Slashdot Mirror
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.
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....)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
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.