Fukushima Ocean Radiation Won't Quit

mdsolar writes with an update on how the oceans around Fukishima are doing. From the article: " The Fukushima disaster caused by far the largest discharge of radioactivity into the ocean ever seen. A new model presented by scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts estimates that 16.2 petabecquerels (1015 becquerels) of radioactive caesium leaked from the plant — roughly the same amount that went into the atmosphere. Most of that radioactivity dispersed across the Pacific Ocean, where it became diluted to extremely low levels. But in the region of the ocean near the plant, levels of caesium-137 have remained fixed at around 1,000 becquerels, a relatively high level compared to the natural background. Similarly, levels of radioactive caesium in bottom-dwelling fish remain pretty much unchanged more than 18 months after the accident." The article suggests run-off from contaminated land and possibly a leak in the plant itself are to blame for the levels not dropping as expected.

Comments

I thought metric solved these issues

[Brett Buck]

Someone needs to check the units on this article!

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Antipater]

A petabequerel is 10^15 bequerels. Someone didn't check when they copy-pasted the paragraph out of the article. Metric doesn't solve negligence.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Quiet_Desperation]

The petabecquerel is an imaginary thing like orgone energy, homeopathy, human reason and Canada.

Obligatory: http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120326002953/simpsons/images/8/87/Blinky_Art.png

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[the eric conspiracy]

More like somebody didn't understand exponentiation.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Brett Buck]

Canada, tooi? I thought only Belgium was imaginary.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have to explain a prefix (here: peta-), don't use it. Since this is Slashdot, the summaries should simply use the ubiquitous "engineering notation:" 1.62E+16 becquerels.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[tolkienfan]

Nope - it was merely copied and pasted without fixing it properly.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Minwee]

It's worse than that. Even the exponents had been corrected, the summary would state that 16.2 petabecquerels is equal to 10^15 becquerels.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Exponentiation is this thing scientists do where they emphasize numbers by making some of the digits smaller.
It just makes them harder to read for us non-nerds, so I always restore the numbers to normal size when I quote them.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Thud457]

hey, watch the potty-mouth!

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[overmoderated]

I wish.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[X0563511]

Not all of us are engineers, and we appreciate (proper) use of SI prefixes.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[X0563511]

... that is unless you're one of those assholes who likes to say a file is 16305067 bytes in length instead of just saying 16.3mb.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it is nice to be precise.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the more difficult bits of the metric system is that it's case-sensitive. While bits and bytes are not SI units, it is customary to differentiate megabytes ("MB") from millibits ("mb").

Remember also that "K" is short for kelvin, while "k" ("kilo-") is the prefix for one thousand.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Anonymous Coward]

So is Wyoming... seriously have you ever met anyone from Wyoming?

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[newcastlejon]

"Engineering notation" would be 16.2E15 becquerels.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Anonymous Coward]

> It just makes them harder to read for us non-nerds, so I always restore the numbers to normal size when I quote them.

I for one thank you, sir. You can't possibly imagine how many times I searched for notes at the bottom of the page, at the end of articles and everywhere, thinking those numbers were indexes to footnotes.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[marcello_dl]

... that is unless you're one of those assholes who likes to say a file is 16305067 bytes in length instead of just saying 16.3mb

16 305 067 bytes = 15.5497236 megabytes

Yes, some jerk objects and wants to define 1M as 1000000 instead of 1024*1024 bytes: the file is in RAM. HA!

(whoever thought that mass memory could use different units than volatile memory, should have been tarred gzipped and feathered)

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Anonymous Coward]

no, the summary is attempting to state that a petabequerel is equal to 10e15 bequerels.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[akeeneye]

I passed through last summer. There's a primitive civilization there that probably deserves more study by anthropologists. The members worship a subset of their ancestors, referred to by them as "cowboys", and they build impressive monuments that they call "wind turbines" in "farms" that cover vast areas of land.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[GTRacer]

Ugh. Posting to undo mod. Aimed for Insightful and missed by /that/ much...

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[SleazyRidr]

"Engineering notation" would be 1.62E16 becquerels.

FTFY

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Talderas]

Yes. Now Nebraska is a whole different' story. I've never met anyone from Nebraska.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[rthille]

No. Engineering notation (as opposed to scientific) always uses exponents evenly divided by 3, like the prefixes.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[thesupraman]

The USSR has dumped over 39PBq in to oceans intentionally .
The UK has dumped over 35PBq in to the oceans intentionally.
A total dumping over all countries of 85PBq is known (ignoring of course military dumping, etc)

So I assume by 'largest' they simply mean as a single event, certainly a lot more than that has been dumped, and there are single sights with more than that also..

While we are at it..

Weapons testing released 2,566,087 PBq also, just for reference (a lot of it not that far from Vegas..)
Chernobyl released 12,060 PBq

Also for reference, 1kg of coffee, and 1kg of granite also has around 1000 becquerels, the remaining number we are supposed to consider 'relatively high'
So here is hoping no one has granite kitchen tops, or drinks coffee regularly..

Yawn.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Billly Gates]

The petabecquerel is an imaginary thing like orgone energy, homeopathy, human reason and Canada.

Obligatory: http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120326002953/simpsons/images/8/87/Blinky_Art.png

And another thing .. there beer sucks!

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Quiet_Desperation]

Wyoming is Colorado's evil twin.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[radiumsoup]

my Great-grandmother... but that's about it.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Jane Q. Public]

"Weapons testing released 2,566,087 PBq also, just for reference (a lot of it not that far from Vegas..)"

Also not very far from Area 51. This might in fact explain a lot of things about that region.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Jane Q. Public]

"... and they build impressive monuments that they call "wind turbines" in "farms" that cover vast areas of land."

They're actually just prayer wheels in disguise.

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Jane Q. Public]

But Kelvin is not a prefix. 300K is perfectly legitimate when you're referring to temperature.

There is a capital "K" metric prefix, though it's not well-known. It's short for "Klepto".

E.g. "I just scored 400 Kleptodollars from that convenience store. I hope the clerk gets out of the hospital soon."

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[Jane Q. Public]

(I should have added: K is a scalar, and is equal to -1.)

Re:I thought metric solved these issues

[celle]

"I've never met anyone from Nebraska."

      You have now.

chapka "mutating" Ahhhhh! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

mdsolar writes

[Anonymous Coward]

mdsolar writes

Stopped reading right there. It's the Slashdot equivalent of "An article on Fox news..."

Re:mdsolar writes

[AmiMoJo]

Then you are an idiot. If you read the summary it seems interesting, and TFA backs it up.

Dismissing information out of hand simply because of the source is dumb.

Re:mdsolar writes

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. "Radioactive material with half-life of 30 years not gone in 18 Monat, more at 11..."

Re:mdsolar writes

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's Bayesian.

Re:mdsolar writes

[rmstar]

Stopped reading right there. It's the Slashdot equivalent of "An article on Fox news..."

You are being ridiculous. The article in question was published in nature, which is about as reputable and prestigious as it gets.

Re:mdsolar writes

[Anonymous Coward]

mdsolar writes

Stopped reading right there. It's the Slashdot equivalent of "An article on Fox news..."

Yeah, those clowns have standards too high for "fake but accurate" stories....

Re:mdsolar writes

[DrJimbo]

AC wrote:

Exactly. "Radioactive material with half-life of 30 years not gone in 18 Monat, more at 11..."

TFS wrote:

... levels of caesium-137 have remained fixed at around 1,000 becquerels ...

IOW, we would expect levels of caesium-137 (with a half-life of 30 years) to be slowly declining yet measurements show the levels have remained constant. This is a puzzle.

Re:mdsolar writes

[Microlith]

And you're the followup to mdsolar. Two peas in a pod.

Re:mdsolar writes

[Anonymous Coward]

It's uh... actually Ad Hominem.

Good thing you're posting as AC. No one will ever level such criticism at you, you little scamp! Now scram!

Re:mdsolar writes

[X0563511]

AC thinks particles go "oh, hey, it's my half-life" and flash into another element.

Isn't the half-life the halfway point between one and the other? And a legitimate question: is the conversion rate constant?

Re:mdsolar writes

[HornWumpus]

Accepting information at face value from an know source of disinformation (mdsolar) is dumb.

It would be like getting political news from MSNBC or Fox. Dumb or pretending to be.

Re:mdsolar writes

[FrangoAssado]

And a legitimate question: is the conversion rate constant?

It's exponential, following the formula x(t)=x(0)*(1/2)^(t/h), where h is the half life, x(t) is the amount left at time t and x(0) is the initial amount -- you can see that at time t=h (that is, after an amount of time equal to the half-life), you have x(h)=x(0)*(1/2)^1, that is, the half the initial amount is left.

Note that this is a statistical property. Each atom has a fixed probability to decay at every instant; but if you have a lot of atoms, the behavior of the "population" is fairly predictable.

Re:mdsolar writes

[angel'o'sphere]

mdsolar is not known for disinformation.
He is known to have a company in the solar energy buisiness.
The two things have not much in common, imho.

Re:mdsolar writes

[angel'o'sphere]

The conversion rate is not constant: that is why it is called half life.
You start with 1000 particles, after the half life of 30 years is over, you have 500, after another 30 years you habe 250 and after 90 years in total, you have 125.
(Excuse me for not using powers of two and show all ten steps from 1024)

Re:mdsolar writes

[HornWumpus]

BS. This is not my first day on /. nor my first encounter with mdsolar's lies.

Re:mdsolar writes

[gnutrino]

Isn't the half-life the halfway point between one and the other?

I'm not sure I quite undertand this question; between one and the other what? If you mean between one element (in this case Cs-137) and the one it decays into (in this case Ba-137) then no, that's a complete misundertandng of what a half-life is (more on what a half-life is below).

And a legitimate question: is the conversion rate constant?

No it isn't, the conversion rate (as measured by the activity of a sample) is proportional to the number of radioactive atoms that are present (because the more atoms you have the greter the chance that one of them will decay in a given time period), so as a sample decays away the rate at which it decays reduces. The net result of all this is that both the number of atoms of the radioactive isotope and the activity follow an exponential decay. This means that the time it takes for half of a sample to decay does not actually depend on the number of atoms present, so it will be contant over time. We call this the half-life of the isotope and it works roughly like this:

1. (i) Take a lump of the isotope, count all the atoms of that isotope present (yeah this doesn't actually happen but we can always imagine), then leave the lump to start decaying and come back in 1 half-life's time (in the case of Cs137 this is about 30 years).
2. (ii) Now count all the atoms of the isotope in the sample, you'll find that it is (probably very nearly) half the number you found in step (i). Leave the sample for another half-life.
3. (iii) Now that we've come back a whole 60 years from when we started we count atoms again and find (probably very nearly) half of the atoms we had in step (ii) one half life ago and a quater of the atoms we started with way back in step (i).
4. (iv) continue this as much as you like, every half life you wait will halve the number of atoms.

5. What's more, because activity is proportional to the number of undecayed atoms you have, your sample will have gotten steady less radioactive over time too, in fact for every half life you waited the number of click/s on your gaiger counter (the activity) will have halved (assuming the decay product doesn't itself decay, this will complicate things a bit if you can't tell the difference between "clicks from the decay of the original isotope" and "clicks from the decay of the decay product", if the thing that the decay product decays into itself decays that'll screw things up further and so on and so forth).

However, all of this is (somewhat) irrelevant because we weren't expecting the decay of the Cs-137 to have decreased the amount we see (although it would, but only about 3.5% of the original if my quick back of the envolope calculation is accurate) but because we would expect the caesium to have dispersed throughout the whole pacific ocean, which would drastically reduce the concentration down to levels that simply aren't worth worrying about. That it hasn't implies that either something is keeping it there (for example it's been taken into the sand on the ocean floor (which doesn't move much)) or (more worrying) it is being dispersed but something is still leaking and replacing the casesium as fast as it's lost into the wide ocean.

Re:mdsolar writes

[angel'o'sphere]

Well the BS is you.
First of all, articles on /. are except for interviews and book reviews links to articles from other sources, like scientific american, nature magazine, or what ever.
So, obviously it can't be mdsolar who constructs a lie but must be the source he is linking to.
Secondly, I read kost of the articles henlinked and lots of his comments and I don't remember a lie.
However I know americans like to use the word lie for everything they don't agree with ... perhaps reading up in a dictionary what actually constitutes a lie would be helpfull.

Re:mdsolar writes

[HornWumpus]

Perhaps reading mdsolars posting history would be helpful.

Re:mdsolar writes

[angel'o'sphere]

I did, and I modded most of his posts up.
Your 'disagreement' does not make his standpoints 'lie'.

Re:mdsolar writes

[tehcyder]

mdsolar writes

Stopped reading right there. It's the Slashdot equivalent of "An article on Fox news..."

For those unacquainted with mdsolar, he is *gasp* a member of the green party and interested in alternative energy sources. Therefore, for many on slashdot, he is a dangerous anarchist/hippy/commie/atheist or something.

Petabecquerels

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for converting petabecquerels to becquerels, that really cleared things up for me.

Re:Petabecquerels

[Anonymous Coward]

1 becquerel (bq)= 1 radioactive event per second.

To put things in perspective, an 80 kg human produces about 4000 bq, mainly from the potassium in our bodies. So 1000bq does not sound very threatening to me.

Re:Petabecquerels

[Muad'Dave]

My source says it's more like 5400 Bq:

"... exposure due to the normal potassium content of the human body, 2.5 g per kg, or 175 grams in a 70 kg adult. This potassium will naturally generate 175 g × 31 Bq/g 5400 Bq of radioactive decays, constantly through the person's adult lifetime."

1000 Bq is about 67 BED (Banana-Equivalent Dose).

Re:Petabecquerels

[X0563511]

That would matter if we are talking about 1000bq. However, we are talking about 16000000000000000bq. (hence the importance of the peta- prefix)

Re:Petabecquerels

[Anonymous Coward]

Here we go with the confusion from the poorly written article and even poorer copy-paste job. The 1000bq would be referring to "But in the region of the ocean near the plant, levels of caesium-137 have remained fixed at around 1,000 becquerels". What is missing is the volume or weight it's measured in. Since the first part refers to "region of the *ocean*" it's reasonable to assume this is 1,000 bq/liters (or kilograms, plus or minus some fudge factor for cesium-salted ocean weight). For a human shaped hunk of water, at 70kg, this would be 70,000 bq total.

The Doses coefficient for calculating exposure for a group aged > 17 years (Adult persons) which ingested 1 Bq Cs-137 1,3E-08 Sv (This equals 0,000 000 013 Sv/Bq). Thus, if you drank the 3 liters of recommended water daily from Fukushima sea, besides throwing up a lot and stuff, you'd on a rough estimate gain 1,3 * 10^-8 Sv/Bq * 365 * 3l * 1000 bq/l = 0.014235 Sv or 14 mSv. This is about 10 times the normal background radiation from natural sources in Japan. Of course drinking that much of seawater is impossible, but fish do filter through it, and people eat fish (or animals that eat fish).

Re:Petabecquerels

[Anonymous Coward]

Both the US and Japan have extremely stringent laws on how much radiation food can contain. The US is 170bq/kg and Japan is 500. I recall a northern European country (Norway?) allows for 3000. Since 4000/80=50, cannibalism is OK by FDA standards.

Re:Petabecquerels

[AmiMoJo]

You don't understand radiation, do you? The problem is not the absolute dose, it is the fact that it accumulates in fish and plants, which you then eat so that it accumulates in your organs.

Re:Petabecquerels

[BitZtream]

No, it doesn't accumulate in your organs, so one would argue that you don't understand radiation yourself.

Specific forms accumulate in a couple organs due to the chemicals they contain and the propensity of THAT element to be a radioactive isotope. Iodine being one, Potassium being other. But otherwise it does not accumulate from eating fish as they don't, generally contain a form that your body likes to store.

Re:Petabecquerels

[Anonymous Coward]

The legal limits in Norway are 3000 Bq/kg for reindeer meat, wild game, and freshwater fish. For most other foods, it's 600 Bq/kg, except for milk and baby food, where the limit is 370 Bq/kg.
The high limit is of course due to the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl.

There's also this interesting graph; the page is in Norwegian, but the graph shows Bq/kg for freshwater fish (trout and char) against years after the Chernobyl disaster. It peaked at 10000, and is now at some hundreds.

Re:Petabecquerels

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you don't understand radiation. If 67 kilobanana-equivalentss get eaten by 100 chimps and then those 100 chimps get eaten by Gojira, then when Gojira breathes fire on Hello Kitty, her radiation exposure due to bioaccumulation could be over 9000!

Re:Petabecquerels

[Anonymous Coward]

the bit you're missing is that it didn't convert petabecquerels to becquerels. it told you (incorrectly) how to convert one petabequerel to becquerels, so that you could figure it out if you wanted to.

one petabecquerel is 10^15 (not 1015) becquerels.

16.2 petabecquerels is 16,200,000,000,000,000 becquerels.

I can haz...

[Nethemas the Great]

Godzilla now?

Re:I can haz...

[Quiet_Desperation]

Nah, the Third Angel, I'm guessing.

Re:I can haz...

[Kiaser Zohsay]

In Japan, Godzilla haz you!

Re:I can haz...

[Intrepid imaginaut]

But godzilla doesn't have any tentacles!

Re:I can haz...

[trum4n]

But godzilla doesn't have any tentacles!

SQUIDZILLA sure does!

Re:I can haz...

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean Blinky?

http://www.redbubble.com/people/tioem/works/7599891-blinky [redbubble.com]

Re:I can haz...

[pixelpusher220]

It's radioactive, just wait, he'll grow them

Radiaton source !Fukishima

[Narnie]

That's where Japan is hiding its forty-meter battle robots, Godzilla, and crashed alien spaceships.

chernobyl - II

[Faisal Rehman]

a lesson for pro nuclear.

Re:chernobyl - II

[RobertLTux]

and a counter to that is the US Navy Nuclear program which has not had ANY accidents in its history
(not counting losing material/ ships getting sunk/ deliberate sabotage).

Fukushima was more or less EOL right??? (and the designers drank to much saki when setting the tolerances)

Re:chernobyl - II

[AmiMoJo]

Fukushima was more or less EOL right??? (and the designers drank to much saki when setting the tolerances)

Problem is Fukushima is not untypical of nuclear plants in Japan. It was thought to be fine when designed, based on the available knowledge and understanding at the time. It turns out that the earthquake did a fair bit of critical damage even before the tsunami arrived, and you just can't build a plant capable of surviving beyond a certain amount of lateral force/acceleration.

And yeah, the Navy didn't have any major accidents, just a few minor ones. The US military as a whole though is a catalogue of fuck-ups. No civilian nuclear programme in the entire world is free of serious accidents.

Re:chernobyl - II

[tp1024]

It was thought to be fine exactly until 1972, when the first studies revealed that the BWR Mark I was insufficient in case of a meltdown. That was before reactor #2 was even finished. It was definitely included in the 1975 WASH-1400 report. This report also said that floods and tsunamis are a major danger to a nuclear power plant and must be protected against.

The Japanese did nothing about either of those points, they didn't train their staff to handle emergency situations in a station blackout. They didn't do anything remotely compatible with European or American standards to ensure availablitity of emergency power. They didn't equip their containments with filtered vents, which have been implemented in Europe since 1988. They didn't equip the containment buildings with hydrogen recombiners - those were only required by law in 2012 in Japan. In Germany (and probably other countries as well) those are required since 1993.

Tokai and Onagawa were perpared for and hit by the tsunami without major damage. The problem was known, countermeasures were known, non were required by law.

How do you say "It's your own damn fault!" in Japanese?

Re:chernobyl - II

[geekoid]

They tolerances where fine. The problem is a private company did not want to pay to dispose of the material when they where supposed to.

Re:chernobyl - II

[Anonymous Coward]

For the Navy, money and personell in not a factor. Maybe that has changed or slowly changing now but the engineering was already done and the operating procedures and safety measures are already in place. I used to be in the Navy as a reactor operator back in the mid 90's on an older sub. There was not much automation and technology in use back then. The only thing that had a microporessor was the reactor protection and alarm system and it was an 8088. All controls, sensors, and gauges were mechanical and/or discrete electronic and electric. All procedures, actions, limits, and methods of operation were in print form in the reactor plant manuals and scaled down copies of those were embedded in your brain through training. It is my understanding that the nuclear training pipeline has got "easier" for folks going through now. Much less demanding and a much higher percentage of people that start actually make it to the end. The Navy now relies less on the operators and more on the supervisors and technology than they did before. Maybe that is good in that it minimizes the human error part of it or maybe that is bad as the human error factor gets shouldered or concentrated onto less people instead of spread across everyone as a collaborative effort. Having an exceptional DEEP understanding of everything coupled with technology and strong supervision would be the most ideal but I guess there aren't enough people that can make it to meet that demand.

Re:chernobyl - II

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you say "It's your own damn fault!" in Japanese?

LMGTFY

Re:chernobyl - II

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, is this the best you can do? "The US Navy Nuclear program which has not had ANY accidents in its history (not counting when they did)."

Re:chernobyl - II

[Jeremi]

and a counter to that is the US Navy Nuclear program which has not had ANY accidents in its history

It's probably not a coincidence that the US Navy is also a not-for-profit institution, and therefore has only minimal incentives to cut corners.

Re:chernobyl - II

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, the word is 'atypical' - not that it matters to your point any, just wanted to drop the correction somewhere.

Re:chernobyl - II

[mrchaotica]

And yet nuclear still manages to be very much environmentally preferable to coal, even after taking such accidents into account!

Re:chernobyl - II

[thygate]

Sore wa anata jishin no ki no seida (slashdotuh no allowsu kana ?)

Re:chernobyl - II

[AmiMoJo]

TEPCO has adequate emergency backup batteries, they just couldn't transport them the 40km from the depot to the plant due to the damage and on-going problems there.

I was in fact talking about earthquake damage anyway, something you conveniently ignored. Even if emergency power had been available it has recently emerged that the system was damaged in the quake anyway, before the tsunami arrived. No-one in the world has plants capable of surviving the kinds of forces that earthquake exerted, so if there was a law requiring it there would be no nuclear power in that country.

It was ultimately the fault of the Japanese government and TEPCO. So what? That doesn't change anything. Nuclear is what it is, a commercial enterprise that needs a combination of lax regulations and government support to be economically viable. Safe an unaffordable or unsafe and affordable, which do you want?

Re:chernobyl - II

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong site.
Try this one.

Re:chernobyl - II

[tp1024]

If, as you say, "No-one in the world has plants capable of surviving the kinds of forces that earthquake exerted" then please explain to me why reactors #5 and #6 suffered no damage in relevant safety equipment(*) despite experiencing the exact same earthequake and being flooded by the exact same tsunami, that Fukushima Daini suffered no earthquake damage in relevant safety equipment, that Onagawa - closer to the epicenter - suffered no earthquake damage in relevant safety equipment?

(*) Reactor #6 had a Mark II containment that was designed with a third, air-cooled, emergency generator that provided electricity to reactors #5 and #6, as they were interconnected. No connection existed to reactors #1 through #4 as those were part of a different building.

BTW German law follows the N+2 rule. Meaning that two generators must be available in all circumstances ON SITE (not 40km away), such circumstances including one generator being down for maintenance, another failing to start for unrecognized failures and generators failing in predicted initiating accidents like airplanes crashing or floods. There is explicit regulation to ensure diversity and redundance among the emergency generators. Most powerplants end up with 6 emergency generators distributed over the site such that initiating events can't take them out all at once.

None of this even begins to describe a situation in which two identical generators were put into the basement of the reactor building and that's it.

Re:chernobyl - II

[angel'o'sphere]

Modern coal plants right now only emmit CO2. And with sequestering as it is planned in the EU, they emmit nothing at all.
If you life in a country where coal plants emit dangerous poluttants I would suggest you talk to your representative instead of claiming nuclear would be more harmless.
But if you think it is, talk to your representative and let him exchange the local coal plant by a nuclear one ...

Re:chernobyl - II

[FireFury03]

Modern coal plants right now only emmit CO2. And with sequestering as it is planned in the EU, they emmit nothing at all.
If you life in a country where coal plants emit dangerous poluttants I would suggest you talk to your representative instead of claiming nuclear would be more harmless.
But if you think it is, talk to your representative and let him exchange the local coal plant by a nuclear one ...

Just sayin'

Re:chernobyl - II

[angel'o'sphere]

That is not an "emmission" but a storage problem.
We just use ash for buildings and street surfaces instead of storing it somewhere where it can leak ...

Re:chernobyl - II

[Anonymous Coward]

And where do those sequestered materials go? Do they disappear or are they packed up, recycled, formed into something else and disposed of similar to how radioactive waste is?

Re:chernobyl - II

[tehcyder]

FYI, the word is 'atypical' - not that it matters to your point any, just wanted to drop the correction somewhere.

The word "untypical" is less formal and pseudo-scientific sounding than "atypical" but it is perfectly acceptably in normal English.

Re:chernobyl - II

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean "sekinin da" (ki no sei is something else)

Not unexpected

[AmiMoJo]

It is expected to take the better part of this decade to even get at where the leaks are coming from, let alone stop them. The problem isn't going away any time soon.

Re:Not unexpected

[hcs_$reboot]

That's ok, in 10 years from now 80% of the Cs-137 will still remain to find where the leak comes from. Lucky us.

Uhh, yeah check the units

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh boy, where to start. 16.2 petabequerels is NOT 1015 bequerels. Caesium-137 is NOT a naturally occurring isotope, thus it's impossible to have a natural background of Caesium-137. I think that's enough for starters.

Re:Uhh, yeah check the units

[tolkienfan]

That stuff was copied from the article.
1015 actually had the "15" in superscript, so it represented 10^15.
The comment about "background" probably refers to natural background radiation rather than natural background Caesium-137, although it's written badly enough that it isn't clear.

Re:Uhh, yeah check the units

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless, bad original is no excuse to repeat the drivel in summary. I could decipher the meaning of those two statements, but I'm sure most random readers couldn't. Those are far from the only problems with the article, of course, I just stopped there. Another thing already pointed out is that "remained fixed at around 1,000 becquerels" makes no sense without the volume or even weight specified. There's certain to be more than 1,000 bequerels in the Pacific total!

Another issue is that according to the nuclear company TEPCO the atmospheric release during first three weeks alone was 900 petabequerels. About half of it was Iodine-131 with half-life of 8 days leaving 360 petabequerels for Cesium (over 4 times Chernobyl's Cesium release) and quite where the article came up with "roughly the same amount that went into the atmosphere" isn't clear.

But, all this is enough to make the average person's head rotate around like in Exorcist, so better not get too detailed. The bottom line is the article is factually incorrect gibberish and the summary only makes it worse.

Russia dumped into Artic Sea

[Anonymous Coward]

Russia dumped more radioactivity in Arctic Sea. Nuclear waste. Google it , no time right now. Articles says it was the MOST. Sorry

Impossible!!

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the armchair physicists that post on Slashdot that type of nuclear accident is impossible, so it must not have happened.

More than the Bikini Atoll tests?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a hard time believing the first sentence given all the nuclear weapon testing we've done in the Pacific.

Re:More than the Bikini Atoll tests?

[scorp1us]

Mod parent up. I want an answer to this too.

Re:More than the Bikini Atoll tests?

[vlm]

Short version is that weapons are optimized to use the absolute minimum fissionable material and reactors are optimized for an engineering reasonable heat flux per sq meter.

The cost of building an ICBM to carry something "just 500 pounds heavier" is enormous. The motivation to make weapons lighter is intense.
On the other hand PWRs need to keep heat flux low enough to not boil at a sane flow rate, and BWRs REALLY need to stay in nucleate boiling mode. This means a reactor is insanely heavier than a weapon.

A normal human can pick up a modern weapons physics package. Well you have to be in .mil and lift weights occasionally, not your average people of walmart. But the point is the fun stuff is pretty light. A reactor core is made out of hundreds of modules each of which requires a rather heavy crane to lift individually.

Another way to put it is if you want to light it off, it needs well under 100 pounds of the fun stuff. But if you want to reliably extract a gigawatt or so for a couple decades, there's some thermodynamic and materials science reasons that ANYTHING that can transfer a GWt over the long term is gonna be tons. Doesn't matter if the heat came from U or Pu or coal, its gonna take tons of metal to reliably transfer that heat into water. Kinda like if you wanna fire, a match isn't all that big, but a GW class coal electrical power plant, which also uses fire, is really heavy.

Re:More than the Bikini Atoll tests?

[careysub]

The lead-in sentence is certainly incorrect in its current, broad brush form. Immediately after a nuclear explosion the decay of short lived isotopes creates levels of radioactivity astronomically higher than a leaking civilian power plant. But those short lived isotopes rapidly disappear. Eventually you just have long-lived isotopes with half-lives of decades or longer.

Nuclear power reactors burn-up an astonishing large amount of fuel. The biggest fission yield of any nuclear test was no more than 15 megatons, which is the energy equivalent of 880 gigawatt-days (thermal) of nuclear reactor operation. Fukushima Da-ichi produced 29,891 gigawatt-days of power a year, a number 35 times larger. The amount of long-lived radioactivity (i.e. what you have left after several weeks) in Fukushima far exceeded any nuclear weapon.

Re:More than the Bikini Atoll tests?

[X0563511]

Not to mention - the more of that material that is released as energy the better, from a weapons perspective. A proper warhead wouldn't spew heavy elements all over the place.

Re:More than the Bikini Atoll tests?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's bullshit nukes weight hundreds of megatons!

Re:More than the Bikini Atoll tests?

[Creepy]

That was going to be my point, as well - the US and Russia did above ground nuclear bomb testing for years. I believe India's initial testing was above ground as well.

Re:More than the Bikini Atoll tests?

[tp1024]

You completely neglect the fact that *all* the radionuclides of a nuclear bomb ends up in the ocean.

But only a small fraction (on the order of 3% give or take a factor of two) of that in Fukushima got out of the containments and of that only specific isotopes. And that's ignoring the obvious points that reactors #4 through #6 were unaffected (the spent fuel in the pool of reactor #4 is undamaged), the remainder accounts for less than half of the generation capacity and the fuel rods in the reactors had only about 200 reactor days on average.

Also, there was more than just this one bomb - a lot more. There were over 500 atmospheric nuclear bomb tests all told.

Re:More than the Bikini Atoll tests?

[Creepy]

Incorrect - at best, nuclear reactors burn 5% of the Uranium used, and that is best case scenario - average is more .5%. Only fast breeder reactors burn near 100% of their fuel and only a few exist and they are all considered experimental. They also require on-site fuel reprocessing, which brings up proliferation concerns (whether warranted or not).

The US is now obsessed with building a LMFBR (liquid metal fast breeder reactor) which converts U238 (aka nuclear waste) to fissionable plutonium through a chain of reactions, but it is extremely complex and not all of the engineering issues have been solved, or at least not in the US. Russia has had one running and generating power since 1986 (BN-600) and several smaller test reactors that I don't think are still in use. Russia is building two more larger test reactors at Beloyarsk (BN I assume means Beloyarsk Nuclear). Personally, I'm not terribly thrilled by fast breeders, which seems like a complex, dangerous solution to a problem we solved with the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment and then abandoned thanks to tricky Dick's agenda, but we get what we get.

Re:More than the Bikini Atoll tests?

[tp1024]

The typical value is 3% not 0.5%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel

Re:More than the Bikini Atoll tests?

[BitZtream]

The yield is something around one percent of the fissionable material in the bomb before the material is blown all over.

Try again.

Re:More than the Bikini Atoll tests?

[X0563511]

Compared to a reactor accident?

Try again.

Re:More than the Bikini Atoll tests?

[tehcyder]

I don't think I'd refer to the material for weapons of mass slaughter as "fun stuff".

1000Bq per WHAT?

[tp1024]

Per kg, per cubic meter, per cubic foot?

If the writer of an article is incapable of determining how to write meaningful data, the article isn't worth anything at all. (S)He's just a parrot of whoever wrote the original and has no understanding of what this is about.

Re:1000Bq per WHAT?

[tp1024]

Also, is it even water we're talking about or is it the ocean floor?

Fuck everything about the "news coverage" of Fukushima.

There is ZERO information you can gain from such rubbish that those retards keep puking out into the public even if you know what you're talking about. This isn't even propaganda, it's worse, it's just ignorant drivel designed to say something against nuclear power, by people who don't know the least what they are takling about, just what they want to be talking against.

Re:1000Bq per WHAT?

[Crispy Critters]

The rest of the article refers to contamination levels in Bq/kg, which seems to be the standard unit for this. The level 1000 Bq/kg is not tremendously high, as it is only a few times larger than safe limits for human consumption of cesium-contaminated water (which hopefully are conservative). (And writers who don't know the difference between "rem" and "rem per hour" are even worse.)

Re:1000Bq per WHAT?

[tp1024]

But is it "the ocean" or is the in fact the ocean floor - which would be much more plausible, as the water should have long been diluted to much lower levels.

Re:1000Bq per WHAT?

[angel'o'sphere]

1000 Bq/kg water is save for humans? Hint: there is not such unit as Bq/kg.
How do you know that?

Anyway the fact that we use Bequerel in our days for measuring radioactivity is one case that everyone thinks radiation is harmless.

Bq is based on an old unit called Curie. 1 gram radium is radiating one Curie (Ci).

However 1 Ci is equivalent to 37 GBq ... so Bq is a very small unit, that is as if I wanted to measure the distance from London to New York in inches and then I say 1000 inches is not very much.

However most people can't jump as far as 1000 inches.

Re:1000Bq per WHAT?

[AmiMoJo]

The problem is that caesium-137 bio-accumulates in plants and fish. If you then eat said plants and fish, as the Japanese like to do on occasion, it gets in your body and sits there, slowly irradiating your organs. In that context 1000Bq/Kg is rather high.

Re:1000Bq per WHAT?

[tp1024]

There is no such unit as 1000Bq per kg?

You don't begin to see the extent of your ignorance, do you?

Re:1000Bq per WHAT?

[nojayuk]

Cesium has a half-life in the human body of between 50 and 120 days depending on which tissues it ends up in (fat, muscle, bone etc.). Ingest a milligram of cesium and half of it will be expelled from the body in that 50-120 days, and half of the residue over the next half-life period and so on. It's not something like radioactive potassium which the body actively tries to conserve in equilibrium in various tissues and which makes up most of the human body's radioactivity level of ca. 4000Bq (assuming a 70-80kg adult).

If elements like cesium never left your body after ingestion you'd be spherical and weigh 200kg in six months. Then again, did you say you were American?

Re:1000Bq per WHAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

A Bq is 1 decay per second. That's all you get for units: 1/sec. Since it immediately gets diluted it doesn't make sense to talk about volume If you have a volume that measures 1 Bq then diluted to 10,000 times it will still measure 1 Bq. I think the author wanted you to do what I did when reading: to simulate in your head all those Becquels flowing out of Fukushima and being slurped up by oceanic currents.

Re:1000Bq per WHAT?

[angel'o'sphere]

Just google for it ...
You will see there are not many scientific articles using this 'term'.
Ofc every 'unit' which is a combination of units does exist, but usualy (for a reason) that is not called a 'unit'.

Re:1000Bq per WHAT?

[Crispy Critters]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-21/japan-sets-safe-limits-for-consuming-radiation-contaminated-food-table-.html Prescribed safe limit from Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare for radioactive cesium in drinking water is 200 Becquerel per kilogram.

What may be expected?

[j-stroy]

If these measurements of what HAS leaked are a concern, what of potential future risks of a greater magnitude?! Around Reactor 4 there is "unequal ground sinking of 0.8 meters" let alone how that projects over decades. Unit 4 is the one with a full core, etc in its top floor fuel pool and the same one that was photoshooped in an official release.

Re:What may be expected?

[X0563511]

Was it ever figured out what was hidden in that shopjob? Did they ever make a statement when it was called out?

Re:What may be expected?

[Anonymous Coward]

Speculation was that the location suggested covering up a certain type of stress fracture.

Not if you knew about ocean dumping

[kriston]

You might think that the Fukushima disaster "caused by far the largest discharge of radioactivity into the ocean ever seen," but not if you weren't already aware of the over five decades' worth of ocean dumping of atomic waste.

Honestly.

Re:Not if you knew about ocean dumping

[geekoid]

Since is says 'largest discharge', they are talking single event, not cumulative.

It still might not be true, but you shoudl be applying 5 decades of dumping.

Re:Not if you knew about ocean dumping

[edxwelch]

I guess that makes it ok then

Re:Not if you knew about ocean dumping

[Troyusrex]

Not to mention decades of atomic testing at Bikini and other pacific islands.

People Never Learn From History

[Anonymous Coward]

History shows again and again how nature points up the folly of man.

Seaweed safe to eat?

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of edible seaweed comes from the ocean in the Asia-Pacific region. Seaweed is a great absorber of iodine (including radioactive iodine dumped from Fukushima). Since Fukushima is still dumping radiation, is the seaweed in the Pacific ocean continuing to be contaminated?

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[tp1024]

There is about 0.0000000000000000015% of the I-131 left that was originally emitted. In short: no.

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[vlm]

LOL the "one week or so" half life of I-131 explains why civil defense and .mil stockpiles only contained at most a month or two's iodine tablets to protect against thyroid cancer.... its just not a credible concern after a couple months.

Thats the cool thing about nuclear waste... 100% of the arsenic that came out of the smokestack of the coal plant "nearby" my house is still in the lake where the city gets its drinking water... oops. However virtually all the radioactive iodine the nuke plant "nearby" my house has ever made has long since decayed into irrelevance.

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[pixelpusher220]

Operational risk != Disaster Risks

Both are bad, the former 'can' be prevented. The latter, not so much...

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[hcs_$reboot]

0.0000000000000000015%

Actually 1/1000 times of that (2^(-606/8))*100%.

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[tp1024]

True, for some reason I estimated about 500 days since March 11 last year.

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[Luckyo]

The latter can be prevented, but costs for plants that burn stuff are pretty steep. My father works for a burner-based power plant manufacturer (I've seen them make stuff ranging from burning coal to burning trash to burning the weird ass crap which is about 30% oil and 70% crushed rock), and one of the things he did was handle certification and maintenance of the new plants across EU that had to comply to rigorous norms.

For example, the main cause of acid rains of the past, SO2 and NOx emissions are currently ZERO on some modern burner plants. Reason for this is extreme degree of burning process control (i.e. they can create burning conditions where certain gasses do not form, instead burning process forms far less harmful gasses such as CO2). Particles nowadays can be handled by filters which also have near-100% efficiency for particles they're responsible for. Basically they get particles out of the exhaust air and store it in a solid form which is then taken away to the appropriate dump.

This stuff is really expensive though, so only new plants get the appropriate upgrades due to rigorous standards applied to them. Older plants still crap on the environment, same thing as old nuclear plants being far more risky when major disaster occurs then new ones.

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[pixelpusher220]

Never said it was cheap or 'easy'. We just choose to not spend that kind of money because the damage is spread out over hundreds of square miles and decades.

But it 'can' be prevented. Not so much the effects of a nuclear disaster.

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[Luckyo]

Actually those can be prevented just as well. Fukushima plant that blew up was a 1st gen 1960s plant. If it was upgraded to modern tech from today, it would likely not have suffered critical malfunctions that it did. Many of their backup systems are still from those times. Entire plant was in fact build to last magnitude 7 earthquake. It took a 9 and survived it. Only the tsunami that followed the disaster, killing over 30.000 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless managed to destroy its power generation capability to extent where it could not be restored fast enough.

As is often pointed out, Fukushima plants weren't the only one hit by the tsunami and earthquake. There were others who took almost as much of a hit. But they were newer (not even by much) so they didn't lose power due to better and newer backup systems, better seawall and better security practices. A modern plant built today would have easily survived the magnitude 9 and followup tsunami, just like a modern coal plant doesn't cause acid rains. It's the progress of technology, and one of the biggest self-defeating problems with anti-nuclear movement is that it blocks the development and implementations necessary to make these plants safer.

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[pixelpusher220]

In a 'disaster', you can no longer count on your safety measures, since by definition, they've failed.

My point is that Fukushima was considered 'safe' when it was built. Saying that today's designs are 'safer' only lowers the probability, it doesn't eliminate it.

Nuclear is the only power source capable of making 100s of sq miles uninhabitable for decades; and that doesn't even take into account the currently unresolved waste issues. When something simply can not fail, as a nuclear plant can not be allowed to fail - any probability of disaster is too much.

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[angel'o'sphere]

Depends how you see it, sure the jod it has produced has decayed, but its stockpile on jod stays constant as there is constantly produced new one.

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[Luckyo]

Then you live in a world of your own, the world where engineers do not exist.

Fact is, engineers plan for disasters. Various disasters, big ones, small ones, medium ones, you name it, they likely have a plan for it on major power plant sites. Fukushima for example was planned to withstand a magnitude 7 earthquake and tsunami of certain height, both huge disasters. Problem was that it got hit by a hundred times stronger earthquake and a tsunami four times higher then their seawall. Other plants in the vicinity of that particular natural disaster that had higher seawalls stood. Most of them are ready to be restarted, if not for sensationalism attached to the Fukushima.

You see, there's this thing called "probability". For example, you certainly cannot plan for a large comet to hit the planet where the nuclear plant stands. Or you can, but if you do you should consider that damage from comet will far eclipse the potential fallout.

Same thing happened in Fukushima. Tsunami essentially wiped out all infrastructure in "thousands of square kilometers". It killed 30.000 people. It made hundreds of thousands to millions homeless. Japan, one of the most developed nations in the world and arguably the most prepared to earthquakes and tsunamis still cannot repair the damage tsunami wrecked on the country tears after it happened. Not damage to just the power plant, but the damage that disaster itself that caused, among other things, the Fukushima incident. Damage far away from Fukushima. Because it was a disaster of a century for a country that prides itself on being able to function while existing on the area where earthquakes and tsunamis are a norm.

Reality is, while there is no way to fully prepare all your local infrastructure for such a tsunami, there are ways to make plants safe in event of them occurring. If someone told you otherwise, know that they are lying to your face. Fukushima for example would have been fine if it had either a higher seawall or electric backup that would be positioned not to be easily flooded in event of tsunami going over the seawall, such as higher parts of reactor building. The problem is costs vs risk assessment. In case of that particular tsunami, the damage from tsunami itself was simply so great that Fukushima is barely a blip on the radar. The reason we're talking about it now is not because it was actually worse then tsunami itself, but because media thrives on certain stories, and while most of us live in parts of the world where tsunamis of that height simply do not occur, many live close enough to a nuclear power plant to be affected by potential fallout.

Additionally there was the issue of the local East Asian culture, the concept of "saving face" (i.e. not admitting problems) and the fact that with nuclear having serious image issues after Tsernobyl and Three Mile Island (not to mention connection to A-weapons), development and modernization of nuclear power plants has been lagging.

In the end, the biggest problem with the issue is sensationalism that actually exacerbates the problems by preventing effective solutions from being fielded.

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[pixelpusher220]

Reality is, while there is no way to fully prepare all your local infrastructure for such a tsunami, there are ways to make plants safe in event of them occurring.

They why pray tell is the radiation not subsiding? It didn't work, the radiation got out and is continuing to render the area uninhabitable.

I am an engineer thank you. I know that you can rate against known threats. What you can't plan for are the unknown unknown's. Nuclear is different than everything else. You talk about how so much Japan was decimated and because this massively hardened facility only sustained damage enough to 'melt down' it some how isn't bad?

'Nothing' else has this type of possible disaster scenario. We haven't even dealt with the nuclear waste from decades of operation. waste that needs to be safely stored longer than modern society has ever existed. It's folly to claim that even though every bit of modern engineering is less than 100 years old, we can render something secure for 10x that.

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[Luckyo]

Kindly explain how "being able to prepare for accident" and "cleaning up after preparations were meant for something hundred times weaker because of a number of reasons and failed" are related?

Also, nothing else? Really?

Are you at all familiar with (from top of my head):

1. Long term toxicity from specific forms of power generation, such as for example oil shale in Estonia, where current waste deposits of heavily toxic cement*like substance are large enough to be visible from the Moon with NAKED EYE?
2. Long term toxicity from extraction and transition of oil in Siberia?
3. Same in Niger delta?

Just a few examples I can think during this insomniac period. There are countless others.

Finally, the biggest fish in the barrel, the conclusion that Fukushima in fact showed us how safe modern nuclear power plants can be is a conclusion that many experts in fact reached. Google for it. The explanation in a nutshell is that we understand what happened in Fukushima. It was metered for a quake of 7 magnitudes. It was hit with hundred times more powerful earthquake. Its survived it. It took a tsunami hitting the diesel generators which were idiotically positioned, combined with several other factors of bad design that were long phased out in modern power plants to actually allow for Fukushima to go into partial meltdown.

Essentially we now know with high degree of certainty based on lessons of Fukushima that modern nuclear power plant would survive a magnitude 9 followed by tsunami of that size with mostly minor issues. The argument "but it's nuclear power so it's the same thing" is equivalent to "well ford's T model wasn't safe enough for a modern highway so no car is". Instead many experts point out that it's a solid warning that we need to phase out those old, first and second generation plants in favor of modern ones.

Again, this requires putting populistic scaremongering aside and thinking about the subject logically. Something that engineer must be able to do. You may be an engineer, but sheer amount of emotion in your posts shows that you're not thinking like one about this subject. You inject emotion into engineering problem, and if you truly are an engineer, you know exactly where that road leads to.

Allow me to re-iterate this point: emotional anti-nuclear response is one of the main factors that stopped old first generation plants like Fukushima from getting mid life upgrades. If Fukushima's safety measures were even up to standards of plants built in 80s, as they would have been if they got their mid life upgrades, the partial meltdown would not have occurred. That is a well established and very sad fact that you can draw from reading the IAEA report.

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[tp1024]

Coal mining destroys landscapes forever - I've been living near strip mines all my life.

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[tehcyder]

Thats the cool thing about nuclear waste... 100% of the arsenic that came out of the smokestack of the coal plant "nearby" my house is still in the lake where the city gets its drinking water... oops. However virtually all the radioactive iodine the nuke plant "nearby" my house has ever made has long since decayed into irrelevance.

Yes, that's why there is no problem with just collecting all nuclear waste, leaving it in a tank for a couple of months then dumping the harmless residue into landfill/the oceans, isn't it?

Obviously, any concerns about the long term storage and disposal of toxic nuclear waste are just scaremongering from Green Hippies.

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[tehcyder]

You see, there's this thing called "probability". For example, you certainly cannot plan for a large comet to hit the planet where the nuclear plant stands. Or you can, but if you do you should consider that damage from comet will far eclipse the potential fallout.

Well done on the patronising tone!

Although the tsunami was obviously not a normal, day-to-day event, and although it had a very low probability of happening, the point is that it did fucking happen.

You're not talking about Godzilla, or time travelling anti-matter zombies suddenly appearing and attacking the power plant.

The fact is, a commercial decision was made that the engineering was sufficiently good for some unspecified probability level. And they got it wrong.

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[Luckyo]

And the point you missed on, which justifies the "patronizing tone" is that it was also preventable through bare minimum upgrades that plants constructed after 1980s received, such as higher seawall and backup diesel generators not sitting the basement ready to be flooded without any protection from floods.

It's hard not to be "patronizing" when people simply refuse to use common sense because of their emotions.

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[pixelpusher220]

Again, Operational Risks != Disaster Risks.

Last I checked uranium was mined as well so both coal and nuclear have this same issue. What coal doesn't have is massive failure issues.

You 'can' put a coal mine back together, it's just not done because of expense. Hell people swim in old abandoned quarries. I'd venture that at least somewhere people are living on top of old mines just a few short years after their closure.

You can't do that with a failed nuclear plant.

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[tp1024]

Mining isn't risk, mining is mining.

Also, last time I looked, I couldn't find the place where the Soviet Union let East Germans mine one of the worlds largest uranium deposits, even though I knew where to look for it, since I wasn't born very far from it. They mined enough Uranium to generate 1000GW of power for 250years using unmoderated reactors.

A lignite stripmine, generating about one GW for about 30-40 years, on the other hand, is impossible to miss - it is larger than the town I was born in.

This isn't about risk. This is about destroying the landscape to generate power. This used to be a good idea, because it left at least some of the forests intact as a substitute for burning wood and charcoal.

But these days, it is all about people having no clue about nuclear power, being afraid of it, being unwilling to learn anything about it and continuing to be clueless and pissing their pants.

Re:Seaweed safe to eat?

[pixelpusher220]

You simply can't claim that nuclear is unique. Nothing else has the potential damage, period.

Nuclear is wildly over engineered for a reason. It simply can not be allowed to fail. Anything with humans involved in the design, construction or operation, *will* fail at some point.

Nuclear will be required by modern society for probably a minimum of 50-100 years. It does not make it a good idea, just a short term lesser evil than full on coal power.

1000 becquerel isn't that much

[Henriok]

1000 bq isn't that much. It might be much compared to the background radiation but to put it in context, recommended values in Sweden after Chernobyl is to not eat meat that radiates more than 1500 bq/kg. This radiation comes from Cesium-137 that mostly rained down over us. And 10 years after we could still kill game (mostly moose) with in excess of 4000 bq/kg. Many residential houses stand on granite that contains radon, and the limits for radiation from radon was 1000 bq/m^2,until 2009 when the EU lowered the limit to 200 bq/m^2. So.. We in Sweden lived with this kind of radiation for quite some time and we don't really consider this a problem. The halflife of Cesium-137 is about 30 years so the radiation is dropping steadily but slowly.

Re:1000 becquerel isn't that much

[Luckyo]

This is a common issue across Fennoscandia, which sits on the world's oldest rock. We have a lot of uranium deep in the crust and radon gas that fills basements comes from its natural decay.

It's one of the main reasons why most building permits nowadays require proper ventilation of basement levels. Radon in miniscule amounts as it seeps in is essentially harmless, but it tends to concentrate in unventilated areas.

Re:1000 becquerel isn't that much

[ultranova]

1000 bq isn't that much.

It is if you have an anti-nuclear agenda to push. Which many people do, for whatever reason.

Re:1000 becquerel isn't that much

[Creepy]

Interesting... I know granite contains radioactive thorium, but had never heard of radon (which is a gas). Guess there are some. Radon gas is much more likely to come from soil or along with natural gas. Fracking tends to bring it up, as well.

Re:1000 becquerel isn't that much

[Grayhand]

1000 bq isn't that much. It might be much compared to the background radiation but to put it in context, recommended values in Sweden after Chernobyl is to not eat meat that radiates more than 1500 bq/kg. This radiation comes from Cesium-137 that mostly rained down over us. And 10 years after we could still kill game (mostly moose) with in excess of 4000 bq/kg. Many residential houses stand on granite that contains radon, and the limits for radiation from radon was 1000 bq/m^2,until 2009 when the EU lowered the limit to 200 bq/m^2. So.. We in Sweden lived with this kind of radiation for quite some time and we don't really consider this a problem. The halflife of Cesium-137 is about 30 years so the radiation is dropping steadily but slowly.

Yeah but radon is one of the main sources of lung cancer so it's far from harmless these levels. Some one in a foreign country that eats fish from there a couple of times a year probably wouldn't have much risk but a local eating it three to five times a week could be affected. I'd limit or avoid consumption of sea food from the area until the levels drop which is likely to be decades given the continued leaking and half life involved. This isn't anti nuke it's pro health so why take the risk if you can avoid it? It can't harm that fishery giving it a few decades to rebound.

Re:1000 becquerel isn't that much

[danomac]

I wonder what would happen if they couldn't use any modern conveniences anymore? Most people would implode.

Re:1000 becquerel isn't that much

[Shinobi]

You forget though, that the values are cumulative, and that alpha particles INSIDE your body can cause quite a bit more damage.

Also, a bigger problem regarding radon is the fact that a lot of concrete was made from powdered granite. Thus you got concrete that contained radon in buildings. Concrete that was drilled in etc, and released dust containing radon, which got into lungs etc. And claiming that it's not been a big deal in Sweden is a big fucking lie. There's a reason many housing corporations perform radon measurements every 3-5 years, especially in houses built before 1990.

Re:1000 becquerel isn't that much

[angel'o'sphere]

No, Radon gas comes mainly from decay processes in granite.
Which ofc happens in natural gas reservoirs as well.

Re:1000 becquerel isn't that much

[Pav]

It would also be nice if the radioactive material was uniformly distributed, which it isn't. As one of the Japanese physicists said (when speaking in a government session) fluid dynamics problems are some of the most difficult in physics. There'll be hot spots forming out there on the sea bed all the time more or less unpredictably.

Re:1000 becquerel isn't that much

[FireFury03]

Interesting... I know granite contains radioactive thorium, but had never heard of radon (which is a gas). Guess there are some. Radon gas is much more likely to come from soil or along with natural gas. Fracking tends to bring it up, as well.

Granite contains uranium, which decays into radon gas.

Just won't quit?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's dolomite, baby!

Russain Response???

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean the Russians at least moved quickly to cover up what happened and in doing so prevented a lot of further radiation leaks. Yes, I realize people were exposed to higher levels of radiation then is or even was considered safe in the clean up. But unfortunately the needs of the many do out way the needs of the few. It's better to expose a statistically insignificant amount of people to high radiation levels then to allow a large radiation leek to poison everyone on the planet. I think Japan has enough people who are proud of their country and willing to shave a few years off their lives to protect the world. Also, I wonder what effect temporary exposure to radiation has on older people considering it takes decades for radiation induced cancers to show up.

  I think the real problem here is political, People think it would be cruel to allow people to volunteer for a possible suicide mission but when the problem is of this magnitude it's crazy not to. Something has to be done soon, even though we know with more time and planing it could be done cheaper and with less risk to life. But time adds more risk in it.

Re:Russain Response???

[vlm]

The Russian cover didn't really help and had to be rebuilt and arguably still isn't very good. What would work is picking up the plant and moving it far inland, but that's a bit impractical. Most of the "armchair engineer" ideas are about as useful as the armchair engineer solutions for the gulf of mexico oil leak, in other words they would not work or would make the situation worse.

Re:Russain Response???

[Luckyo]

Considering that Chernobyl had working reactors sitting next to the one that melted down up until 2000 I'd say that it worked good enough. And closure wasn't for technical reasons at all - it was a political decision taken under heavy pressure from EU.

What it wasn't good for was long term containment, because it was eroding faster then planned.

Re:Russain Response???

[angel'o'sphere]

The wording alone that you think that Chernobyl melted down makes the rest of your post nonsense.

Re:Russain Response???

[Luckyo]

I blame english being my third language. Meltdown wasn't nuclear. Instead they have a shitload of molten sand in the reactor building which is what they were dropping into the reactor to put the fire out. That melted, deformed, and combined with water that seems through the cracks eroded the concrete sarcofagus that was erected around the reactor building. This didn't make it any more dangerous in short term, but it became obvious that it would be useless for long term protection, which is why they're building that big containment thing on rails.

Storage for Nuclear Weapons Program?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps Fukushima was also being used to store plutonium for Japan's nuclear weapons program? Could be a much bigger mess to clean up than what is known publicly...

why? because it's still leaking...

[edxwelch]

It's no surpise that the sea is radiactive. Since the accedient there have been a series of leaks from the jury-rigged water purification setup:
December 2011
45 tons of water heavily contaminated with radioactive strontium escaped, of which 150 liters of water found its way into the ocean through a ditch connected with the beach
26 March 2012
80 litres radioactive water seeped into the ocean
5 April 2012
12.000 liters water with high levels of radioactive strontium escaped through a nearby sewer-system into the ocean

On top of that the contaminated water lying in the basements is leaking into the ground water and out to the ocean. TEPCO are building a wall to contain that, but it won't be finished until 2014.

Not credible

[Anonymous Coward]

"Largest release of radioactivity into ocean ever"? Really? Larger than oceanic atomic weapons tests? Coal plants put far more radioactivity into oceans than Fukushima and Chernobyl combined.
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

unholy slashdot army

[Thud457]

I dunno, 50 Roland Piquepailles sounds pretty dire to me.

did they clone him first, then zombify him, or did they zombify him then clone him? Is such a thing even possible? Either way, an abomination against nature.

It does not make sense.

[angel'o'sphere]

It does notmmake sense to compare background radiation with polution from a nuclear desaster.
Background radiation is basically caused by stone and radon, bouncing of from yur clothes or skin. In case of radon you inhale it and exhale it and radiation hits the surface of your lung.
Polution from a nuclear desaster has dozens or hundrets of isotopes that get build into your metabolizm. That means your inner organs ore more precisely your cells get radiated and destructed from the inside.
That all has nothing to do with 'becquarelle' but how and where they are 'emitted' or in this case received.

Re:It does not make sense.

[tp1024]

And that's why there is that concept called absorbed effective dose used to measure the biological effect of radioactivity (in sievert) - natural or otherwise. And using those, there is no question that Finland and Sweden must be evacuated in order to comply with the WHO rules setting a limit of 350mSv of absorbed effective lifetime dose, as the average there is 7mSv and 6mSv per person per year on average.

Re:It does not make sense.

[i]

Gamma rays don't "bounce".

Re:It does not make sense.

[angel'o'sphere]

And caesium does not emmit gamma rays, so where is the point?

bullshit

[edxwelch]

The only reason US NAvy appears to have no accidents, is because of lack of transparancy and military secrecy.
For instance, in 22 May 1978 500 gallons of "hot" radioactive water escaped from the USS Puffer's primary coolant system into a shipyard.
http://oc.itgo.com/kitsap/nuclear/clymer.htm

Re:bullshit

[RobertLTux]

Invalid for this

1 it was coolant that was leaked AND CONTAINED WITHIN THE SHIPYARD
2 no long lived radioactive materials leaked
3 the cause was somebody got stupid and opened the wrong valve

im sure that there are reports that are classified with more examples but nothing on the scale of Fukushima.

oh and a ship being sunk that happens to be nuclear does not count unless the reactor actually went full meltdown

Engineering notation vs. scientific notation

[DragonWriter]

If you have to explain a prefix (here: peta-), don't use it. Since this is Slashdot, the summaries should simply use the ubiquitous "engineering notation:" 1.62E+16 becquerels.

That's just the common ASCII-friendly version of scientific notation; the equivalent in engineering notation would be 16.2E+15 becquerels, as "engineering notation" differs from "scientific notation" in that while the latter uses the smallest exponent which gives a mantissa >= 1, the former uses the smallest exponent divisible by 3 which gives a mantissa >= 1.

Don't worry, it will decay eventually

[davidwr]

With a half-life of about 30 years we should see rates falling from 250x acceptable levels to acceptable levels in another 250 years or so, if ocean current don't disperse it first.

largest ever?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Fukushima disaster caused by far the largest discharge of radioactivity into the ocean ever seen.

Does that include the radioactivity released from weapon testing?

GODZILLA!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Rook Out!
It's a giant Rizard!
Run for your Rives!!!!

USS Thresher

[mdsolar]

The Thresher went down owing to a reactor shut down in 1963. All hands lost. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)

Re:USS Thresher

[TheSync]

The Thresher went down because a brazed salt-water pipe burst, and the subsequent inability to blow the ballast tanks due to excessive moisture in the sub's high-pressure air flasks, which froze and plugged the flasks' flowpaths while passing through the valves.

The Thresher reactor scram (due to the leak shorting out electrical panels) was not the main cause of the sinking and loss of lives.

Re:USS Thresher

[ravenshrike]

No, it went down because of a high pressure water leak and poor design. The SCRAM worked perfectly as designed and the reactor has never been any trouble.

Re:USS Thresher

[edxwelch]

That fact is disputed in the article I linked to:
"Admiral Rickover repeatedly asserted that the accident had nothing to do with the reactor plant. But some leading naval authorities believe otherwise including Adm. Ralph K. James, then chief of the navy's Bureau of Ships. James believes that failure of a seawater pipe on board caused a violent stream of pressurized water to hit the nuclear control board initiating a "scram" (emergency shutdown) of the reactor. Because of "inadequate design of the nuclear controls for the plant" power was lost and the Thresher, already on a deep dive, continued down to "collapse depth". Among others who concur with this account is Norman Polmar, author of Death of the Thresher and for ten years U.S. editor of Janes Fighting Ships, the standard reference book on the world's navies."

Re:USS Thresher

[mdsolar]

Actually, loss of power was the proximate cause. Read the timeline.

Re:USS Thresher

[Anonymous Coward]

There were many changes after to submarine equipment and operating procedures after that. I do not remember them all but they were taught to all submariners.
One was high pressure air dryers were installed on submarines which uses a desiccant to dry out the air before it is put into the air tanks.
Another was pulling steam from the system when the reactor shut down. I believe it was common practice to immediately shut the main steam valves after a reactor scam and control any decay heat from the bypass valves. Even if it wasn't you were not supposed to use stream after a scram back then. Advanced engineering and calculations were not done on the effects of operating the steam plant without the reactor heat input. Thermal stress and the effects on the next startup from the + reactivity added by the cooler primary water and the potential to maintain pressure control and pressurizer water level being major factors with a rapidly cooling primary plant. The catsup pumps can only pump so fast. The change was a battleshort switch which prevents a automatic reactor scam when activated and the ability to pull steam down to about 400F and still allow a faster recovery reactor startup when the scam condition was fixed or known. I'm sure the captain has a book that tells him exactly what temperature and pressure you could operate at above and beyond what we had.

The goal changed to just being cautious and shutting down the reactor to the reactor is only safe if the boat is not on the bottom of the ocean. Keep the boat operating and the screw turning with steam greatly increases your chances of getting back up to the surface when major flooding is happening and keeping the reactor safe. I'm sure there were other changes with QA and sea water systems and shutoff valves as well.

I may have missed some and added some in there but that is the gist of it, positive and immediate changes were made because of that loss. Yes, the Navy does not have a real budget and shareholders to answer to but had the entire public perception to maintain. Safety of submariners and the reactor was a top priority by the Navy. It was not a thing that was talked about or written down that everyone ignored or bypassed, it was practiced, safety was not a joke, it was the culture. Integrity and honesty was expected, lying and covering up were not. I scrammed a reactor myself through a situational fuckup, I told the truth and owned up to it. I was back in front of that reactor plant control panel 6 hours later. If I fudged a simple temperature reading or got caught blowing off maintenance, I would have been banned from operating a plant forever, stripped of my duties and sent off the sub at the first port finishing my navy career one rank lower as a non nuclear person on a surface ship if I was not just kicked out.
There was no shortcuts by the personnel directly associated with the reactor and the ship on the military level. Hey, maybe the shipyard slacked, maybe radioactive material that was leaving the military base fell off of a truck onto the highway but not at the boat level.

Re:USS Thresher

[TheSync]

The point is even with loss of power plant, Thresher should have been able to blow its tanks in order to surface (although that would be an emergency maneuver). Thresher was unable to blow its tanks due to icing.

What would happen if a diesel sub ran out of batteries at depth? It would not have been able to drive on power to the surface either. It would have to have blown its tanks, and would have run into the same problem as Thresher.

The icing problem with blowing tanks at depth was solved after Thresher by adding driers.

Re:USS Thresher

[TheSync]

"When the Navy conducted tests on another Thresher-class vessel, it found that the pressure drop across the component at high flow rates caused entrained moisture to accumulate on the strainers and form enough ice to block the air flow. Venturi cooling, as this phenomenon is called, was thought to be the reason that the Thresher's attempts to blow its main ballast tanks were ineffective." source.

"Thresher's inability to blow the ballast tanks had nothing to do with the reactor shutdown. It was a separate problem that unfortunately reared it's head at the wrong time. The blow system had plenty of capacity and it can be manually operated. That was not the problem. When the high pressure air that was used to blow the tanks left the storage banks, it passes through the control valves that keep it in the banks under pressure. Anytime a compressed gas expands, it cools rapidly. As the very cold air passed through the valves, frost began to form due to the presence of moisture in the air. It very quickly built up (a matter of a few seconds) and froze solid in the valves. The solid ice stopped the air just as effectively as shutting the valves, thus the Thresher was unable to blow her tanks. This problem was discovered in one of the Thresher's sister boats when a test was conducted alongside the pier. Everyone involved was shocked at what happened. This discovery resulted in an immediate redesign of the whole ballast tank blow system. The valves were redesigned and moisture traps were installed in the air lines. The new design was completely effective and it eliminated the problem. Unfortunately, it was far too late for the Thresher's crew." source.

half-life 2

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a statistical thing. You can use the decay events as a random number generator even. Someone recently did that to make a radioactive orchestra.

forget mdsolar, what about sr-90

[Anonymous Coward]

mdsolar is (presumably) not the source of the information, but the submitter of the Slashdot article.

It is very courageous of you to be wary of accepting information at face value that has been published in Nature.

Can you give us any specific reason why we should be distrusting of Geoff Brumfiel's "Nature News" article "Ocean still suffering from Fukushima fallout", or is it just because you hate (Mother) Nature?

Since you're so cynical, please riddle me this: why is it that they are talking about the bio-accumulation of Cs-137, something which apparently most fishes and humans piss out easily because it looks like potassium, but they are NOT talking about the bio-accumulation of Sr-90, which I believe builds up in fishes' and humans' bones, causes leukaemia, and should be present in about equal quantity to the Cs-137 in nuclear waste.
Nobody ever talks about the Sr-90 bio-accumulation. Not even in relation to

The Fukushima disaster caused by far the largest discharge of radioactivity into the ocean ever seen.

. (Well there used to be a German punk band, but that's about it).
Report back here what you found, please. I don't want to google it, because I intend to become very very old.

Re:forget mdsolar, what about sr-90

[tp1024]

Because Strontium isn't soluble in water and simply stayed inside of the containment.

Note: Fukushima isn't Chernobyl.

Re:forget mdsolar, what about sr-90

[budgenator]

Solubility in water
Strontium nitrate, 66 g/100 mL (20 C)
Strontium chloride,, anhydrous: 53.8 g/100 mL (20 C)
Strontium oxide,reacts, forms Sr(OH)2 => Strontium hydroxide, 1.77 g/100 mL (20 C), 21.83 g/100 mL (100 C)
Strontium sulfate, 0.0135 g/100 mL (25 C)
Strontium carbonate, 0.0011 g/100 mL (18 C)
While I'm not a nuclear chemist, I'll bet a lot of the above species form durring a core melt-down and the strontium got out in the copious amounts of fresh and seawater pored in and leaked out.

Re:forget mdsolar, what about sr-90

[Jubedgy]

Strontium Nitrate...possible, not likely (depends on their chemistry controls)
Strontium Chloride...only if saltwater got into the core
Strontium Oxide/Hydroxide...probable, depending on how easily the oxide forms and how long it takes. Probably had aerated water following the event, water also always has plenty of OH ions around to react.
Strontium Sulfate...possible, depends on their chemistry controls
Strontium Carbonate...not sure on this one, inclined to say it would only be present in trace amounts, but that's a WAG

Re:forget mdsolar, what about sr-90

[ozmanjusri]

only if saltwater got into the core

If?

Re:forget mdsolar, what about sr-90

[budgenator]

They were dumping sea-water in as fast as they could, the core melted, no matter how many weasel words they said, it melted and they poured sea water on it. Sea-water naturally contains sodium-chloride, sodium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate, sodium sulfate, calcium carbonate, calcium chloride, calcium sulfate and ammonia and a plethora of nitrites and nitrates. Trust me anything that could reacted did react under those conditions, that shit gets so hot that water breaks down chemically, that's where the infamous hydrogen bubles come from.

Particles

[Mr Bubble]

Perhaps someone who has more knowledge can elucidate me, but when they say "diluted by the Pacific ocean", I think the implication is that it is like dumping a million gallons of Kool-Aid in the ocean - it would disperse so much that the things that identify it as Kool-Aid - color and sweetness - would essentially disappear into the soup.

However, as I understand it, we are talking about irradiated particles. The radiation does not "dilute", right? It is like adding 2-3 deadly ping pong balls to a sports arena full of ping pong balls. The chances of encountering one are slim, but, if you do, you could die or be seriously hurt. ( I am talking about ingestion ).

And, it's not like the risk of ingestion is a function of the volume of the ocean necessarily, as there are specific vectors of distribution - mainly things like seaweed, krill, tuna, etc. that are small compared to the mass of the ocean, but significant in likeliness of human contact due to the over fishing and reliance on the ocean for food.

So, am I looking at a greater risk of ingesting a particle of cesium when I eat my canned tuna and having it give me cancer - or are we really saying that the properties of radiation are somehow lessened by contact with so much sea water?

Re:Particles

[HornWumpus]

Don't want to scare you. There are about 2000 potassium decays in your body every second. Run away, run away.

Re:Particles

[tehcyder]

Don't want to scare you. There are about 2000 potassium decays in your body every second. Run away, run away.

One little radioactive particle never did anyone any harm, right?

Similarly, if starting with one grain, you add one grain of sand at a time, at what point does it become a heap?

16,200,000,000,000,000 beqquerels

[Anonymous Coward]

the "1015" in the summary is some idiot fucking up "10^15", and is defining one petabecquerel in becquerels, not definining the total leak in becquerels. the total leak is 16.2 petabecquerels.

What an astonishing coincidence!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Japanese authorities have not measured radioactive contamination for longer than one year after the accident. They have not even measured the contamination on the land-side. They have not measured reliably how big the contamination of Tokyo actually is. Insted, they announce "they have not measured plutonium in Fukushima's ground water.". Not because there is not, but because they have not measured it. They have miserably failed to protect their own population.

And now they pretend to be surprised that they find radioactive contamination in the water. This whole ocean is a mess! And it will continue to be so for generations! This should be clear to any sane person.

kBKbxzAv

Re:What an astonishing coincidence!?!

[RockDoctor]

And now they pretend to be surprised that they find radioactive contamination in the water. This whole ocean is a mess! And it will continue to be so for generations! This should be clear to any sane person.

The ocean has never recovered since the core of the Oklo reactor went "hot" in unrestricted seawater. Poor Gaia!

Re:Indeed! Drink bleach! Far less toxic than cyani

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiot.

Hippie.

check your math

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, 15 MT TNT is 730 GWd.

Second, 29,891 GWd/year is 82 GW. This is 10 times the combined output of all 4 Fukushima units. Typical reactor output is 2.5 GW.