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Japan's Damaged Reactor Has High Radiation, No Water
mdsolar passes along this quote from an Associated Press report:
"One of Japan's crippled nuclear reactors still has fatally high radiation levels and hardly any water to cool it, according to an internal examination Tuesday that renews doubts about the plant's stability. A tool equipped with a tiny video camera, a thermometer, a dosimeter and a water gauge was used to assess damage inside the No. 2 reactor's containment chamber for the second time since the tsunami swept into the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant a year ago. The probe done in January failed to find the water surface and provided only images showing steam, unidentified parts and rusty metal surfaces scarred by exposure to radiation, heat and humidity. The data collected from the probes showed the damage from the disaster was so severe, the plant operator will have to develop special equipment and technology to tolerate the harsh environment and decommission the plant, a process expected to last decades."
The birth of Godzilla is near!
Pure fear mongering. Another black eye for /.
Be assured that it will be worse than what they tell you.
n/t
Mentions a new leak of radiation into the ocean as well. You know, burning fossil fuels actually reduces radiation exposure. Maybe this nuclear stuff is just kind of stupid. http://slashdot.org/journal/279815/fossil-fuel-use-cuts-bodys-internal-radiation-burden
The Slashdot propaganda tells us that nuclear power is safe. Perfectly safe!
A tool equipped with a tiny video camera, a thermometer, a dosimeter and a water gauge was used to assess damage inside Lindsay Lohan, and came to the exact same conclusions before the tip of the tool corroded.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Holy shit! Those radiation levels would be high enough to kill a guy. If only they were isolated inside some kind of containment unit where they would pose little hazard to the public.
How long until we're taking tours of Japan's exclusion zone? Chernobyl's getting old and busted.
According to some, it's easy to deal with. Just grind it up, extract the valuable radioisotopes, and Bob's your uncle!
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Kool-aid taste? You sure have gulped it.
"metal surfaces scarred by exposure to radiation"
No pics? Booo.
a process expected to last decades
Japan does not have so much habitable areas. Considering that a plant failure condemns 1000 km, how many accidents are needed to have the Japanese move to Korea/Australia? In other words, how many nuclear accidents do we need to realize that alternative solutions have to be seriously considered, everywhere?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I wonder what the average cost of the electricity produced over the life of the plant is now after the tangible costs of clean up are added - not even getting into the collateral radiation damage when cancer rates "mysteriously" rise.
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That nuclear radiation was bad for their people.
It's a shame that they didn't learn from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Do not look at enhanced geothermal systems. They do not exist! Continue to argue the relative merits of nuclear and coal. Geothermal is not the cheap, clean, safe renewable locally sourced baseload power you are looking for.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What are the long term costs of anything? But that goes for all other industries just as much. Lets not forget the Santorum frot after the BP oil disaster. What are the long term costs of that? Coal isn't clean either and all that dust is another long term hassle. Will the tar sands really be cleaned up by mining it or will it create an even worse environmental area. What are the costs of mining the minerals needed for solar plants? Just how many birds are killed by wind farms. Just how sustainable is a hydro plant when a river fills it with silth and the fish can no longer migrate?
Every advocate of any scheme will ignore long term risks on his own pet scheme and highlight them for the rest. Up to you to make sense of it all. Good luck.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Or, they could just wait for most active products of fission to hit their half lives enough times for radiation to go down to far more tolerable levels, and then decommission the plant.
Like they do in the West even now.
Go in basal, granite mountain, like near limoge in France (massif central) and you get 5 to 10 times as much background radioactivity as in japan. Other country may even have more. That said I would like to see the calibration of that dosimeter. Color me skeptical , as in my life I had dosimeter go haywire on me.
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Yeah, it was kinda neat.
Too bad it's gone.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Yet, throughout the world support for nuclear is stable or growing. Also, the majority of core material melted through to the bottom of the containment vessel so it is being cooled. If it wasn't, we'd know about it, there'd be no hiding that. Several decades of decommissioning ... nothing unusual there regardless of the state of the plant when it was set for decommissioning.
I won't matter if I present a rational argument here I'll still be modded a troll because Slashdot is where the Nuklear Cowboys riiide. People who want to be Nuclear Free are derided as 'Anti'. Facts are dealt with ad-hominem attacks and evidence based arguments are dealt with ignorance. The Nuclear Cowboys don't have the mental capacity to asses the facts rationally and instead rely on dogmatic skepticism and the assurance that they a mentally superior because they rely on the social proof of being modded up to re-assure their own internal belief systems. Bring on the AC losers.
Reality is irrelevant, these Nuklear Cowboys have a reality distortion field that comes from years subjected to professional propaganda and spin doctoring. Fukushima proves every day what a industry full of cowboys can achieve. Want a reliable nuclear industry fanbois then take responsibility for the failures instead of making excuses for them. Even presented with this sobering situation the bullshit flows as freely as the kool aid.
The wonderful, amazing and ultimately pointless technology of the Nuclear Industry is the most massive failure modern man has produced, that's reality!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Okay, some cards on the table here. I work for a nuclear industry company. I'm not a nuclear anything -- just an IT guy -- but I have seen and learned a lot over the past few years about the nuclear industry and about the Japanese nuclear industry and the Japanese business mindsets and more.
I know the kind of hard-mindedness behind what has led up to Fukushima and what has PERSISTED it. It's the persistence that really gets under my U.S. American skin. In the U.S., we KNOW when we've made mistakes and we learn from them quickly, readily and even hungrily. Sure, we have our share of arrogant assholes too, but it's not our "culture" to be that way. Watching the Japanese in action routinely fills me with a sense of "WTF?!"
Fortunately, not all Japanese are alike. Some think in far better ways. But unfortunately, there are too many arrogant assholes who are still trying to keep it covered up and glossed over and they simply don't want to talk about it. The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) situation uses Japanese nuclear equipment and it has recently been determined that there is a design flaw in it leading to the problems they are experiencing over there. (BTW, does it help to know that the gear in Fukushima is mostly Westinghouse? I suppose not as the problems come from poor disaster planning, maintenance and other factors of implementation... the gear itself was just fine.)
@MrKaos
Sorry bud, but you're just wrong. Nuclear is the best thing we've got for energy. The problems you are identifying is jackasses who don't respect the danger and manage it properly. Do you also think that fire is a bad idea as well? After all, it also has incredible destructive potential but can be perfectly safe when managed properly. Nuclear incidents are rare. Extremely rare. The problem is people who don't understand running and funding these things thinking they can save a few bucks (or yen) here and there or make bad decisions because they have a business partner who could benefit from using one thing over another and so on and on. It's the PEOPLE, MrKaos, which is the problem... and actually, a relatively small number of people at that. I find most people in the nuclear industry to be quite competent and capable. But there are arrogant jackasses everywhere thinking "I could save $1 million by cutting back on...." The problems here are the same as the ones found in the BP oil catastrophe. THE SAME.
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Whoever submitted this story didn't even read the content of the link s/he provided. There is enough water, although less than thought and it is sufficient to cool the reactor. It is certainly a deliberate lie to claim there was no water.
I also cannot imagine anybody thought that standing right next to the core of a nuclear reactor within the containment was anything less than deadly or that anybody should be concerned about this, the area being, as it was, on the inside of an over 1m thick concrete shell.
This isn't an actual commercial solicitation leading up to any kind of authorship. Unless you count authoring a comment (below).
Q: What in your estimation is the worst-case scenario involving critical mass left uncooled and resting on a surface attached to the ground?
Allow me to instigate some imaginings:
* Melting through to the center of the earth, causing a singularity
* Turning into a carrot
Please respond, I'm really concerned about what this lump of actively fissile material is apt to accomplish.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
...Why yes, I guess the Nuclear industry does regulate the hell out of itself, to enforce it's monopoly. (Bombed Iran lately?) I'd say it works about as well as the FDA protects us from the Pharms.
You guys been drinkin' the Kool-Aid for a while.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Wait, so that make it alright to dig up all the rest and burn it?
And, you are mistaken about the release as well. The radioactive components remain in the ash and are not released to the atmosphere. And, since the ash has the same radioactivity as the soil that it originally was, with the same naturally occurring elements, there is no increase in exposure by piling coal ash on the dirt that surrounds the plant. It is the same stuff as that dirt in terms of its radioactivity.
Properly working nuclear plants do leak quite a lot of tritium, something that is quite bio-available. But, as we see, they spread a huge radioactive mess of bio-available fission products from time to time as well when they are not properly working.
Mercury and sulfur, (sulfur also for some oil) are problems with coal, but not over a 6000 year timescale, that of the reduced cancer risk timescale from dilution of carbon-14. And, carbon itself is a problem with all fossil fuels, but the reduced cancer risk remains even as we clean up that mess.
Three quarts per minute for about a week. I've been fretting about it ever since that 'quake busted the reactor in Livermore.
Maybe next time the incident will be a significant enough issue that others, too, will notice
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Probably should point out the original AP story has had the headline updated to little water. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5izZXHoP17G8R-yOYb9RjczkhL1UQ?docId=dff2ed1434ab430c86596f672dab8414 .
Also, I wonder how money people stop to think that other non-damaged reactors also contain dangerously/lethally high radiation, ya know ... cause they are reactors.
Code softly but carry a big magnet.
Already posted on slashdot: http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/01/21/0354238/endoscopic-exam-of-fukushima-reactor
There's a lot I don't think is coming out when it comes to how many people are at risk. How I see things, those in charge are keeping things quiet as much as possible to prevent the masses from panicking and fleeing the country. I might be pulling this outta my backside, but I'd bet a few bucks that there's much more danger than what's been reported.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
The radioactive part of coal is retained in the ash which has the same content as the soil it originally was. As I pointed out in my journal article, claiming coal spreads radioactivity is like claiming a bulldozer spreads radioactivity when it moves soil at a construction site. The claim isn't even wrong, it is just stupid.
Some soil has more uranium than other soil, but is is not radioactive waste. You need fission to get radioactive waste. Fission is very rare in nature.
And, I've never ever heard of coal being considered uranium ore and neither have you.
Post some BS pro-nuke stats to "shut up" a critic's thread. Then, laugh all the way to the karma bank.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
You've embarrassed yourself with your comment.
only one way to stop those fires :)
"Radiation-blurred images" -- OK... since when does widely separated spots of noise make something "blurry?" Noise is also not distortion, it's noise.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Then if coal is the ore, nuclear is a high carbon emissions power source.
;-o
Usually I zap khallow, but you stepped into it first
just take some RadX and RadAway.
I had seen a figure of 52mSv/year in Denver, however it looks like that was an error. Denver actually gets 52mRem/year which is 0.52mSv. So, yes the levels in the playground are high compared to background in Denver. The question is what is the average on the playground (hard to tell from a 2 second video showing 1 spot before the reading settles). In any event, the 6.4uSv/hr is still reasonably safe for an intermittent exposure.
The one thing I dislike sometimes about Slashdot is that people only seem to post personally selected 'quotes'. This is one of those cases. The reactor building does not have "No water". It has water, and that water is at a decent temperature for what it needs to do. The point of the article was that there wasn't as much in there as they thought there would be, meaning that the leak in the building is probably worse, and located lower, than they originally thought. And with less water level means higher radiation levels (as water acts as a partial shield on radiation).
yea. what'd you think?
No. I think that the right thing to do is to convert the coal to natural gas. There are multiple programs underway to do just that. In doing that, it simplifies delivery, and stops all of the pollution EXCEPT for CO2 and some side reactions (small amounts of NOx, etc).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That would assume they'd let anybody build modern nuclear reactors, which is crazy talk, but if you want a funding model it's there.
I highly doubt you could find any commercial insurance company that would underwrite a new nuclear plant these days. Since I know you're staunchly against government funding of such, and I suspect it's impossible for any free civilization to deliberately curtail its energy use, I guess that leaves global warming, right?
(I'm stirring the pot, yes. :) )
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Interestingly, posting something true and damaging to the nuclear industry gets you a lot of negative mods. I happened to submit a new story today : http://slashdot.org/submission/1999741/strange-weather-meets-new-analysis
Usually my stories start out at red in the firehose but this one started out blue today. Perhaps the pack of negative mods had an effect. Too bad. The Nuke Kooks could certainly clutter up that story with molten salt wet fantasies if it were accepted.