Slashdot Mirror
NRC Releases Audio of Fukushima Disaster
mdsolar writes "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission today released transcripts and audio recordings made at the NRC Operations Center during last year's meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. The release of these audio recordings comes at the request of the public radio program 'BURN: An Energy Journal,' and its host Alex Chadwick. The recordings show the inside workings of the U.S. government's highest level efforts to understand and deal with the unfolding nuclear crisis as the reactors meltdown. In the course of a week, the NRC is repeatedly alarmed that the situation may turn even more catastrophic. The NRC emergency staff discusses what to do — and what the consequences may be — as it learns that reactor containment safeguards are failing, and that spent fuel pools are boiling away their cooling water, and in one case perhaps catching fire."
Most of the comments on the linked site are pretty critical, here's a typical post:
rfordwm - Feb 21, 2012:
Actually I don't remember any of that. Checking the initial article reveals that I don't remember it because it didn't happen. One person said it wasn't a meltdown, and nobody said anything like "STFU luddites" (nothing even close to that quote ever appears).
I also wouldn't gloat... given the most costly natural disaster in human history, which claimed 20,000 lives, only two workers died from the nuclear plant, and there have been no cases of radiation poisoning. Compare this to the six who immediately died in the nearby oil refinery.
At worse, there may be a 0.1% increase in cancer risk due to radiation for the locals (per the most pessimistic scientist opining on the topic), but a lot more have died from the simple loss of electricity. Plus, that works out to ~1,000 deaths over ~50 years, compared to 1,200 cancer deaths due to coal mining (not burning) in Appalachia in the US each year.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but that comment did make me curious enough to see how Slashdot fares at predicting the future.
What's the controversy here? This is a US regulatory agency who regulates US reactors, and the hubbub is that they weren't aware of each detail of events that were going on in Japan? Besides it not being in their job description to keep track of Japanese reactors, I don't think the first reaction of the Japanese was "Call the American nuclear regulators! Otherwise they might have to follow events on CNN!"
If this were the Japanese nuclear regulators, then I'd be worried.
It was terrible, but it's not even in the top ten as natural disasters go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_death_toll
You're completely right, I should have clarified "the most economically costly". It is estimated to have caused $235 billion (World Bank) to $309 billion (Japan) in immediate damages, which is 2-3 times that of the Kobe Earthquake (1995) and 3-4 times that of Hurricane Katrina (2005).
I actually do remember a whole lot of that stuff, and they had mod points too. Japan got off lucky on this one. Being an already overpopulated island nation they can hardly bear to give up the hundreds of square kilometers of territory that will be a no-man's land for the next few centuries, but it could have been much worse. Another plant further down the coast just barely managed to keep just enough generators running to complete their shutdown, or they'd have had two whole plants melting down. If the wind had been blowing a little more Easterly and a little faster, Tokyo would be in the No-man's land. Let's be happy it wasn't worse than we already know it was, and hope they still aren't holding out information on us like they were then.
In 30 years whey they can crack the reactor and grope about with robots for the corium my kids may get to find out how bad it really was - because until then we really won't know. What we do know is that for Japan at least the cost of abandoning this land, the cost of cleaning up this mess, the "~1000 deaths" as you so callously put it is a part of the cost of nuclear power they're no longer willing to invest in - and those costs weren't previously figured into their energy budget.
Japan's going to have money and energy issues for 30 years as they turn away from nuclear and burn more imported fossil fuels as a result. If they had not been so overcommitted to nuclear it wouldn't be so bad for them. Their economy will be depressed from this for the rest of my life because Japan is not rich in fossil fuels. It also makes their economy dependent on the foreign fossil fuels market, which is never going to get cheaper, and makes them vulnerable to foreign diplomatic negotiations with a big energy stick.
But hey, let's talk about the evils of coal and petroleum because fossil fuels are the only alternative baseload power to nuclear, particularly for Japan. There's no such thing as effectively limitless safe cheap clean sustainable carbon-neutral freshwater miserly locally-derived geothermal baseload power on a volcanic island chain like Japan. If they had such a thing they'd be using it already, right?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The controversy is that many of the Nuclear reactors in operation in the U.S are the G.E Mk 1, that Fukushima was. Even the Hitachi and Toshiba reactors are copies of the GE Mk 1.
The second part of the controversy is that the spent fuel cooling pools in the US are much more heavily loaded with pu-239 than Fukushima is/was.
The third part of the controversy is that U.S operators are at least as bad as the Japanese counterparts.
I've observed that most people on slashdot don't want their belief systems about Nuclear power challenged. People who do are modded into oblivion. The fact remains that the U.S is at least as vulnerable to these accidents because it has many of these types of reactors *still* in operation itself. Coupled with the spent fuel density in many U.S reactor installation's cooling pools and you have a recipe for disaster that rivals the Japanese situation.
Unfortunately the lack of observable consensus between those for (pro) and against (anti) Nuclear power leaves the situation deadlocked against any pragmatic solution to the actual situation. Any form of, what I term "Responsible Nuclear Advocacy" is judged by both parties as against "their" argument when, in reality, if you observe both sides from afar you discover that while the end goal of both sides differ, the means to achieving it is the same: A geologically sound spent fuel facility in granite - built like the Rocky Mountains NORAD military facility (which is an ideal place).
It's actually easier for most people to maintain a certain level of apathy towards the situation so they can remain untroubled by events and not challenge their "ism" and I don't blame them because it's a horrendously complex subject. It encapsulates not only an understanding of physics, but engineering, governance and regulation, political constructs, economics and legislation, medicine and, of course, the Nuclear Industry itself.
I started off as undecided (well slightly pro) but determined to learn more and as I did became increasingly fascinated by this wonderful but also terrifying technology, after all, it's related to the atomic bomb. I encourage everyone who argues for Nuclear Power to really get an understanding of this technology. How much energy does mining take, what is the toxicity of mine tailings, what are the consequences of uranium enrichment and the relation to du weapons and the effect of CFC114 on the environment, how reactors are designed and their operational life cycle how basis design issues affect reactor operations (which lead to accidents like Fukushima AND Chernobyl) and, most importantly why dealing with spent fuel containment (and maintaining it in the U.S) is the most pressing issue that the faces humanity.
Simply put, I have long felt that it is up to our generation to deal with the issue of spent fuel containment if we are going to receive the benefits of the energy that Nuclear fuel provides. These reactors have life spans that are measured in decades, while it's "spent" fuel is toxic to life for thousands of years. We have a responsibility to future human generation to deal with this issue permanently. If we can't solve this, the simplest problem facing the Nuclear industry (spent fuel containment) then how can we ever expect to develop better reactor technology (that I completely support), when we are simply rendering the technology pointless. What actual right do we have to this technology if we are too short sighted to see such far reaching consequences.
I don't care if I'm modded down, I have always spoken to the truth of the Nuclear present and this argument has always been treated too flippantly on slashdot. The truth about the Nuclear industry gets modded down here because the truth about it introduces discomfiture that challenges the established dogma of the Nuclear industry and no one wants
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
1) Yes, the USA are in many (though not all) regards just as vulnerable as Japan was. There were some improvements in American plants (like hardened, but unfiltered, containment vents, reinforced condensation chambers, hydrogen igniters (of doubtful value if you ask me) etc.), but certainly not enough in terms of redundant power supply and especially the lack of filters. None of which are discussed in mainstream media for political (and entirely wrong headed) reasons - either to avoid the cost of implementing additional safety measures or to avoid talking about their existence. (Which is the case in Germany, where the media are now entirely anti-nuclear - to the point that the fact that laws were issued a quarter of a century past to install filtered containment vents and catalyzers for hydrogen hasn't been mentioned in any of the larger media during the past year, while pretending that the behaviour of nuclear reactors is entirely unpredictable.)
... and you can switch them both off and on!)
2) The main problem of spent fuel storage is that spent fuel must be reprocessed before any responsible storage is at all possible - an impossible suggestion in the ever paranoid USA. Unreprocessed fuel is a mixture of Uranium (which is neglible compared to either tailings or "natural uranium" in the earth, which is Uranium mixed with tailings), fission products (which decay below the level of the tailings within 200-300 years) and activation products. Activation products from moderated reactors are mostly plutonium, which is responsible for projected storage times of 10k to 1mio years depending upon whom you ask. In short, it is impossible to store activation products in a waste dump in any responsible way whatsoever.
3) Activation products can be split and turned into fission products with fast neutron reactors. This is a straightforward process that consists of switching the reactor on and letting the neutrons do their work. (It depends on neutron cross sections and the neutronicity of the reactor, but it is only slightly more complicated than this.) Those reactors are not new. They are technology over a decade older than Sputnik. (The reactor "Clementine" was build and finished in 1946.) The Russians used lead-cooled fast fission reactors to power their Alfa submarines (of "Hunt for Red October" fame), they also still run the BN-600 (sodium cooled) reactor and have been doing so for decades. The Americans ran the EBR-II for over 30 years until it was shut down by the clinton administration in 1994. (Along with most nuclear research.) The French build and ran the 300MW Phoenix and 1650MW Super-Phoenix plant. (The latter shut down in 1998 IIRC because power was supposed to be too expensive: 4-6ct/kWh. Cheaper than any of todays renewables
That's the greatest misconception of them all - we're not talking about hypothetical processes using newfangled, untested, unpredictable technology. This is really old stuff, it just needs doing.