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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.
Stopped reading right there. It's the Slashdot equivalent of "An article on Fox news..."
Godzilla now?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
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.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
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
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
Canada, tooi? I thought only Belgium was imaginary.
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
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).
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
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
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
hey, watch the potty-mouth!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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
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.
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.
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
> 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.
Sore wa anata jishin no ki no seida (slashdotuh no allowsu kana ?)
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
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."
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.
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.