Jesus for giving us the intellect to harness the power of the atom.
Coal kills thousands of people every year in mining accidents, plant accidents (mostly fires and explosions), and due to radiation exposure and heavy metal contamination of ground water from all the waste products. Hydro power plants have killed tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands in single accidents. Solar power kills a number of people every year due to various causes such as installers falling off rooftops and electrocutions. Electrocutions and falling deaths during installations also kill a number of people working on wind power every year. If all you people have are Three Mile Island (where nobody died and nobody received any significant radiation exposure) and Fukushima (where nobody died and two people received enough
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Look up "Banqiao dam failure" on wikipedia, or google it. 26k dead from flooding alone, more than 140k dead from secondary effects. Severe ecological effects and property damage as well. China's got a bad history when it comes to dams.
Even the most severe estimates for Chernobyl are a fraction as many dead, short and long term combined - the highest figure I've ever seen put forward was grossly inflated (the person posting it treated every additional cancer caused by the radiation as "fatal", see if you can spot the logical error there), and it still fell well short of Banqiao in deaths. Fukushima's repercussions aren't fully known yet (Chernobyl's are known because it's been twenty-five years), but there will be far fewer deaths than Chernobyl caused, even according to the people who think Tepco is downplaying the severity.
Other nuclear accidents have single digit fatalities (SL-1 comes to mind), or no fatalities at all. Three Mile Island was a zero casualty disaster, where nobody was killed or irradiated and the final cost was measured in dollar figures alone.
It isn't that nuke plants are intrinsically safe - they aren't. It's that we're so paranoid about nuclear safety we go out of the way when designing for failure, such that the actual damage done by a meltdown is a fraction of what it would be in a plant with few or no safety systems. If we built hydro dams the way we build nuclear plants they'd be incapable of killing anybody when they fail. But we don't. We don't built anything non-nuclear to nuclear-spec safety levels. Which means both the anti-nuke ninnies and the nuclear fanboys are wrong - the former for inflating the danger by pretending there are no adequate safeties and the later for pretending there are no risks.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure for more. The average estimate for the one you mention is actually 171,000, according to Wikipedia, plus it left some eleven million people homeless.
Put another way, that one hydroelectric incident killed more people than all the nuclear accidents in human history, and some of the higher estimates for that incident (as high as 230,000) actually exceed the official estimate for total deaths for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, plus the immediate deaths from Chernobyl combined.
The big difference between nuclear power and hydro power in terms of safety is that it is always possible to avoid the danger in the latter case. Just don't build within a couple hundred miles downstream of one.... (On the other hand, I suppose you could make the same argument about living downwind from a nuke plant....)
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You got wrong from the first statement, so I wont bother with the rest of your rant:
The earthquake was 9 at the epicenter. Far from Fukushima Daiichi (150km) were it was much much lower (6+) hence the problem for Tepco.
Bias is cute... but sometimes check a bit more before posting it...
All the other statement you make have no backing or reference to be check except the cute but limited in it's scope XKCD graph... I know XKCD reference are usually thread winning arguments on Digg on fark but I expect better here.
Just know that as of today the Jgov is insisting on spreading radioactive waste in standard recycling plants all over japan spreading pollution everywhere and that farmer are growing rice and vegetables on contamined soil and selling them everywhere. Most supermarket now openly lie about the origine of the farm product they sale to protect their profit. Aeon group has been cought red handed several times already including for vegetables harvested during the short timespan where it was illegal to sell product from fields near Daiichi.
Go to f_ckedgaijin.com, there is a LONG thread were all your claims have already been considered and burried deep to the earth core...
To finish:
>>Fukushima (where nobody died)
You should have started here... would'nt have wasted more time with your shortsighted ness... After all, Chernobyl only killed 40 people... why should we even care...
Coal kills thousands of people every year
You are off by a large margin. Coal contributes to approximately 1-2 MILLION early deaths EVERY YEAR. 1 in 7 people will die early because of coal pollution.
And if you don't believe me, just look at your "clear skies". If you want to see what clear sky looks like, then look at this,
http://good-wallpapers.com/pictures/4519/Deep_blue_sky_wallpaper.jpg
Yes, this probably looks "touched up" to you guys, but the sky itself is how it looks around here on a really clear day (central canada - about 3000km from any coal plants and 1500km from any city larger than 50k people). When you look straight up, it is almost black. When you look at the horizon, there is no haze. No smog. No particulates. It is clear, right down to the horizon.
Now go outside in any of the cities you live in, and look up. I will bet your zenith looks more milky than my horizon.
When I came over from Eastern Europe, Toronto was "super clean" in comparison. In comparison to this place, Toronto air is extremely polluted. Eastern Europe is much worse and I can't even imagine places in China.
When snow falls here, it stays WHITE as the day it fell for 6 months. And when it melts, it is as white as 6 months prior. In Eastern Europe, snow became gray and black within HOURS thanks to coal soot.
So if you ask me what is the most dangerous pollutant on this planet, it is coal and oil and gas, in that order. Nuclear is super clean in comparison, and if any radiation escapes, it is because of a fault, not by design.
So, have seen a blue sky?
PS. CANDU has its problems. It is not as economical as some others. It is not as safe as some different others. But it is pretty good. But above all, nuclear doesn't pollute by design. And this is something that cannot be said about fossil fuels.
Actually, the gp is totally relevant when discussing nuclear safety.
Otherwise you can just through some numbers around and say LOOK NUCLEAR ... BAD without any point of reference.
If you want to discuss nuclear safety, you must have a reference point, which should be the safety of other power generating sources.
If you want a car analogy, more people die each year on France's roads than in plane crashes in the whole world in the same timeframe (3000 for french road accidents, +=1200 for aviation accidents). But if you believe the media, planes are far more dangerous.
Also, if your lutins page is anything approaching an exhaustive list of nuclear accidents of the last 50 years, that's pretty good going (especially since people dying in a plane crash carrying nuclear weapons is counted as fatalities, even though the weapons were unscathed and not involved). No one would even attempt to do such a listing for coal since it would take too much time (and yes, I know that this is an US list).
A small irrigation dam in the hills above Fukushima city in Japan failed after the 2011 earthquake. Four people inspecting the dam at the time were drowned and a few houses below it were swept away, their occupants missing presumed drowned too. Google "Fujinuma dam collapse" for details.
It was an irrigation dam, not for power per se but it used the same technology other power dams use. That one incident directly killed more people and destroyed more homes than the Fukushima radiation releases have done to date.
Elsewhere a dam collapsed during flooding in Nigeria in September 2011, killing over a hundred people and destroying homes and property in its wake. It barely made the world news unlike the events at Fukushima.
In other words, it's about as radioactive as Denver, Co..
Solar power kills a number of people every year due to various causes such as installers falling off rooftops and electrocutions. Electrocutions and falling deaths during installations also kill a number of people working on wind power every year.
And how many people died during construction of the nuclear power plants? Not that I think this makes nuclear power special, rather that if you count installation deaths from one form of power generation system then you should from all the others too. Fair is fair. Building sites are hazardous places.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Show me one case where a melted core traveled 500 m into the earth. One. There isn't any. At Chernobyl there is a big blob of it that traveled a few meters within the building and froze before burning through the concrete floor. At three mile island it didn't leave containment. Give the China syndrome a rest. It ain't real. There are enough REAL dangers without making shit up.
I recommend doing a Google Search on Arnie Gundersen's name. He is a hired consultant for anti-nuclear lobbyists. There is a record of people complaining about the exagerration of his experience. From what I have been able to find, he does indeed have a master's degree in nuclear engineering. He also worked briefly as a technician in a non-operational plant (I haven't been able to find reliable reports on how long he was employed in that capacity, but I have read that he has never worked at an operational plant. It seems likely that he last worked in a nuclear facility in the early 70s.). Most of his career has been as a high school math teacher.
As a high school teacher myself, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that profession. But when these kinds of stories come out with quotes from him (and if you really do the googling, you will see that there are a *lot* of scary sounding predictions from him going back decades), you are always left with the impression that he is an insider in the nuclear industry. But rather he seems to be just a guy with an engineering degree who doesn't like nuclear power. At one point some anti-nuclear lobbyists latched on to him as being a credible source and have used him as an expert witness in trials or to make sound bites like the above. It appears (but I can not verify) that his 39 years of nuclear power engineering is mostly his work as a consultant for lobbyists rather than actively working as an engineer.
This is, of course, simply an opinion based on googling around. I recommend having a look yourself.
Also, it took a combination a flood bigger than the dam was designed to control and seriously under-designing the dam and shoddy construction of that design and operating it poorly and failure to evacuate the flood-prone regions in order to cause this many loss of lives.
Also, it took a combination of an earthquake bigger than the plant was designed to withstand and the biggest tsunami wave in recorded history and the backup pumps flooding and failing and still there was no radiation-caused loss of life at Fukushima.
So let's tally up the deaths then, shall we:
Direct deaths: Banqiao: 26.000 Fukushima: 0
Indirect deaths: Banqiao: 140.000 Fukushima: 0
No matter how anyone trembling in their pants at the thought of the invisible bogey-man radiation tries to spin it, nuclear power is safer than any other means of producing electricity we have - even when it goes badly wrong.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
That's intellectual laziness and you damn well know it. Several cores melting down "near" each other doesn't make their individual blobs of melted fuel any hotter.
Hyperbole much?
I don't know where you get the bit about a third of Japan's rice being grown in Fukushima province. A lot of the rice eaten in Japan is imported, for one thing. For another thing the major part of the contamination from the Fukushima reactors was deposited in mountainous terrain to the north-west of the plant. Nearly all rice-growing in Japan is done on coastal flatlands such as the Kansai region, a looong way from Fukushima.
The tsunami smashed a lot of agricultural areas along the Tohoku coast, polluting them with salt, building debris, fuel oil etc. and they will need several years remediation before crops can be grown there again. This is basically the same situation for the agricultural areas contaminated with fallout although decontamination there might be easier as less soil needs removing and treating.
As for radioactivity levels, I do hope you are aware that seafood swims in radioactivity? Seawater has about 10Bq/litre of radioactivity due to the presence of potassium-40 (K-40). A rough BOTE calculation says there are 50 million tonnes of this radioactive isotope in the world's oceans continuously emitting beta particles and gamma rays. The few kilogrammes of cesium-134 and -137 deposited in the sea by the Fukushima explosions are a spit in the bucket by comparison. The short half-lives (2 years and 30 years) of the cesium isotopes means their radioactivity will diminish in a short timescale -- the amount of cesium and strontium fallout deposited in the Pacific during the H-bomb tests in the 1950s has already decayed significantly, for example. Conversely K-40 has a half-life of over a billion years meaning it will be a threat to life until the Sun goes into its red giant phase.
The FDA already recommends limits on eating seafood. This is due to the high levels of mercury found in fish like tuna. Unlike radiation this cumulative toxin never decays and more is being added every year to the seas, due in part to coal-burning power stations. Attempts are being made by the EPA to reduce the US contribution to this ongoing natural disaster from the current level of 50 tonnes a year at the smokestack but the coal industry is pushing back on this, not surprisingly. In comparison guess how much mercury the nuclear power industry adds to the seas each year? Yep, you you're right. A big fat zero.
I didn't read the entire latest COMARE report, but the summary says "it has been concluded that the risk estimate for childhood leukaemia associated with proximity to an NPP is extremely small, if not zero".