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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.
Someone needs to check the units on this article!
Stopped reading right there. It's the Slashdot equivalent of "An article on Fox news..."
Thank you for converting petabecquerels to becquerels, that really cleared things up for me.
Godzilla now?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
That's where Japan is hiding its forty-meter battle robots, Godzilla, and crashed alien spaceships.
greed@All_Evils:~#
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I have a hard time believing the first sentence given all the nuclear weapon testing we've done in the Pacific.
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.
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
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.
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?
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.
Kriston
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There is about 0.0000000000000000015% of the I-131 left that was originally emitted. In short: no.
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.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
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.
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.
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Operational risk != Disaster Risks
Both are bad, the former 'can' be prevented. The latter, not so much...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
0.0000000000000000015%
Actually 1/1000 times of that (2^(-606/8))*100%.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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
True, for some reason I estimated about 500 days since March 11 last year.
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.
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.
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
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.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
And yet nuclear still manages to be very much environmentally preferable to coal, even after taking such accidents into account!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Sore wa anata jishin no ki no seida (slashdotuh no allowsu kana ?)
The Thresher went down owing to a reactor shut down in 1963. All hands lost. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)
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?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
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.
Because Strontium isn't soluble in water and simply stayed inside of the containment.
Note: Fukushima isn't Chernobyl.
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.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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?
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
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.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The wording alone that you think that Chernobyl melted down makes the rest of your post nonsense.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
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'
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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.
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.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis hebes
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.
only if saltwater got into the core
If?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Coal mining destroys landscapes forever - I've been living near strip mines all my life.
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.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
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.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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.
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.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
The ocean has never recovered since the core of the Oklo reactor went "hot" in unrestricted seawater. Poor Gaia!
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds