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US Freezes Nuclear Power Plant Permits Because of Waste Issues
KindMind writes "The U.S. Government said it will stop issuing all permits for new plants and license extensions for existing plants are being frozen due to concerns over waste storage. From the article: 'The government's main watchdog, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, believes that current storage plans are safe and achievable. But a federal court said that the NRC didn't detail what the environmental consequences would be if the agency is wrong. The NRC says that "We are now considering all available options for resolving the waste issue, But, in recognition of our duties under the law, we will not issue [reactor] licenses until the court's remand is appropriately addressed." Affected are 14 reactors awaiting license renewals, and an additional 16 reactors awaiting permits for new construction.'"
Uranium sealed in massive lead cans, encased in concrete, and stored deep underground in an area free of earthquakes.
Of course they should have also built other sites too. It makes no sense to dump all your waste in the same spot. Spread it out.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Store it in Washington, D.C. with the rest of the waste.
Analysts feel the agency can conduct its research relatively quickly without having a major impact on nuclear plants currently seeking license extensions or utilities seeking permission to build new reactors.
A technicality, no significant impact to anything.
That is a myth. Nuclear plants release less radioactive material into the environment when they don't melt down. The meltdowns at TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukashima have made nuclear power release more radioactive material than coal over this period.
It should make sense. Coal releases uranium and its decay products. Uranium isn't especially radioactive (U-235 has a 700 million year half-life and U-238 has a 4 billion year half-life). It takes a lot of it to have a significant effect. Nuclear plants contain massive amounts of fission products with half-lives from microseconds to millenniums. Radioactivity (activity) is equal to the concentration times the natural log of 2 divided by the half-life (A = N * ln 2 / t_1/2). It is apparent that you would need a massive amount of natural uranium to compare with even small amounts of fission product releases. Meltdowns are of a completely different magnitude.
I'm not anti-nuke, but this argument of radioactive releases needs to be stopped. It is not valid.
Then next mother fucker who says anything about global warming to my face, I'm going to fucking punch his lights out.
Seriously. Bitch about CO2 generation, close down coal plants and now kibosh Nuclear. These fucking morons don't want a solution, they want everyone living in caves.
So when the lights go out because their isn't enough generation capacity, I'm going to break some windows and set shit on fire and find some hippies to shoot just for the fucking hell of it.
The world would be in a lot better place if you couldn't burn it until you'd removed an equal or greater quantity of CO2 from the atmosphere.
The fact is, that if we would add a couple of GE PRISM at all of the nuke sites, either running, shutting down, or shut down, we could burn up the vast majority of the 'waste'. From there, what would remain in 100 years, would fit easily in a corner of WIPPS and last only 200 years. Oddly, this would make loads of money for the plants while pretty much using up all of the 'waste'.
In addition, all of the new sites should be switched to a thorium cycle. Very safe to run and at a fraction of the price.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I wasn't aware that they were planning on building several new nuclear plants. I had heard of one or two, but sixteen is quite a few more than I expected. What caused this shift in new building versus how new plants were basically put on hiatus after three mile?
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
can't we just pump it into the air. its probably not half as bad as the stuff that a coal plant releases.
Are you sure about that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Toxicity
The court decision that forced this was actually written by a conservative Reagan appointee. The 3-judge panel overall had 2 Republican and 1 Democratic appointees.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
They're upholding the law, as a judge should. Anti-nuke activists filed the suit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Human_exposure QED.
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Actually, until the Ford administration there was a highly effective recycling program in place. But the end of building weapons and the collapse of the price of newly mined uranium make it cheaper to just buy new and let it sit... with 95% of the available energy still in place.
BTW That's one reason why Yucca mountain was chosen over the salt domes in New Mexico: You can easily retrieve the waste for reprocessing at Yucca, but if you bury it in the salt it will be much more difficult down the road.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
But the deal is, whoever owns my house gets free electricity, in any amount they want to use (as a Minnesotan, I can see the value of a heated driveway & sidewalks).
I always thought they should have done something like that when building a new nuke plant. To make nice with the neighbors, all residents within an X mile radius get electricity at a sharp discount (aka wholesale prices).
I think it has arisen now because the "plan A" Yucca Mountain in Nevada have been abandoned, states are suing the NRC over on-site waste storage and nuclear power plants are reaching maximum capacity in storing of waste. The solution the NRC has is for power plants to use above ground dry cask storage.
BM3
Burial of Radioactive Waste under the Seabed
You have to transport the waste to these deep-sea sites. Underwater recovery in the event of an accident becomes a very expensive and dangerous business.
The worst that can happen to a shipment that moves by rail to a site in Nevada is a routine derailment.
You clear the site, bring in a crane, reload the containers onto another car, and move on.
[And this is why...] We'll continue to burn lots and lots of coal for the foreseeable future.
Actually, coal plants are being shut down to the tune of ~8.5% of total US generation capacity this year alone. Google it.
With nothing planned to replace the lost generation capacity.
I, for one, welcome our skyrocketing-energy-costs-and rolling-blackout/brownout Overlords.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
That's the half-assed way of dealing with it. Reprocessing and advanced reactor designs can massively cut the lifetime of the waste while allowing for more energy to be extracted without the need for more raw materials.
Don't worry, "Environmentalists" are already mounting legal challenges to stop modern methods of Natural Gas extraction and will force us back to coal fairly soon. The worst thing for the environment always has, and always will be hippies.
Has their been any significant progress toward Breeder reactors? Reactors that use existing spent fuel and can tap energy from our rotting nuclear arsenal always sounded lucrative to me but progress towards reactors of this sort has been slow. What are the challenges of producing reactors like this?
Yes, you ACs get so brave. You scream to not do something to your face, while at the same time hiding who you are. Brilliant.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If we remove the actinides (also known as fuel), the remainder will decay to safe levels within 500 years. By safe levels, I mean no more radioactive than the naturally occurring ore the fuel came from in the first place.
Some numbers: Fukushima 900 PBq & Chernobyl 5200 PBq.
Total radioactive releases from coal power plants from 1937 to 2040: 100 PBq (2,721,736,430 millicuries).
So, just Fukushima and Chernobyl have released 61 times the radioactivity released by burning coal for electricity for a century (predicted).
Let's compare this to all of the proven coal reserves in the world being burned: 860 billion tonnes (950 billion tons) at 0.00427 millicuries/ton and 3.7e10 Bq/curie equals 150 PBq.
Obviously, these values are codependent, but we can probably safely assume that at least 200 PBq would be released (meaning that we have burned all of the known coal in the world). Fukashima alone still beats that value by almost 5 times and Chernobyl by 26.
Ouch!
All the Old reactors need to go away but we also need to use safe nuclear power. We have to stop using old fuels like coal and petroleum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
The federal government is shutting down coal mines, holding up nuclear power plants, and denying permits for oil drills and pipelines. It seems like every week we hear about another solar power company going out of business because of mismanagement, fraud, and/or because they can't make a panel that works. We've dammed up every river worth a dam. Where are we supposed to get our electricity?
Wind power might actually pan out as cheap and viable if only the federal government would let someone run the wires from where the wind blows to where the people need the electricity. Since the wind blows when it wants we'll still need some sort of storage or backup. Natural gas seems to be booming despite the best efforts of the federal government to stop that too. If we add pumping stations to the hydro dams we got we could store the electricity when the wind blows. Wind, pumped hydro, and natural gas might make for a nice mix for our electricity, each complementing the others. Problem is that at some point we're going to run out of natural gas. Can we build enough dams and windmills to power our world? Can we do it cheap enough to maintain our standard of living?
The problem of nuclear waste is a creation of the federal government. They decided that we cannot recycle the "spent" fuel from current reactors. The so called "spent" fuel still contains large amounts of usable fuel, it's just tainted with the fission products of the fuel that was used up. The fuel waste problem would actually be solved with new, more efficient, nuclear reactors designed to use the "spent" fuel from the old reactors.
We supposedly have a Department of Energy to solve these problems. What are they doing for us?
It's just so frustrating seeing the government foul things up for us. The energy problems we have now are all political. The government is causing more problems than it's solving. Don't get me wrong, we need government. I think the government has just gotten too big. To get a power plant built or a pipeline run a person would have to satisfy dozens of different agencies that often have conflicting goals. We need to trim down the size of government, getting rid of the Department of Energy is as good of a place to start as any.
Rant over.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Disenfranchising is nothing new and definitely not limited to the Chicago machine (which Obama was only minimally a part of). Bush ran a particularly dirty campaign in 2000. For example, Rove's people called a bunch of voters suggesting that McCain had an illegitimate vietnamese child to win the primary (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll#Political_push_polls:_United_States ) Then a bunch of paid GOP staffers were responsible for starting a riot that stopped the recount in 2000: http://archive.democrats.com/images/miamirioters.jpg
This has been going on long before Obama: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression#Examples_of_voter_suppression_in_the_United_States
The licensing was shut down because the NRC issued a report indicating that existing solutions are safe and effective, and didn't report what would happen if they were wrong.
This is sort of like the stupidity around "the LHC dragons":
Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”
Here, let me help them out: "If we're wrong about being able to store nuclear waste, we could all be turned into Super Mario characters. If that doesn't work out, we'll have to reprocess the spent fuel, with the down side that energy becomes cheap and abundant and we have power forever.".
Obama dishonest: 6.7 million results
Romney dishonest: 2 million results
I call that proof that Obama is 3.35 times more dishonest.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
That "radiation that a functioning nuclear power plant releases into the surrounding environment" is a tightly controlled quantity and should be as close to "none" as possible. That number does not include the radioactive waste that the plant generates, because the intention for the waste is to not release it into the environment. Sometimes, however a nuclear power plant does release more than the normal amount of radiation, and then usually it's bad enough to be referred to as a 'disaster', with greatly increased releases of radiation into the surrounding environment (chernobyl, fukushima daiichi). How often has an area been declared a nuclear disaster area from an "event" caused by a nuclear plant?
So... venting the radioactive waste into the air would, well, poison the planet faster than you can say slardibartfast.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Three Mile Island "melted down" - I think you are confusing it with the nuclear plant in the movie that came out at the same time.
Wikipedia refers to it as a "partial meltdown."
Ken
In fairness all the highly radioactive (= short half-life) fission by-products with half-lives less than several months (or even years) isn't really an environmental issue - you need to be careful with it initially, but it disappears on it's own in short order. And most of the rest of the high-level "waste" is actually perfectly good fuel which could be reprocessed to remove the fission-damping contaminants (or just used in a more efficient reactor to begin with). Add in the fact that all your waste remains neatly fused into your spent fuel pellets where it's easy to deal with and the waste problems are pretty minor. (if handled intelligently)
Coal on the other hand releases all that uranium and thorium directly into the environment, whether in the smoke or the ash.
As for meltdowns - yeah, ugly things. But offhand I can't think of a single modern reactor that has even had a major containment breach - TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima were all designed in the 60s, and fission wasn't even theorized until the late 30's, with the first experimental reactor achieving criticality in '42. That's only about 20 years of experience to go into their design, without any major catastrophes having occurred to inform their risk-management - compared to the 70 years and multiple accidents worth of paranoia going into modern reactor design. Probably the biggest problem with fission reactors is that the vast majority are still based on designs driven by weapons research (i.e. goal #1 was extraction of weaponizable byproducts). CANDU is the only in-use design family I can think of offhand that was designed from the ground up to be a power plant - and while a "meltdown" in such a reactor would be costly to repair it's highly unlikely that anything particularly radioactive would escape the core.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
And while we're making uninformed blanket statements, I'll say that "nuke lovers" have never witnessed what happens when sodium mixes with water and have no idea how corrosive steam can be. Add a bunch of plutonium into the mix (radioactivity causes metals to become brittle over time) and you've got a disaster waiting to happen. You don't want to be anywhere near one of these if the sodium/water heat exchanger in a PRISM type reactor develops a leak. And since you've probably never worked as an engineer in the nuclear field, you probably have no idea that we're still learning about the behaviors of materials under these conditions.
Maybe we could make glass with it. The color is quite lovely. Plates?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
no it doesn't disappear at the end of its halflife.. it's 1/2 as potent as it was.. still potent enough to cause serious problems. take caesium 137.. I believe the halflife for that is 30 years.. short, yes, but even at 90 years, it's still causing harm to the environment/food supply. the body treats it like calcium, so it'll end up in the bones and muscles of your grandkids. While I think nuclear power is a necessary reality, people really need to understand what all these related terms, numbers, and their scales imply.
Sorry, can't treat your Ebola ... the drug sometimes causes stomach aches ...
// task: can you find the unsafe production practices in this psuedocode? // assume we can create this // important first step: use fissional fuel // might be a while
class ThoriumCycle {
VALUE money;
LICENSE licence;
REACTOR Reactor;
REPROCESSOR ReprocessingFacility;
FUEL fuel;
vector<MESS> wasteStorage;
ThoriumCycle (VALUE &startupMoney, FUEL &Plutonium) : money(startupMoney) {
licence = Government.Lobby(money,influence);
assert(licence.recieved(), "damn protestors");
Reactor = license.Factory(REACTOR);
Reprocessor = license.Factory(REPROCESSOR);
fuel = Plutonium;
}
Running(vector<FERTILE> &ThoriumSupply) {
Reactor.FuelWith(fuel);
(heat, neutrons, waste) = Reactor.Burn();
wasteStorage.push(waste);
forall (Th232 in ThoriumSupply) {
MESS U233_Th232_mixture = Reactor.Breed(neutrons, Th232);
(fuel=U233, residualTh232, waste) = Reprocessor.Mess(U233_Th232_mixture);
ThoriumSupply.push(residualTh232);
wasteStorage.push(waste);
if (not_enough_to_be_critical(U233) or Reactor.BeyondServiceLife() or money<minimum) break;
Reactor.FuelWith(U233);
(heat, neutrons, waste) = Reactor.Burn();
wasteStorage.push(waste);
ENERGY electricity = ELECTRICITY(heat);
money += CASH(electricity) - currentOperatingExpenses;
}
}
~ThoriumCycle() {
wasteStorage.push(Reprocessor.Decommision(money));
delete Reprocessor;
wasteStorage.push(Reactor.Decommision(money));
delete Reactor;
waitFor(wasteStorage.isSafe(money));
assert (money>0,"oops not viable operation");
}
};
The meltdowns at TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukashima have made nuclear power release more radioactive material than coal over this period.
Oh, horse shit.
TMI released essentially no radioactive material at all. No deaths have been attributed to it.
Chernobyl was possibly the worst stereotypical example of batshit-crazy Soviet-era negligence I've ever heard of. Someone who attempts to hold the modern nuclear power industry to the standards of Chernobyl is not doing so in an effort to enlighten, educate, or warn, but rather, to deceive. Lay off the vodka, and you won't have a Chernobyl. It's as simple as that.
The Fukushima disaster resulted from similar incompetence. A 40-year-old nuclear plant was allowed to operate long past its scheduled 25-year design life, in a seismically active zone that was known to be prone to tsunamis, under the control of a corrupt power company with demonstrably inadequate oversight. Despite all that, it almost managed to survive an 8.9 earthquake. No one could possibly have been surprised when it didn't. The lesson of Fukushima is that events like Fukushima are 100% avoidable if existing laws and practices are followed.
Meanwhile, people are dying right now from coal-fired plant emissions, all over the industrialized world. It just doesn't look scary enough on CNN for people like you to notice.
You are confusing weapons production with proliferation resistance. CANDU was designed to be able to use natural uranium or very lowly enriched uranium. This makes it proliferation resistant as far as fueling it. Chernobyl was designed for dual use (power and plutonium production). For this reason it was designed to refuel online (to remove plutonium before it burns up). None of the Western civilian reactors that are currently in use were designed for weapons production. They all burn up far too much of the plutonium that they produce and they are not equipped to process it.
Rather than nuclear or coal power, why don't we all tilt at windmills or solar. Obviously those solutions are ready, cost-effective and totally hazard-free!!
I'm not sure that this is the right comparison. A Becquerel is one decay per second. But the output from an exploding nuclear plant is mostly comprised of freshly-created short-half-life isotopes that decay within days or weeks. The radioactive isotopes in the ash from a coal plant are super-stable ones that have lasted since the formation of the Earth, and will keep putting out radiation for billions more years. So if you take the integrated radiation produced from the waste over the decade or so after it's released (measured in Bequerel-years or equivalent), then the coal plants should come out on top.
But even that isn't the right comparison, because the waste/ash doesn't stay in the environment, in an easy-to-expose-yourself-to form, for decades. And then we have to start considering the particulate size and inhalibility of the fallout from a nuclear accident versus the ash from a coal plant, the specific isotopes involved and how well they bioaccumulate, etc.
Here is an idea, start building reactors that have a closed fuel cycle (thorium) or use reactors that can burn transuranic waste into waste that is less long lived (i.e. breeders, and CANDU). I think the biggest mistake that was ever made was the curtailing of nuclear reactor research. We have technology that can do this, but the morons in charge keep kicking the can down the road so it doesn't have to be their problem in the future.
Actually, molten salt reactors such as the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) could be the solution the our nuclear waste problem.
Here's the issue: besides the spent uranium fuel rods, we also have a large amount of plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons that need to disposed of. With an LFTR, the spent uranium fuel rods and plutonium can be reprocessed into a form that can be dissolved with molten sodium fluoride salts and used as LFTR reactor fuel. We get a large source of nuclear fuel, and best of all, the radioactive waste from a LFTR only has a half-life of under 300 years, which means very cheap waste disposal by using disused salt mines or salt domes as disposal sites--if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!
Chernobyl was possibly the worst stereotypical example of batshit-crazy Soviet-era negligence I've ever heard of. [...] The Fukushima disaster resulted from similar incompetence.
This special pleading is typical engineer mentality. "Don't blame the technology, blame the humans!" Yes, fine, but the fact is that all of these plants are operated and managed by humans, and there will continue to be errors due to all those messy irrational things that humans do (politics, cost-cutting, negligence, incompetence, etc.). When those errors take place in nuclear power plants, bad things can happen. While better-enforced regulations can help, you'd be a fool to think that we're never going to have more nuclear accidents.
Only 500 years!
Show me a civilization that lasted that long.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I'm guessing you're trolling, but you could argue that a lack of electric power resulting from forced adoption of inadequate/inappropriate energy sources can result in unnecessary deaths.
I wonder how many elderly and infirm people in India died of heatstroke or food poisoning over the last week, when the power went off? In this case it didn't happen because they insisted on using solar and wind power in places where it couldn't meet demand, but it's not inconceivable that such misguided regulations will indeed get people killed.
And like I said elsewhere, nobody will notice or care, because nothing is glowing green and setting off Geiger counters on the nightly news.
But all of those isotopes remain locked into the fuel pellets rather than being pumped into the environment, an important distinction. As for being easy to handle - easy is a relative term, I think you'll agree it's a lot easier to manage the contamination problem of a bunch of spent fuel pellets than a mountain of smoke and ash distributed across the countryside. The problem is that coal plants have been grandfathered in and we don't actually make them deal with their contamination in any meaningful way. If we did then the business picture for nuclear plants (and every other energy source) would look a whole lot rosier.
As for fuel reprocessing - we'll get that as soon as there's either a business model or government push for it. It's dangerous, expensive work, especially when you have the cost of building prototype reprocessing plants between now and then - as long as there's plenty of readily accessible uranium ore it's a lot cheaper and easier to simply rely on the existing infrastructure and cross our fingers about the pools. Which brings up another issue - even with reprocessing you'll probably have cooling pools - it takes a few year/decades for the mostly useless short-halflife stuff to burn out (at least down to the radiation levels of the long-lived stuff). So basically you can work with the spent fuel today and deal with extreme radiation, or wait for a while and deal with much lower radiation levels but the same basic concentration of valuable fuel. As for storing it at the nuclear plant-yeah, grade A stupid, but you can thank poorly considered regulations for that - nobody else has the proper clearance to handle the stuff in it's short-lived "hot" state, and no politician is going to risk a NIMBY outbreak by opening a hot-waste "internment camp" somewhere. Sort of like the situation we were in (has it improved?) where nuclear plants were reaching their limit on stored waste quantities, but there were nowhere to sequester it so instead they shipped it from one side of the country to the other, and back, and forth, and... basically storing our spent nuclear fuel in semis rolling down the highway - the worst possible solution because nobody was willing to suck it up and do what had to be done (either build a storage facility, build a waste reprocessing plant, or shut down the power plants)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Fine, whatever. But if you want to climb onto your high horse and preach about the amount of radioactive material released, why pick on a few isolated unintentional nuclear accidents? Why not cite the thousands of nuclear weapons tests that were deliberately conducted during the Cold War? Any one of those tests probably released more radioactivity into the air than Fukushima, and we know for a fact that people have died as a result. But did they ever kill 13,000 people a year?
(Admittedly, that's probably some kind of nuclear-industry astroturf site, but I'll still stand by the point that we would never tolerate the environmental harm caused by coal-fired plants if it were as obvious as a Fukushima or Chernobyl.)
The worst thing for the environment always has, and always will be hippies.
Are hippies really worse than rivers catching on fire?
The worst thing for the environment always has, and always will be unregulated corporations.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The waste stored underground at the closed Humbodlt Bay reactor is ready to be inundated by sea level rise. The court is obviously right that the NRC has its head up a lower orifice granting new licenses or renewing old ones.
I have never understood why we keep nuclear waste on the planet. Why not send it into the sun? It would be like sending a BB at a freight train.
1. escape velocity requires a LOT of energy.
2. it's also extremely expensive.
3. bad things would happen if the rocket exploded on the way up.
The engineering and store has been solved on all technical details. Environmentalist who know nothing about nuclear power, storage, risk or containment are always given too much voice.
Let the people who have the actual knowledge debate these issue, the rest of the public should just shut the hell up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The contaminated material at the Gore site is 20 million metric tons of source materials in the form of uranium, uranium oxides, uranium fluorides, thorium, radium, and decay-chain products in process equipment and buildings, soil, sludge, and groundwater.
Citation needed. Here's the description of the site: http://www.wise-uranium.org/edusa.html#GORE (11-14 acres) and here's what I could find on the reclamation: http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/facility/gore.htm. In fact that link uses the exact words you used, which leads me to believe you have read it. It also says, in the same fucking article, that "The total radiological and hazardous waste volume is estimated to be 141,600-311,520 m3 (5-11 million ft3)." I leave it as an exercise to get the density of your material using these numbers and find something on earth that dense. The latter site does mention that they have a licence to "possess" up to 20 million tons of stuff including groundwater.
In fact, do you have the foggiest notion of what 20 million tons is? Assuming a density of 5 tons per cubic meter (rough approximation, within one order of magnitude) that's 4 million cubic meters. Since I bothered to google, I know that the area where the waste will be stored is 11 to 14 acres, or around 4.5 hectares. 4 million cubic meters over 45,000 square meters is about 900 meters tall. So tell me, is your claim bullshit or are they building a mountain of contaminated material?
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
Something needs to be pointed out, quite loudly.
The REASON that "We didn't learn for years..." is that the containment structure WORKED AS DESIGNED. It contained the melt.
It's almost certain lifespans will be reduced significantly, though we won't necessarily be told how many and by how much.
When asked why these results haven't been widely reported, Calidcott noted that Japanese officials are not sharing ultrasound results with foremost experts of thyroid nodules in children and accused the media of "practicing psychic numbing," saying that she doesn't understand why media outlets are choosing to ignore the nuclear fallout.
http://www.businessinsider.com/fukushima-children-have-abnormal-thyroid-growths-2012-7
When the above four studies are tallied in one table, it becomes obvious that the result of the thyroid examinations of children in the “Fukushima Prefecture Health Management Survey” is astonishing. This is because one-third of the children had developed “ cysts.” A “cyst” is a fluid-filled sac. Cysts don’t mean there is an immediate chance of developing thyroid cancer. However, it is apparent that something extraordinary is happening inside the thyroid gland, such as inflammation or changes in cellular properties.
Summarizing the thyroid ultrasound examination results from Japan and overseas, prevalence of “cysts” detected in children around the age of 10 is approximately 0.5-1.0%.
The fact that 35% of Fukushima children (average age around 10) have thyroid cysts strongly suggests that these children’s thyroid glands are negatively affected by undesirable environmental factors.
http://enenews.com/head-of-internal-medicine-at-japan-hospital-astonished-by-fukushima-thyroid-exams-immediate-evacuation-is-imperative-a-violation-of-human-rights-for-those-exposed-to-radiation
In June [2012], 56 percent of Japanese fish catches tested by the Japanese government were contaminated with cesium-137 and -134. (Both are human-made radioactive isotopes—produced through nuclear fission—of the element cesium.)
And 9.3 percent of the catches exceeded Japan’s official ceiling for cesium, which is 100 becquerels per kilogram (Bq/kg). (A becquerel is a unit of radioactivity equal to one nuclear disintegration per second.)
The numbers show that far from dissipating with time, as government officials and scientists in Canada and elsewhere claimed they would, levels of radiation from Fukushima have stayed stubbornly high in fish. In June 2012, the average contaminated fish catch had 65 becquerels of cesium per kilo. That’s much higher than the average of five Bq/kg found in the days after the accident back in March 2011, before cesium from Fukushima had spread widely through the region’s food chain.
In some species, radiation levels are actually higher this year than last.
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/forum/218/are-fish-pacific-ocean-and-japanese-coastal-and-inland-waters-safe-eat-16-months-after-fuk
Sevendsen et al, from the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of South Carolina, demonstrated in 2010 that children who had been living in areas heavily contaminated with radioactive cesium have decreased pulmonary function.
http://fukushimavoice-eng.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/position-statement-what-is-currently.html
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The difference is that much of the Fukashima and Chenobyl radioactivity will be gone in a century, from short lived fission products. The radioactivity from coal (Th232, U235, U238, K40) will mostly still be here in hundreds of millions, and billions of years. Albeit, mostly buried in "our" geological layer.
The engineers knew the site was faulty in many ways, the IAEA knew the Japanese reactors had lots of serious subcode issues, relative to US/European standards. No body could motivate or hold willful TEPCo management responsible. Still can't.
While that would indeed be better than the current fleet of water-cooled reactors, I'm skeptical of sodium-cooled IFRs, given their less-than-stellar track record over the years. IMHO, molten salt is the best way forward. LFTRs have gotten some attention lately, and I'm all in favor. But there's another MSR variant being developed now that is specifically designed to use our existing waste stockpile as its fuel, called WAMSR (waste annihilating molten-salt reactor).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
They also know nothing about Coal power as well. Or really much of anything other than hysteria borne of bad science. I have yet to meet an "Environmentalist" that wasn't, at heart, either a raving lunatic or a dyed-in-the-wool hard core Communist. Most of them run on nothing more than Utopian fantasies of a primordial "perfect state of man" that never existed and never could.
That said, Coal fired power plants are actually quite clean as power plants go. For some reason people hear "Coal Fired" and think of an old steam locomotive gobbling up tons of coal while producing a comparatively small amount of steam power and spewing tons of smoke and ash and unburnt coal into the air.
The reality is FAR from that. Here in Buffalo we have a coal fired power plant that produces large amount of power for the area. (No, we don't get most of our power from Hydro, most of that is sent all the way across the state to New York City.)
I have been into this plant and seen how it works. Much like Nuclear, the coal is used to generate Steam which is used to turn turbines. However, the efficiency is MUCH higher because of how they burn the coal. Essentially, the coal is pulverized into a powder somewhat finer than talcum powder. it is dried with hot air (about 650 F) and then blown with even hotter air out of a compression nozzle into the firing area of the boiler. The pressure from the nozzle heats the powered coal and air to the ignition point and you get a blowtorch of incinerating coal dust and air blasting out of the end.
Not only does this create tremendous amounts of heat (which is used to generate steam, like a Nuclear power plant) but it much more thoroughly burns the coal, (something like 70-80% burned) leaving just a tiny fraction of ash left, which is removed from the exhaust air by scrubbers. Modern coal fired plants produce ALMOST NO airborne waste, and contribute far less to air pollution than diesel plants of similar generation capacity. They also produce no radioactive waste, so the lasting environmental effects are minimal.
That said, Nuclear is STILL the preferred solution, but Big Government Eco-Commie-Utopianists are once again getting in the way with their fantasy desire to have 0% impact ever on anything, but still somehow have a modern society.
We NEED to get these morons out of office and out of government. They will be the death of our society.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
The problem is they're pushing trying to push one piece of a big lump of jello in the hopes that another will move in the right direction, despite the fact that any movement at all will cost somebody money. The nuclear industry is far too small and heavily regulated to expect the "free market" to come up with a solution. Maybe someone will suck it up and do the right thing - more likely I would expect someone to find a loophole somewhere to make the problem "disappear" from the books, which is bad news for everybody.
Early on fuel reprocessing was the norm, then uranium mining became efficient enough that it was cheaper to just buy fresh fuel than reprocess the old - since everyone involved is in the business of making money, here we are. If you want to change behaviors you have to change the rules of the game - my own suggestion would be to take inspiration from bottle-recycling programs and impose a major "waste deposit" fee on reactor fuel, said deposit to be reclaimed when the fuel is reprocessed. Or just put a heavy sin tax on all freshly-mined uranium - whatever it takes to make reprocessed fuel more cost effective. If the government isn't going to step in and fix the problem they need to at least change the economic landscape - because right now they're the ones controlling it (and in the case of nuclear power I think that is the only rational situation), and all they're doing is making all possible solutions unviable.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.