Leak Found In Fukushima Tank Holding Radioactive Water

The fallout from tsunami damage at Japan's Fukushima plant isn't over yet. New submitter OldJuke writes "Tokyo Electric power Co. said about 120 tons of the water are believed to have breached [a water storage tank's] inner linings, some of it possibly leaking into the soil. TEPCO is moving the water to a nearby tank at the Fukushima Dai-chi plant — a process that could take several days ...More than 270,000 tons of highly radioactive water is already stored in hundreds of gigantic tanks and another underground tank. They are visible even at the plant's entrance and built around the compound, taking up more than 80 percent of its storage capacity. TEPCO expects the amount to double over three years and plans to build hundreds of more tanks by mid-2015 to meet the demand."

Comments

Pastor Rick Warren's son commits suicide

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't they mix this water into the ocean, diluting it to background levels? Surely the ocean has a certain amount of naturally occurring radioactive materials in it and I'm sure this wouldn't change it much.

Re:Pastor Rick Warren's son commits suicide

[ColdWetDog]

Can't they mix this water into the ocean, diluting it to background levels? Surely the ocean has a certain amount of naturally occurring radioactive materials in it and I'm sure this wouldn't change it much.

Been there done that.

On top of the millions of bequarels they've dumped so far. "It's only a little drop in the ocean".

I hope you don't like seafood.

Re:Pastor Rick Warren's son commits suicide

[DarkOx]

It sounds nice but what tends to happen is it settle to floor, get picked up by pants and tiny creatures concentrating it again, the eaten by fewer bigger creatures concentrating it more, and finally poisioning us we we go to eat fish.

Yes if you had some way to spread it over a very very large area of sea it would be fine probably, but you'd likely need to move it out to deep water with container ships, and then you'd have to do something with the contaminated ships. I suppose you might just scuttle them. Anyway just dump it in the ocean sounds simple but doing right ( if there is a right way ) is risky and expensive.

Re:Pastor Rick Warren's son commits suicide

[umghhh]

But I thought nuclear energy is safe so surely just dumping this radioactive whatever it is into the ocean is ok then?

Re:Pastor Rick Warren's son commits suicide

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Can't they mix this water into the ocean, diluting it to background levels? Surely the ocean has a certain amount of naturally occurring radioactive materials in it and I'm sure this wouldn't change it much.

I suspect that it depends on what flavor of radioactives you are working with. The worst-case scenario is that a substantial quantity of them are (like Strontium, which looks almost like Calcium) compounds that are readily water-soluble and readily absorbed by organisms in the water and concentrated up the food chain.

Best case scenario is that it's mostly larger silt-type particles that are largely insoluble and not bioavalable, which still isn't great but should at least end up hanging out on the bottom for most of its lifetime.

Does anybody know what makes this delicious fluid tick?

Re:Pastor Rick Warren's son commits suicide

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think Molasses is safe? Ever given a second of thought to the fear that your bottle of syrup might attack you?

But wait, a disaster COULD happen.

Just like with cotton balls, unicorn dust, and pixie wings.

Re:Pastor Rick Warren's son commits suicide

[ColdWetDog]

Picked up by pants?

Nuclear concentration by clothing? Could make 'hot to trot' a reality.

Re:Pastor Rick Warren's son commits suicide

[icebraining]

But I thought nuclear energy is safe

s/$/r/

Re:Pastor Rick Warren's son commits suicide

[hawguy]

Do you think Molasses is safe? Ever given a second of thought to the fear that your bottle of syrup might attack you?

But wait, a disaster COULD happen.

Just like with cotton balls, unicorn dust, and pixie wings.

Get your facts straight, the only result from the great Unicorn Dust Explosion in Ireland back in the 1800's was a slight increase in the birth rate of Leprechans.

Re:Pastor Rick Warren's son commits suicide

[Eevee]

Do you think Molasses is safe? Ever given a second of thought to the fear that your bottle of syrup might attack you? But wait, a disaster COULD happen.

It's happened before.

Re:Pastor Rick Warren's son commits suicide

[TheTurtlesMoves]

If you cared about ocean ecology, you wouldn't be eating fish anyway ;)

Re:Pastor Rick Warren's son commits suicide

[DarkOx]

I care about ocean ecology to the point that it continues to be feed me and billions of others. Use it but don't abuse it. Natural resources are there for us; our use is there purpose. That means we do have to be careful with them, we do have moderate our use of them, but saying we should not use them is wrong.

Conservation is important, I think of the planet as humanities bank account. We get regular deposits in the form of sun light. We also get interest from the operation of the ecosystem, we have to be vigilant though not to exceed the income and interest, because if we burn to much of the principle we won't have anymore interest in the future. We are failing at this today.

Re:Pastor Rick Warren's son commits suicide

[hey!]

When I was a kid in the 60s, the North End still had a kind of stale-candy smell on a hot summer day. I thought that was how all cities smelled in a heat wave, but later I learned it was from the Great Molasses Flood.

Re:Pastor Rick Warren's son commits suicide

[RivenAleem]

And you wonder how shit like Godzilla happens...

Re:Pastor Rick Warren's son commits suicide

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Well the ocean fisheries, as far as we can tell. Are decimated. Stocks that are no longer fished are not recovering. We don't know if they can. But the data at this point suggests they can't recover. Ocean fish will not last our lifetime.

So I hope you like jellyfish.

Ca-Ching! Ca-Ching! Ca-Ching! Ca-Ching!

[Anonymous Coward]

That sound you hear continuously in the background are the massive profits made from all of this!

Captcha: joyously

Distillation

[sanman2]

Then can't they distill away the water, so that just the crap is left and unable to flow anywhere else?

Re:Distillation

[Anonymous Coward]

Obligatory XKCD

Re:Distillation

[clemdoc]

The water itself is radioactive. The problem is neither new, nor has it been solved (satisfyingly). AFAIR, there have been problems with leaking tanks reported in Washington state (or somewhere up there) not long ago.

Re:Distillation

[emt377]

The water itself is radioactive.

No it's not; this isn't tritium (T2O) being discussed, but normal water contaminated with Sr90. ALPS is supposed to separate the Sr. The remaining water has a modestly low level of tritium. Releasing tritium is no big deal; it may slightly harm seafood or maybe even kill it, but it will dilute quickly and is of no harm to humans who eat seafood. Sr90 on the other hand is a metal and while it's easily broken up into dust and carried around by currents it's heavier than water so collects in hot spots on the sea floor.

Re:Distillation

[Anonymous Coward]

Distilling [sic] radioactive water gives you radioactive water vapor. When that cools off and condenses then you have radioactive water again.

Radiation isn't something you can separate from matter by distilling it or burning it.

If it were that simple then it wouldn't be the problem that it is.

Re:Distillation

[gewalker]

Assuming that you are correct, why would this be a BIG problem?

The oxygen is not radioactive (at least not for very long as the longest oxygen half-life is about 2 minutes). Everything past hydrogen 3 has incredibly short half-life. So really, it is all about the tritium, half-life about 12.3 years

I would think that given the mass ratios for the hydrogen isotopes that separating out the tritium would be trivial compared to enriching uranium, and given our history of separating this out -- not a big problem, in fact there are commercial plants that do this already for water from nuclear reactors (thousands of tons per year). BTW tritium is a valuable commercial product, so much so that we intentional create it by other means.

Tritium decay is very easily mitigated beta decay. The thinnest wall, human skin, or even a little air will stop it. So, the real threat is if you manage to inhale or drink radioactive water. Even then, you get the safety bonus of the water in your body having a biological half life of about 1-2 weeks, so drink more water to flush the bad water out of your system faster.

So, compared to nuclear wastes, seems to be a fairly minor threat.

Re:Distillation

[PSUspud]

The tanks in Washington State (Hanford, to be precise) are cold-war era relics filled with corrosive slime. The Fukushima tanks are overflowing with treated water. And yes, the problem is that distillation won't work, since the main problem is tritium, actually in the water itself.

Re:Distillation

[Charliemopps]

Water can not be radioactive. It's actually an incredibly good radiation insulator and that's exactly why they use it. The problem is the radioactive particulates in it. Fish eat, absorb those and then still, the fish is not radioactive, the problem is that when you eat the fish these materials get into your body. Funny enough, the radiations usually not going to cause you any health problems, the material itself is almost always heavy metals however. And those are very bad for you indeed.

Re:Distillation

[compro01]

That only applies if you're talking about tritiated water (water containing tritium rather than hydrogen). If it's water contaminated with radioactive materials (like Strontium-90 in this case) distilling will remove the contaminant like it would anything else.

Re:Distillation

[symbolset]

You're talking about Hanford. Approximately one third of Hanford's waste storage tanks are known to have been or be leaking into the groundwater, having contaminated approximately 270 billion gallons or one billion cubic meters of aquifers. This contaminated groundwater is expected to reach the Columbia river in 7 to 45 years, and start contaminating everything along the river from Eastern Washington to Portland and the Pacific ocean shortly thereafter. The loss of real estate values along that river is a very real concern. Waterfront property is normally very valuable. Waterfront property on a radioactive river, less so.

Currently there is no practical plan to deal with this situation nor adequate budget to even stop it from getting worse. It is likely impossible to prevent this radioactive waste from reaching the Pacific. The Columbia river is quite a considerable river, 4th largest in the US by volume and the largest draining into the Pacific. Though Hanford is the most highly contaminated nuclear site in the US - containing approximately 2/3rds of all US high-level waste, it still retains an operating nuclear power generating station to this day. It uses a newer version of the type of reactor used at Fukushima, a General Electric Type 5 Boiling Water Reactor.

Over $30 billions (pdf) have been spent cleaning up Hanford already. 20 years into the initial 30 year plan only minor progress has been made. The vitrification plant, for example, is not expected to complete vitrification operations for another 34 years from now - and that may be optimistic, meaning we are further from the end now than when the work was begun. The estimate for the cost of the remaining cleanup is $112 billion and is, given the nature of such things, likely to be at least three times even that.

Although the so-far estimated cost of $145 billion is very high it is important to remember than Hanford was a critical part of the Manhattan Project, essential for developing the technology and materials that made the US the first nuclear weapon capable global power at a critical cusp of international relations. The cost of not doing that might have been much higher than cleaning up or living with this mess will be.

Cleaning up Fukushima will cost far more than cleaning up Hanford. Cleaning up Chernobyl will also be more costly, to the extent cleanup is possible at all. If you add up the cleanup costs of all three and the off-book costs of getting rid of the current stock of spent nuclear fuels you could probably outfit the entire world with alternative electrical energy solutions like geothermal, wind and solar for less. On this scale a manned Mars colony would be a trivial side project. Of more concern might be that cleaning up these messes entirely is quite simply not possible, even given the full weight of the national economies involved. It cannot be done. We have developed the power to create problems we cannot cure no matter how hard we try.

Re:Distillation

[icebike]

Water can not be radioactive. It's actually an incredibly good radiation insulator and that's exactly why they use it. The problem is the radioactive particulates in it.

Depending on particle size, Reverse Osmosis, Activated Charcoal, and Ion exchange are all somewhat successful, and using all three together does a very good job of removing even very small particles. Distillation also works well.

Re:Distillation

[icebike]

The water itself is not radioactive. Particles in the water are. Therefore, distillation is one of the methods that will work.
Other methods include RO, Ion Exchange, Activated Carbon filtration. But Water itself is not radio active.

Further, there are already methods of removal, (this is done every day all around the world), and its not particularly a difficult problem, other than the fact that the Fukushima site has an awful lot of water to deal with.

Re:Distillation

[symbolset]

This is completely off-topic and I expect it to be moderated that way and that's OK.

The costs of combating the ideas of Fascism, Global communism (or what was presented as such), Japanese imperialism, militarized Islam and other such notions offensive to personal liberty so *far* outweigh the costs in lives and treasure of these accidental excursions into nuclear physics as to be on an entirely different scale. It seems the pen is still mightier than the sword even when the sword is a MIRV.

What strange fools these mortals be.

Re:Distillation

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell no, do you KNOW how much distillation would cost!? More than having the right cables to connect batteries to the cooling system which would have prevented the meltdown, and you know nuclear power execs are too cheap for that. Remember, the goal here is to maximize profit by minimizing costs TO THE COMPANY, fuck the health of the public. They wont be able to prove shit anyway: "You got cancer, bitch? Fucking PROVE it has anything to do with Fukushima. That's what I thought . . . now go fucking die a horrible death while I count my money . . ."

Re:Distillation

[MrL0G1C]

90Sr in Fallout

Strontium-90 is not quite as likely as caesium-137 to be released as a part of a nuclear reactor accident because it is much less volatile, but is probably the most dangerous component of the radioactive fallout from a nuclear weapon.[1]

Sounds pretty fucking dangerous to me, and if you're saying heavy metals are not poisonous then again you are full of it, Or are you you going to tell me that nothing lives on the sea floor and it won't get passed up the food chain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium-90#Dispersal_hazards

Re:Distillation

[thegarbz]

Water is never radioactive. In fact divers routinely swim in these pools for maintenance. They just need to keep a certain distance from the spent fuel.

Re:Distillation

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Turns out that isotope separation (through mass difference) is easy or hard based on absolute difference of the isotopes, not the ratio. That is Tritium enrichment from hydrogen (2au) is harder than 235U from 238U (3au)! Or more to the point UF_6 with only 3au mass difference. However the real hard part is how dilute it is in the first place. This makes it much harder. 235U is .7% of naturally occurring uranium. Compared to the amounts of tritium everyone jumps up and down about this is much more dilute by many orders of magnitude. This is what makes it really hard.

Re:Distillation

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this moderated informative? It is patently false. There are a ton of possible isotopes of elements. The isotopes we see in nature are the stable ones. The unstable ones will decay and emit radiation. Tritium a isotope of hydrogen is radioactive. This means that water with tritium hydrogen will be radioactive. The important thing with radiation is significant dose(which I think you are trying to allude to). Calling something radioactive means nothing. All bananas are radioactive from the potassium and everyone seems to manage to not get radiation poisoning eating them. This is probably why the unit Sievert was created.

Re:Distillation

[Guppy]

Sounds pretty fucking dangerous to me, and if you're saying heavy metals are not poisonous then again you are full of it, Or are you you going to tell me that nothing lives on the sea floor and it won't get passed up the food chain.

Strontium (the non-radioactive kind) is actually not rare in seawater; per Wikipedia: "The mean strontium content of ocean water is 8 mg/L". There is enough that an unusual class of protozoa, the Acantharea, even uses Strontium Sulfate as the main constituent of its skeleton.

Re:Distillation

[MrL0G1C]

Read a bit further because plain strontium is not the same as the isotope strontium-90

Effect on the human body

The human body absorbs strontium as if it were calcium. Due to the chemical similarity of the elements, the stable forms of strontium might not pose a significant health threat â" in fact, the levels found naturally may actually be beneficial (see below) â" but the radioactive 90Sr can lead to various bone disorders and diseases, including bone cancer. The strontium unit is used in measuring radioactivity from absorbed 90Sr.

Re:Distillation

[HiThere]

Sorry, but water CAN be radioactive. That's not the problem here, but it's certainly possible. Half-life is, I believe, 12 1/2 years. (Check the Tritium half-life to be sure.)

OTOH, the radioactivity level of the water itself is probably negligible. It's the stuff that it carries that's the problem. Most of the really bad radioactives have already decayed, however. I doubt there's any radioactive iodine left. OTOH, I am definitely not an expert in this field. Maybe there is small (non-filterable) stuff that's dangerous. My first thought, though, is to let the water seep through a few meters of sand and humus. The chemically active stuff should attach to the humus. Most of the particles should be caught by the sand. The stuff coming out should be very low level radioactive material that is so small that it will diffuse rapidly to the background level. OTOH, I am definitely not an expert in this field.

Re:Distillation

[AK Marc]

A heavy metal is contaminating water. I'm guessing that boiling the water will "purify" the Sr pretty well. Then you have reasonably pure radioactive sludge (much easier to contain than water).

Re:Distillation

[AK Marc]

Others here are claiming the issue is 90Sr in the water, not the water itself.

Re:Distillation

[Charliemopps]

No, tritium is a hydrogen isotope. It can not be used to make a water molecule. Water can not be radioactive. It can only contain radioactive contaminants.

Re:Distillation

[HiThere]

Got a reference for that? I believe that Tritium Dioxide is called water. (I'm quite sure that Deuterium Dioxide is called water. Yes, it's also called heavy water, but that doesn't mean it isn't water.)

Re:Distillation

[Guppy]

Read a bit further because plain strontium is not the same as the isotope strontium-90

I specifically pointed this out, starting with the very second word of my reply. The issue specifically addressed was the parent post's comment on "heavy metal poisoning" of sea life, and as such my reply specifically addresses the aspect of chemical (not radioactive) toxicity, as an unlikely issue.

Re:Distillation

[Anonymous Coward]

[citation needed]

What's The Worst ...

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the worst that can happen? Would it be worse than what's already happened there? Can it contaminate things any more than they already are?

If yes, then they should have tested all of their infrastructure before starting things up again. It's only been a year and clearly they need more time before starting things up again.

Re:What's The Worst ...

[icebraining]

They didn't start anything up in reactor n.4. This is water from the day of the meltdown.

Re:What's The Worst ...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is new water that is being used to cool the spent fuel and the trashed reactor, that is why the amount of radioactive water is constantly growing such that they need to build more tanks.

THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

This did not happen. Nothing to see here.

There are no problems with nuclear power. It is good and glorious.

No one will ever be harmed by nuclear power. You can trust it. It is good.

Sincerely, the Slashdot nuclear re-education committee

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[IRWolfie-]

Despite your post, noone has died at Fukushima from radiation. Compare that to coal.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[ATMAvatar]

Coal power disasters make for more interesting entertainment, anyways.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

Cancer can take decades to show up.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

Why, whenever anyone says anything the slightest bit negative about nuclear power here on Slashdot, does someone come and start whining about coal?

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn.. You are right. For the sake of the children shut down those evil radiation factories and open more coal plants!

Oh . wait...

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot is supported in part by coal industry shills.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[ohnocitizen]

Because its an easy target? Probably also because the relative panic over nuclear power rubs geeks the wrong way: "Those peasants are being anti science again. WHY won't they look at the math?!". If we want nuclear power to succeed, and it should, we need to look at the real problem - lack of regulation. The companies that run plants too often get away with cutting corners. The lack of trust with nuclear power stems directly from this lack of trust mixed with the potential severity of a mistake. If we work hard to solve both problems, to implement solutions that already exist, and publicize those success stories, we should see progress.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

...er, I mean nuclear industry shills, not coal industry. By the way, where are all the coal industry shills? If Slashdot is overwhelmed by nuclear apologists, it's kind of weird that the coal industry hasn't noticed and sent some of their own.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[ColdWetDog]

Slashdot is supported in part by coal industry shills.

You know, if Slashdot were really supported by every flavor of shill that is attributed to this site, then Dice Holdings picked a great meal ticket. Given the fact that Slashdot has just now figured out part of unicode (and then blundered several steps back with the mobile site), I find this a bit hard to believe.

Or maybe Timothy et. al. are just getting rich. Filthy rich. 1% rich.

Or maybe not.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe Slashdot is swarming with nuclear industry shills and the Slashdot staff had nothing to do with it. They're not getting rich or making any money at all. The nuclear industry hired people to mod down posts critical of nuclear power, and scream, "But COAL!!111!1" to everything, and the nuclear industry is getting rich, not Slashdot.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[symbolset]

The deaths from Fukushima happened before the fuel even showed up at the plant.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Relic of the Future]

I'll pretend that's not a rhetorical question.

Because a typical coal plant causes more dollars in health problems, and puts more radioactive material into the environment, than a typical nuclear plant. And then there's the carbon dioxide.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[AlphaWolf_HK]

There might actually be a ring of truth, though for the opposite cause and not on slashdot specifically.

The coal industry has a very powerful lobby. The coal union itself is very powerful, far more powerful than the corporate interests. Combine the two though and you have a great combination for retarding nuclear research and development.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[toQDuj]

And can be effectively prevented by exercising and eating healthily.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

Because there is enough moronic fear about nuclear. All anti-nuclear fanatics do is hurt our entire world. Total nuclear conversion solves every energy and pollution problem the world faces today. It also solves an enormous number of problems in international relations. The lives saved in war related deaths alone would be enough to compensate for us having a full scale meltdown once or twice a decade. The greatest accomplishment that the anti-nuclear establishment can hope to achieve is to keep us all in the dark ages.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[mad flyer]

Thank you for proving that you are a complete knuckledragger.
Nuclear already triggered at least 2 non survivable contaminated zone onearth. And the mass casualties will only be seen in 10 to 20 years. (or at least mass thyroid cancer patients).

Plus you are totally ignoring the several workers death by cardiac arrest of cleanup workers or the untraceable illness of the unproperly declared/registered/followed cleanup temp workers.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

You ignorant bastard.

No-one has died but many might now face reduced life and lower quality of life caused by cancers or other toxic reactions. Not to mention the lost land, lost livelihoods, and the shadow of those broken reactors. To say no-one died is completely missing the point. Besides, do we even know anyone died? I'm sure the nuclear industry would want to keep that quiet too.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

One day you will get untreatable cancer . . . and God will be smiling.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

"No one ever died from Fukushima."
"You could feed nuclear waste to babies, and it still would do less harm than coal."
"Dams are a thousand times more dangerous than nuclear power."


Nuclear power will continue to decline until it is a distant memory . . . too many fucking nutcases supporting it . . .

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[nitehawk214]

...er, I mean nuclear industry shills, not coal industry. By the way, where are all the coal industry shills? If Slashdot is overwhelmed by nuclear apologists, it's kind of weird that the coal industry hasn't noticed and sent some of their own.

Local television and radio stations in my city (Pittsburgh) have coal and natural gas shill commercials at least once every commercial break. Range Resource and Consol Energy are the biggest offenders on telling us how fracking and coal power do not fuck up our environment. When documents say otherwise, they dissapear.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

Wut? Exercise and eat as healthily as you like. Just don't expect that to "effectively" prevent cancer if you are exposed to significant amounts of radiation.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if this was true: Can you guarantee that nobody will die from radiation until the radioactive material poses no more threat? Like in hundreds of thousands of years? The risks involved using coal as an energy source can be reduced to nearly zero almost instantly.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[beckett]

And coal comes from a dust-free dispenser next to the tree of gumdrops on lollipop lane. oh wait it's also mined.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[symbolset]

If we agree that nuclear and coal both kill people and should be avoided, let us agree to pursue sources of energy that don't, like geothermal.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

So that covers Iceland and Hawaii. What will the rest of the world do?

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[symbolset]

Right now we're talking about US and Japan, both of whom have ample geothermal resources - as does all of South America, Indonesia - the entire Ring of Fire.

There are some places that geothermal isn't apt for, but as the technology evolves they grow fewer. You would think Russia isn't a geothermal powerhouse, but they have the Siberian Traps and have more potential even than the US. North and South America, Russia, India, China, Pakistan all have ample geothermal resources, and that's the home of 90% of breathing humans. I think we'd be OK with the rest of us making do with other sources of local power if the people with geothermal resources would just make use of what they have.

Geothermal is immune from international strife as it requires no imported fuel, nor rail or pipelines to deliver fuel. Distribution lines are vulnerable but they can be made redundant and are rather hard to hit. They can be made absolutely immune from international strife by burying to adequate depths.

Geothermal is the baseload power that is the perfect counterpoint to wind and solar. It can be ramped up at dusk and down at dawn; increase output when the wind doesn't blow, and decrease it when it does. It can exceed its base for years while alternative plants are being built and then decrease it to avoid depleting the thermal resource. You can't do any of those things with nuclear power.

Many countries with no terrestrial geothermal resources have them just offshore, and the availability of the ocean as a thermal countersink is compelling.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[drinkypoo]

Geothermal is the baseload power that is the perfect counterpoint to wind and solar. It can be ramped up at dusk and down at dawn; increase output when the wind doesn't blow, and decrease it when it does. It can exceed its base for years while alternative plants are being built and then decrease it to avoid depleting the thermal resource. You can't do any of those things with nuclear power.

America's poster child for geothermal, situated in the world's most geothermally active region, is perpetually over budget and under production and also produced a superfund site in the earlier years of its operation, because they were burying the slurry produced by pressure-washing the turbines in drums off of butts canyon rd. More recently (and ongoing) they've had to pump treated sewage into the ground (as an available source of water) to keep what production they do have up, because they have depleted the thermal resource. In short, while everything you say may be true, none of it is true in the USA.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[drinkypoo]

If we want nuclear power to succeed, and it should, we need to look at the real problem - lack of regulation.

Bull shit. Fukushima Daiichi failed for two reasons. One, because it was built where it should not have been built (at the insistence of General Electric, and forced upon Japan by the US Gov't.) Two, being built where it should not have been built, it was then built without taking into account existing historical records concerning flooding and taking adequate measures to protect the system from flooding (e.g. a great wall-esque seawall, offsite backup power or at least elevated generators, et cetera.) Both of these facts were true before the plant even started operation. No amount of regulation would fix the problems with Fukushima Daiichi. Government created the problems with the plant, by deciding where and how it should be built. More government will not help.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

Then what, exactly would help? Letting corporations do whatever the hell they want? If your statements are true, you had the US government doing the bidding of a corporation to pressure for this location. Are you seriously dense enough to believe that an absence of government would lead to an absence of corporate corruption and dirty dealings? What we need is less corporate involvement, especially in government.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[symbolset]

Ah, Drinkypoo, you're the local NIMBY for this one. Sorry, but that's how it is.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

>And can be effectively prevented by exercising and eating healthily.

Says the guy who knows absolutely NOTHING about cancer. You must be kidding.

Cancer is a lottery. The number of tickets you buy is your lifestyle, but everyone gets some number of tickets. When your ticket is pulled, it's pulled. There is no exercise and diet that will stop cancer. You can only make some choices that reduce your chances (somewhat).

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[jez9999]

No amount of regulation would fix the problems with Fukushima Daiichi

No, but it would've stopped it being built there in the first place without the proper protections against tsunamis.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

So that covers Iceland and Hawaii. What will the rest of the world do?

And Japan. But I guess that is off topic, since Japan has never had any problems with nuclear power.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying that nuclear is better than coal is like saying Bush is better than Hitler. Of course it is true, but it kind of misses the point...

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[AmiMoJo]

Coal must be the most often used straw man ever. Coal is not the only other way of generating electricity. Japan in particular has vast geothermal resources, for example.

Japan wanted nuclear because it made them look modern and technologically advances (everyone was at it in the 60s, which is also when they developed the world's first high speed train and launched their first satellite). They also wanted it because it means they could build a nuclear weapon in a few months if necessary, but don't actually need to become a nuclear sate with all the antagonism that would generate.

Every nuclear plant in Japan went offline at once, and they coped. No blackouts during the summer. No collapse of the economy or return to an agrarian society. If anything is spurred demand for more efficient products as people wanted to do their bit to help. The US seems to assume that more watts = better life, where as Japan, like most places, assumes that less watts and less pollution through efficiency = better life. They have a lot of cool tech now like whole-house battery packs - wouldn't you love you have a whole house UPS powered by free energy from the sun?

So despite pressure on politicians from energy companies and certain parts of industry to restart reactors it is unlikely that the majority will ever come back online due to public opposition and the rapid rise of renewable energy and more efficient devices. People also look at what has happened to the people who used to live near Fukushima and the farmers and fishermen who live in the wider area, and they don't want it to happen again in a country that has regular large earthquakes and occasional tsunami.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a lot of scientific research indicating that you'd reduce your odds of dying from cancer if you don't exercise and just eat McD supersize meals.

Exercising and eating healthily would increase your odds of dying from cancer in comparison. It would also of course increase the odds of you living a lot longer ;).

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[toQDuj]

Indeed, I said prevent, not cure. It is a healthier lifestyle that is the likely cause for the people exposed to the Hiroshima bomb to have a lower than average cancer rate.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuclear already triggered at least 2 non survivable contaminated zone onearth.

There are people living in both the Fukushima and Chernobyl exclusion zones: thousands, in the case of Chernobyl.

It's not like other energy forms haven't ever done the same.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[TheTurtlesMoves]

However geothermal is based on stored heat in rocks. That stored heat is good a few decades at best. Try and at least run the numbers. If you don't believe that BOTE calculation, do your own.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

Every nuclear plant in Japan went offline at once, and they coped. No blackouts during the summer.

What are you talking about? If it's the March 11, 2011 eq/tsunami, then you are wrong. Rolling blackouts and a 28C minimum AC in public buildings all over the Kanto area isn't a 36C-summer worthy.(at least not for this northern european) When businesses didn't take such a big economic hit, it was exactly because the blackouts targeted residential/small business areas to spare industry.

So despite pressure on politicians from energy companies and certain parts of industry to restart reactors

Restart the fukushima dai ichi reactors? How many kinds of insane are you? However, many other reactors got started up again just months after 3/11.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[IRWolfie-]

Sorry, but why would I be counting someone having a heart attack? Are you seriously contending that radiation causes heart attacks?

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[drinkypoo]

Ah, Drinkypoo, you're the local NIMBY for this one. Sorry, but that's how it is.

When you call me a NIMBY because I'm reporting the facts about geothermal power in the USA, you make yourself a slashbot. You're no different from all the idiots who shake pom-poms for nuclear power even as it is abused to horrible, long-lasting effect. It's a nice theory that geothermal power would be good for the USA, but the fact is that it won't change anything. It can be done wrong, and because this is the USA, it will.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[alien9]

The assumption that proper regulations will solve the problem of used fuel maintenance may be right. What folks tend to ignore is that the fuel will have to be kept by future generations with the same zealous care (and the costs) and no profit, for tens of thousand years. Ah, yeah, add that used fuel is a nice material ready to be weaponized. It's arrogant and naive to assume that all the pools will be controlled and properly maintained by stabile and friendly governments for thousand years from now.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[MrKaos]

Because its an easy target? Probably also because the relative panic over nuclear power rubs geeks the wrong way: "Those peasants are being anti science again. WHY won't they look at the math?!".

I don't think that is very fair. I'm a geek and I've been explaining the dangers of Nuclear power from an engineering and science perspective for many years now.

I understand the dogmatic type of person you are talking about but I think it has more to do with social proof and the beliefs a person holds about Nuclear Power than being a geek. It's pretty easy to get lulled into complacency by the nuclear industries propaganda and the long term nature of the industry.

There are a lot of aspects to the issues of the nuclear industry and stereotyping this group or that group won't really help us deal with the issues that will remain no matter who is to 'blame'. Over the next decade as more and more Nuclear plants move into old age we are going to need the geeks talent to solve problems as much as we need the socially adept person to negotiate political solution, the legal person to navigate and construct new laws.

The retirement of the Nuclear industry and how to do it so that it doesn't impose a hidden tax on future generations will need many talents focused on solutions.

If we don't, history will judge our entire generation as those who failed to deal with the issue, not just geeks.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[AmiMoJo]

There is actually some serious doubt over whether you can build a nuclear plant that could survive a magnitude 9 quake and tsunami if it happened near by. By the time the quake reached Fukushima it had dissipated much of its energy, but it still damaged the plant's cooling system and quite possibly caused this leaking as well.

Nuclear plants in Japan are designed to survive a magnitude 7.5 quake, based on the assumption that most of the force will be lateral. Since the scale is logarithmic the difference between a 7.5 and magnitude 9 quake is massive. There is also a danger of things like liquification of the ground or vertical movement, cracks opening in the ground and so forth. Remember, it isn't just the reactor that must shut down safely, the on-site waste storage tanks and pools must remain intact as well.

Japan really is not the ideal place for nuclear power. Aside from anything else when there is a large earthquake there are always power shortages as reactors automatically shut down. They can't be spooled up very quickly again and other forms of energy have to make up the shortfall as quickly as they can. That is why whole-house UPS systems are popular now, and Nissan heavily promotes the ability of its Leaf EV to be used as such.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[ohnocitizen]

Your cit the very reasons regulation would help. There should have been a law making sure nuclear reactors are never built in dangerous locations, and a law requiring that they take at least adequate measures (if not exceptional) to ensure the system is protected from a variety of threats. Those two laws would have done a lot of good. Just because a given government takes the wrong action, doesn't mean all government is evil. That is a fallacy.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

120 tons is ~3 truckloads, ~685 barrels WOOOOOOHHHH! SCARY!

FU sensationalist.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[HiThere]

That's not totally clear. A strong immune system can often kill off a cancer before it becomes a problem. Usually before it's detected. (Admittedly, not always. Sometimes it's a cance of the immune system. Or of an area that the immune system can't reach.)

So, yes, some of it's chance. Some of it's your genetic history (epigenetic as well as inherent). Some of it's diet. Perhaps some of it's exercise...though I'm not clear whether exercise creates or prevents it, or perhaps both.

Note that the dose of radiation that gives one person cancer will leave another unaffected. This is a combination of lottery and everything else. It's not pure lottery. But it's also not pure everything else.

What you CAN say is that if you expose a population to a certain level of radiation, then number of cancers will increase by a certain amount. There are large error bars except at the extreme ends, and possibly there, but it's still a reasonably defensible statement. (N.B.: *I* couldn't make that statement, as I can't quantify any of this. But I assert that there are those who reasonably can make that statement, though they *ought* to be more explicit about the error bars than I ever hear them being.)

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[HiThere]

Not all of them. But that's not what you're talking about, is it.

ALL sources of energy, and ALL construction leads to deaths. So does driving cars. The question is, what's a reasonable balance.

It isn't clear to me that fission power is a net benefit. It may be, but all the governments cook the books and subsidize various energy provision methods in such varying degrees that I find it impossible to be sure. It *is* clear that the companies won't build and operate the plants without governments idemnifying them against any major problems that they cause. So I have severe doubts as to the economic justification of fission power.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[HiThere]

You clearly don't mean what you say, or shouldn't, as cockroaches have been found eating the insulation inside working nuclear plants. And, IIRC, radiodurans has been found within the core of working reactors. (Not, of course, where the temperature was above the boiling point of water.)

If you mean places that are officially too dangerous for people to reside there, yes, there are many. Within the reactors, e.g. If you mean the official exclusion zones, people have lived there for years. I don't know how safe it is, but it may well be as safe as many inner cities are for those not of the appropriate ethinic group. Or as safe as the Kalahari is for a bushman, for that matter. (Naturally, this will depend on exactly where you are within either the inner city or the exclusion zone.)

People tend to be either irrationally fearful or irrationally trusting of nuclear power. For that matter, it's the irrationality that makes it so hard to store spent fuel. The clearly best answer is to store it in a place that's restricted of access, and contains moderate barriers against access. Say dehydrating it and sintering it. Then use it to produce process heat. (Say stick it in a pressure cooker, and use it to drive a heat pump.) Or if you're worried about neutrons, use it to heat or water. (The idea here is not so much to get additional power out of it, though that's a benefit, but to cool it down while waiting for some better use to show up.) Perhaps it could be used to preheat water for some other purpose. Of course, this would mean you would need to have it near a factory. SO WHAT!!

N.B.: This is probably a cost neutral (or nearly neutral) way of disposing of spent radioactive fuel. It's not a justification of fission piles. I'm not sure they are justifiable. But a lot of the problems are due to hysteria.

P.S.: There may actually be real problems with the precise solution that I proposed for dealing with radioactive waste. That's ok, I'm not an expert. This is my adaptation of an approach that one expert proposed quite awhile ago, and I may have introduced flaws. But do note that because the waste is not totally inaccessible, it's quite possible to fix any problems with the proposal. Maybe, e.g., the glass needs to be in the form of thin threads (angle hair?) and embedded in a matrix of wax. That would limit the amount of heat that could be extracted. If gamma is a problem, perhaps a matrix of lead is needed. Or perhaps needles sheathed in lead and embedded in a wax matrix. But making it more complex makes it more expensive. Thin glass needles would keep the radiation from reinforcing (via short chain reactions), and make the heat easy to extract. High level radioactives don't have a long life, so it would cool down within decades. Low level radio-isotopes aren't particularly dangerous unless they are within your body (and even then not really dangerous unless they are biologically active molecules). Yes, if you bury the glass, some of them will eventually leak out. So don't bury it. Or grind it up and use it in cement blocks. Granite is naturally radioactive already, so this isn't new. Just watch the background level, and where you use the blocks. Support columns for a factory shouldn't be any problem, and it's not as if we're talking about THAT much solid waste. If you're worried about it, commission statues in the park, and use the building blocks for support stands. And sheathe them in marble or granite or sandstone. (Note that this is after the 10 year half-life isotopes have had three or four half-lives, so nothing high level is left.)

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[couchslug]

"wouldn't you love you have a whole house UPS powered by free energy from the sun?"

I could have that now, and save thousands by fabbing some of it and installing all of it myself.

It's not cost-effective for what I want, which is to be able to run my heat pump, appiances, power tools, welders and air compressors.

If you want one and your needs are less, there are plenty of resources online. Have at it.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[symbolset]

That's not how it works. This sort of geothermal energy is heat stored from the infall of the earth, and natural fission reactions in the core of the planet. This heat is already migrating out to the surface and into space, and it is continually replenished from the core. All a geothermal plant does is let the heat out a little sooner, and take advantage of the energy. It doesn't run out, unless you try to take too much out too fast for the size of your resource - which takes years.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[HiThere]

I think his poiint was that regulation CAUSED it to be built where and how it was. Regulation can't solve the problem when the regulators ARE the problem.

That said, the US has many such plants that weren't imposed on it by regulators, but which are kept running despite regulations because the operating entities have more political pull than do the regulators (or at least the technologists of the regulatory agency). So again, regulations aren't the answer, though if they were properly enforced they would be.

So the basic answer appears to be that regulations can't cause nuclear plants to operate safely, because the regulators answer to politics. Note that this is true of EVERY regulatory agency, not just the nuclear power industry. But most industries to threaten so much damage from one incident.

P.S.: Did you catch to post about the Hanford plant on the Columbia river above. Apparently we are 7-45 years from a CONTINUING radioactive poisoing of the Columbia river through ground water seepage, and no fix appears possible. And we don't know how bad the poisoning will be. AND the Hanford plant is both still operating and still leaking. (Admittedly the leak comes from a differnt pile than the one that is still operational.) Not only did regulations not solve this problem, they aren't even ameliorating it...well, not in this century unless things change in an unexpected manner. (Presumably when the currently leaking tanks are empty, the poisoning will decline after awhile, unless some new problem arrises.)

People rarely learn from infrequent disasters. If something happens once a day, you learn quickly. If it happens on a random day once a week, you learn more slowly. If it happens once a year, and not on a predicatible day, you may never learn.

Nuclear plants provide random accidents once every decade or so, in an unpredictable pattern. The people who suffer from the accident aren't the people who decide how things are to be done. How long do you expect it to take to learn how to prevent accidents? Teenagers usually learn to be fairly safe drivers in around a decade. (This isn't all learning, it's partially hormonal change.) And they directly experience the results of their actions.

I have my doubts that human societies are designed to learn to manage something as complex and dangerous and powerful as nuclear reactors. One accident/decade isn't an acceptable accident rate. Not in the long term, and there isn't much sign of organizational learning. (Plants in the US of essentially the same design as Fukishima have applied for permits to operate beyond their design specifications and beyond the designed lifetime since the Fukishima accident. It appears that at least some of them will receive the requested waivers.)

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[AmiMoJo]

I don't think you understand the concept for a UPS. The idea is to keep essential stuff like your fridge running when the power goes out, so all your food isn't ruined. Maybe run the TV to watch the news, get some idea of when power will be back on too, or charge up your mobile phone.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[gullevek]

Except that

- they had to restart one nuclear power plant in the south because they had not enough electricity to keep factories running
- east of japan is running every one of their old coal and their current LPG plants at maximum and imports billions yen worth of fossile fules every month

Of course Japan didn't fall back to a pre-industrial civilization, but if there is nothing done, it will no longer be a big industrial nation because it is just not economical feasable to run industry in a country where the gov has to support the electricity providers so they can buy the fuel to run the nation.

I, for one, am not happy to pay more to TEPCO ...

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[AK Marc]

No amount of exercise can "prevent" cancer. It might help reduce the chance, but that's not related to "prevention".

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[AK Marc]

Coal is ok because I can see the smog killing me. Nuk-u-ler is invisible. And a reactor is like a nuclear bomb, harnessed for energy. It's inherently unsafe, and any country with a reactor can bomb us, as reactors can even fly on their own, and they don't even need a missile or anything like that.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[RivenAleem]

Well of course, didn't you know that the greatest praise/honour that Japanese politicians can get revolves around how selfless they can be? American politicians get praise for how rich they can become, how well they can "play the game".

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[mikael]

Coal releases sulfur and other compounds that form acids, leading to acid rain that was literally "burning" forests in other countries. There are some radioactive gases released when coal is burnt.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Run the numbers. The heat flow is so stupidly low, that geothermal power uses hot rocks that *cool* down since the heat from below cannot flow fast enough. The geothermal heat from under our feet is something like 1W/m2. Its tiny.

Every geothermal plant has a steady reduction in heat after opening. It is not sustainable on terms of decades and useful power densities.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[sjames]

Yeah, nobody was ever killed in a drilling accident...

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[sjames]

Coal is no strawman. It may not be the only other way of generating power, but it most certainly is a common one. It has been common for decades and few are all that worried about it. That makes it a perfectly valid point of comparison with Nuclear (or any other power source under consideration).

I support moving to a variety of non fossil fuel sources including nuclear. I also support improving efficiency when it is a genuine improvement in efficiency (some are truly false economies).

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[sjames]

Let's not forget that they were also entirely unprepared to deal with any problems. It was outrageous that they had a bunch of people standing around awkwardly for DAYS because they didn't have the right connector to connect a spare generator to the site to get emergency equipment back online.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[dbIII]

IMHO the US civilian nuclear industry ate it's own children to prevent any threat to their current investments which is why they are stuck in the 1980s. The strong nuclear industry opposition to thorium research is a prime example. Opposition to research into waste treatment is another (finally something newer than a 1950s vitrification approach came out of a tiny reactor in Australia for less total cost of development than a single jet fighter). The only clear advances in the last few decades that I'm aware of are related to military use or from outside of the USA - both cases where the lazy nuclear lobby couldn't stop it. There may be a lot of coal lobby money going into elected US pockets but the nuclear lobby has also been filling those pockets with a couple of orders of magnitude more than they've spend on R&D.
However you don't have to believe me - I mostly work for the coal industry although I did have a tiny bit to do with some exploration work for a Uranium mine a couple of years ago.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Well for what it's worth, the anti-nuclear coalition themselves claim responsibility for making nuclear power unaffordable.

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[dbIII]

That's just like the Afgans ridiculous claim to have destroyed the USSR in my opinion. The usually unaffordable price worldwide of constructing civilian nuclear power generation plants shows what happens even when there is no anti-nuclear efforts, so I don't think they can take any credit as being anything more than annoying. Maybe something decent will come out of India (accelerated thorium) but the current US nuclear efforts are even a decade or so behind South Africa's pebble bed!

Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

...and very few people died from lung cancer within the first two years of smoking tobacco. It must be a safe product that probably increases your longevity and builds strong muscles too.

Take your manipulative salesmanship and turn it sideways.

Disclaimer: I support nuclear energy as a power source but not bullshit twisting of facts.

What is the Dai-chi plant?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/... it's Daiichi.

I'm guessing they would know.

Re:What is the Dai-chi plant?

[nitehawk214]

According to http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/... it's Daiichi.

I'm guessing they would know.

Yeah, because we can trust Tepco to tell the truth.

Bah! Little league.

[Trax3001BBS]

Hanford Washington USA
April 02, 2013

"A nuclear safety board has warned a key U.S. senator that underground tanks holding radioactive
waste at the nation's most contaminated nuclear site pose a possible risk of explosion."
http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2013/04/nuclear_safety_board_warns_of.html

I as everybody else in this area are "down winders". A tank blows we will certainly know about it.
These tanks have some of the most radioactive materials "contained"; the left overs of
30 some years of Plutonium production.

A lot of work has been done to the tanks to stop the leaks that have "flowed" for many years.
The leaks are now... well one can't say as everyday it's different; tomorrow they may well be gone.

I'm sure if they could, they would have by now so not sweating it myself.

Such is our bane for helping stop the japs.

Re:Bah! Little league.

[AmiMoJo]

The UK has similar problems with radioactive waste and contaminated water stored in open pools where the birds can get at them and leaking into the ground. It seems like once all the profit has been made the power companies running nuclear sites suddenly lose interest and aren't even willing to spend money building reliable storage.

Fukushima's leak is unforgivable since such forces should have been accounted for in the design (which was only rated for magnitude 7.5 quakes). There have been questions ask about if it is even possible to do that with current technology, especially for plants on or near fault lines.

Re:Bah! Little league.

[Anonymous Coward]

The UK has similar problems with radioactive waste and contaminated water stored in open pools where the birds can get at them and leaking into the ground. It seems like once all the profit has been made the power companies running nuclear sites suddenly lose interest and aren't even willing to spend money building reliable storage.

Both Hanford & the vast majority of the plant at Windscale/Sellafield were primarily military nuclear sites for the production of plutonium and other radionuclides useful for building nuclear weapons. They were built in the 40's and 50's, in a great hurry, with little or no understanding of the finer points of nuclear reactors. Producing plutonium was a greater driving force than worrying about proper safety standards.

Comparing military nuclear sites to (nominally) civilian sites is comparing pears to tangerines. It's like complaining that Yucca Flats is contaminated.

Re:Bah! Little league.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Such is our bane for helping stop the japs.

Nah, such is our bane for divorcing science from policy. There are people who want to buy up that 'waste' that endangers you and your family and 'burn' it as fuel in more advanced reactors, eliminating 97% of the waste and converting that highly-radioactive 300,000 year waste into minimally-radioactive 600-year waste in the process.

Their efforts have been (and are being) thwarted by the same people who want to tax and regulate the carbon economy.

Re:Bah! Little league.

[Anonymous Coward]

Such is our bane for helping stop the japs?

No. Such is our bane from that asinine social experiment known as "communism." To contain the communist inspired campaigns for global domination, the free world (i.e. the USA) required a massive exploitation of nuclear materials for weapons production which led to most of the radioactive contamination and waste problems that we now face.

It can also be said that communist-bred social torpor and ineptitude was the ultimate cause of the great nuclear accident at Chernobyl. At that time, only dumb luck saved much of the world from a much more widespread and lasting catastrophe.

Re:Bah! Little league.

[AK Marc]

highly-radioactive 300,000 year waste

The longer the time it's "bad" the less radioactive it is. Most of the long-term stuff is things like cleaning materials, office furniture, consoles, and other things with long-term exposure to very low levels. It's about as radioactive as a brick house.

This is for a normal spent fuel pool

[symbolset]

The spent fuel pools at Fukushima are not in any sense "normal."

And how bad is that?

[PSUspud]

And so what? Before we can evaluate how bad this is, we need to know how bad the radioactivity is. Are we talking "enough to kill everybody" or "enough to detect"? Given that this is water that has already been cleaned, I suspect the latter. The only radionuclide they couldn't get out is tritium, and that at a relatively low concentration. Until there are actual numbers, I won't get excited.
And when you read "highly contaminated water", remember that bananas are too radioactive to meet Japanese food regulations. A little radioactivity goes a long way, as does a little hysteria.

Idiot! Idiot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said anything about coal? It's not politically correct to say this on Slashdot, with all the nuclear worship around here, but nuclear power can be completely fucked up, whether or not coal is. Coal is irrelevant.

re:polluting the ocean

[noh8rz10]

umm, as a california resident, no thank you! I don't want to be pulling 3-eyed fish out of the water.

Re:Idiot! Idiot!

[icebraining]

That statement means nothing in absolute terms. You need to compare it with something else for a meaningful insight.

Fuckin' nips

[Anonymous Coward]

If they don't get this shit under control we should drop a hydrogen bomb on hiroshima and nagasaki. The first time was just a 'warning shot'...

The problem with nuclear power is

[n3r0.m4dski11z]

Cost cutting, and imperfect solutions.As well as other things that happen in The Real World to fallible human beings.

Why everyone on slashdot defends to death nuclear power is beyond my understanding. The waste lasts for tens to HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of years. You cannot possibly ensure anythings containment on that time scale.

We have a molten planet full of heat, a source a few tens of km away from every person. We have a fusion reactor wirelessly sending power to the planet. People need to figure out that nuclear is not the answer.

Re:The problem with nuclear power is

[0123456]

Why everyone on slashdot defends to death nuclear power is beyond my understanding. The waste lasts for tens to HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of years.

Who cares?

I mean, seriously: you're worried that someone might get cancer hundreds of thousands of years in the future?

You really think that's something worth worrying about?

In even a single thousand years, our descendants will be living in space or in caves, depending on whether or not we listen to the doomsayers. Worrying about nuclear waste thousands of years in the future is just insane.

Re:The problem with nuclear power is

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yes? Where is my flying car?

Re:The problem with nuclear power is

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure they were worried about the continued leakage for too many years combined with accumulation of concentrated radioactive particles higher and higher up the foodchain.

Re:The problem with nuclear power is

[silas_moeckel]

The issue is that were treating stuff as ubber scary that's far less dangerous that what goes up coal plants smoke stacks. Things less radioactive than coal get treated as major problems that we have to contain forever we might as well just throw the stuff into the furnace.

Spent fuel rods are the major highly radioactive bit and those should be reprocessed to make more fuel rods. We don't because that reprocessing is also a good way to get weapon grade bits. Pretty much anything that's radioactive enough to need to be contained over huge periods is radioactive enough to run a reactor. Other bits are non issues.

Re:The problem with nuclear power is

[Omestes]

Yeah, not worrying about the future has brought us all sorts of good things historically...

Or not.

Re:The problem with nuclear power is

[Anonymous Coward]

When has "this is beyond my understanding", which means the ssame as "I am uneducated", become a rational argument? When you quote "hundreds of thousands of years", would you please point out which radioactive isotope has such a long half life and is actually dangerous? You can't, because you don't know, and also because there is no such isotope.

Educate yourself, and the argument will no longer be beyond your understanding. You will know about dangerous radioactive waste (half life of ~30 years), dangerous longer lived intemediate products (actinides, half lives of hundreds to thousands of years) and harmless long lived, but valuable byproducts (technetium, palladium, with half lives >100000 years). Then we can talk again about possible solutions, and you will find that there are precisely two that work: nuclear and coal. Smart people have already figure out hat coal is not the answer.

Re:The problem with nuclear power is

[TheTurtlesMoves]

The waste lasts for tens to HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of years.

A pretty standard "nuclear is scary" misleading and incorrect piece of truthiness. Most of the activity is gone after just a century. Its still not all that good for you in the same way lead is not good for you. But its not in the same league it was at the start.

Guess how long you have to wait for DDT or asbestos to become safe? Its over a few HUNDREDS of TRILLIONS of years. Along with many other very toxic and very poisons chemicals that we do in fact spill and contaminate local areas with all too frequently.

Re:The problem with nuclear power is

[Anonymous Coward]

Usage of asbestos has been banned for decades. Another core difference is that asbestos is inert, i.e., nothing bad happens until you try to drill a hole in it. Nuclear waste is an issue that needs to be adressed, not one that is to be ignored because you can't be bothered to think a few decades ahead.

Re:The problem with nuclear power is

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Who said anything about not doing something about it? Did you reply to the right post? I was addressing the "HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of years" factoid. Which is wrong.

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

I have observed this as well. Conspiracy surely explains it.

Considering the cover-ups involved though...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fairewinds Speech at the New York Academy of Medicine

Fairewinds Speech at the New York Academy of Medicine - Fukushima Two Years On - Gundersen Presents New Information concerning the Fukushima Accident: In this new video, Polaris Mediaworks laces together a video of Arnie Gundersen speaking along with the PowerPoint presentation he gave so viewers can better understand the presentation.

Cover-ups biggest threat...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fairewinds Speech at the New York Academy of Medicine

Fairewinds Speech at the New York Academy of Medicine - Fukushima Two Years On - Gundersen Presents New Information concerning the Fukushima Accident: In this new video, Polaris Mediaworks laces together a video of Arnie Gundersen speaking along with the PowerPoint presentation he gave so viewers can better understand the presentation.

Captcha: faiths

Re:Cover-ups biggest threat...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fairewinds Energy Education Corp received a grant to produce educational videos to help people around the world understand the truth about what happened at Fukushima Daiichi and the world-wide impact of this nuclear catastrophe that dwarfs Three Mile Island (TMI) and Chernobyl.

Thanks for linking some strong propaganda there. The truth is, all nuclear accidents are local, to one extend or another, by definition. A few km of contamination is what you get for being lazy about safety standards.

Global impact would require all out nuclear war or large amount of atmospheric nuclear tests (much more than in even in reckless 1960s). And even then, the impact would be shorter lived than what we are doing thanks to coal/gas/oil trifecta.

What I would like to know is who is behind groups like that? Big coal? They can lose quite a lot from nuclear power.

Re:Cover-ups biggest threat...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. It just becomes harder to prove the causal connection the farther away the incident.

Moot point, irregardless. Nuclear power is dead. Too fucking expensive. Takes too fucking long to implement. Requires fucking central planning socialist fucks telling the general public to bend over and take it if anything ever happens. By the way, consuming power now at a cost of storing waste for fucking ever is the most fucking stupid and selfish idea ever (even with your magical "reprocessing" fucking magical fairy fart wet dream that has been tried endlessly and failed miserably, no matter how much money gets thrown at it. You want nuclear power? Establish the "reprocessing" technology BEFORE you create any waste, you miserable excuse of a fucking human being.).

And, most of all, you have an army of retarded fucks of supporters who endlessly parrot the false "dirty" coal dichotomy every which fucking way, when natural gas has been shutting down coal plants for the last 10 years. And you think I need some kind of fucking special interest sponsor to get me to post how much a fucking despise your filthy, intellectually bankrupt drivel? You think special interests NEED to do anything to keep you cluster-fucks from "melting down" your own cause!? Fuck you and your delusions of grandeur. Your blind stupidity is what is motivating these "groups" to piss on your delusional parade, not some global conspiracy, you paranoid fuck.

Re:Cover-ups biggest threat...

[mbstone]

Here's the PowerPoint version so's you don't have to sit through 30 minutes of video.

Re:polluting the ocean

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be silly. Everyone knows that the tastiest three-headed fish come from Springfi***CARRIER LOST***

The nuclear industry likes comparing to coal

[symbolset]

Why, whenever anyone says anything the slightest bit negative about nuclear power here on Slashdot, does someone come and start whining about coal?

Coal is traditional and cheap. Coal-fired plants have the least startup cost and the quickest time to operation. Nuclear proponents need to sell their advantages over coal. They have a point - to a point - but like all admen they are blinded by the money.

If the entire US converted to nuclear power electricity generation (beyond the huge share we get from hydroelectric) that would not slow down US coal mining, natural gas or oil production a whit. The coal would be shipped overland by trains, the gas and oil through pipelines to ports where they would be shipped overseas to be used to power developing economies and contribute even more to greenhouse gas production in places where emission standards are more lax. The net result would be even more growth of greenhouse gas emissions than present. The carcinogens would still come into the air - even more so than they are now. We would still breathe the air contaminated by these plants. Our coal miners would still die in scary numbers. But the source of these problems would be overseas, and beyond the reach of domestic policy. It's a NIMBY thing.

If US nuclear power advances to the point where it can drive more efficient extraction of fossil fuels it will be used to do so, stripping the land of them even more quickly than at present - because these resources have value and the companies that do this have obligations to their shareholders.

Think about bunker fuel. This is the sulfur-rich tar left over from converting oil to gasoline so viscous it must be heated before it is used. Instead of being used in US power plants it powers the ships that move stuff over the oceans just outside the reach of US regulation. Just because US regulations don't allow it to be burned here doesn't mean that it doesn't get burned, and the waste gasses waft over our shores. It has energy in it. Do you think anybody is just going to throw that away? By exporting the problem beyond our international boundaries we can absolve ourselves of guilt for it without actually contributing to a solution to the problem.

There is no fission solution to this problem. You're not going to get fission-powered superfreighters any time soon, and if you did they would be used to carry our local fossil fuels more efficiently to places they could be burned less and less optimally.

The value of a free thing approaches zero

[symbolset]

Making public comment free motivates profit-oriented bodies to participate and contend for space in the process until the contributions of individuals speaking their own mind is lost in the noise. Such is the nature of open discussion and there is no cure for this problem. If there is a soapbox in the public square, profit-motivated individuals subsidized to do so will contend against personally motivated folk to stand on it until there is no personally motivated person able to survive the wait time for his turn.

Radioactive water has been leaking all along

[Required Snark]

A recently caught fish (April 7th) was found with very high levels of radiation.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2265732/Mike-Murasoi-fish-contaminated-radiation-Fukushima-nuclear-disaster-2-500-times-legal-limit.html

It was confirmed by Tepco to have amounts of radioactive cesium equal to 254,000 becquerels per kilogram, or 2540 times the limit of 100 becquerels/kg set for seafood by the government.

...

On 21 August last year, Tepco announced that rockfish caught in the Pacific Ocean within the circular area of 20 km around the plant, which is closed to all human activity, had a level of 25,800 becquerels of cesium per kilogram .

It's painfully obvious that this is caused by ongoing leakage of radioactive water from the plant. In contrast, there has be a reduction in radiatons levels on land http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201303120107. It's unlikely that biological concentration in the food chain is the primary cause after two years of radiation decay and sea water dilution.

If you don't trust the Japanese government, this would explain why they are prohibiting non-government organizations from sampling the ocean near the plant location. They say it's still too dangerous.

The motivation for a coverup is that ongoing radioactive ocean contamination would be a huge international incident. China, Korea, Taiwan, Viet Nam, Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines would all protest. There would be reputational repercussions, diplomatic turmoil and possibly economic sanctions. There is still a lot of hostility in the region from WW2, and this would be just the issue to reopen those wounds. Not to mention current rivalry over ocean areas that have China, Tiawan and Japan sending naval vessels to tiny islands with disputed ownership.

Obama Administration's NOD to Nuclear Power

[wanfuse123]

I was happy to read last week that the Obama administration seems to have been reading the blogs about the mass deployment of modular generation IV reactors. I hope it was brought to their attention by my "We the People" petition to study the efficacy of a plan to convert all coal plants to LFTR Nuclear Reactors but that is probably just wishful thinking. They said that they would be deploying 50 300 MW reactors every year starting in 2050 maybe sooner if they can get the technology right. Unfortunately this is far short of the 5 year start time that I feel we could do with a Manhattan style effort. I came to a capital cost figure of 1.6 Trillion for the conversion process but have recently learned that this figure could be over costly by a factor of two which would bring the figure to 800 billion in capital costs if the new data is right. I believe it is totally worth the 23 Billion dollar effort to make it happen and will try again with another "We the People" petition when they integrate my suggested "Facebook Authentication" into their site. Hopefully with enough signatures we can make this study happen and make the results fully public in all aspects of it's execution and findings.

And the headline is self-contradictory

[Forty Two Tenfold]

And the headline is self-contradictory. If there's a leak, then the container obiously doesn't hold. See also nuclear apologists' arguments that Fuckupshima was a non-lethal accident.

Re:And the headline is self-contradictory

[symbolset]

I share your enthusiasm for the topic and your point of view. The whole coining words like "Fuckupshima" thing is antihelpful. Could you not do that? Please?

Re:And the headline is self-contradictory

[Forty Two Tenfold]

No. Greasemonkey/filter. KTHXBAI.

Re:And the headline is self-contradictory

[symbolset]

OK fine. I wasn't looking to censor you - only to encourage you to execute your advocacy in a more effective manner. If this is the way you enjoy doing your bit and effectiveness is irrelevant to your joy then knock yourself out.

Re:And the headline is self-contradictory

[professionalfurryele]

You are wasting your time I'm afraid. There are just too many people out there who cant imagine how anyone could come to a different perspective on controversial issues and how abuse of rhetoric can be polarising. If you can please take comfort in the fact that while I disagree with your point of view I can understand how someone with different facts, experiences and values could come to a different conclusion about nuclear power to the one I have. I appreciate your efforts to keep the discourse civil.

Re:And the headline is self-contradictory

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Slashdot give you achievements for successive Troll moderations?

Re:And the headline is self-contradictory

[symbolset]

Every one comes at every thing from their own point of view. They cannot help it, as they see the world from the direction of their own experience. I can respect that. I can't too far exceed my own experience, and I'm aware of that limitation. Though I try to take an objective view I am well aware that my experiences build a belief framework that limits the potential solutions I can imagine, and respect that others have other experiential frameworks to build their beliefs and solutions upon. I actually rely upon that in my work. I do find here those who help me expand my point of view.

But yes, there are many here who are more limited, who seem to stop at "ur retarted" and not grow.

Re:And the headline is self-contradictory

[Forty Two Tenfold]

Oh, boy! You're so perfectly above and beyond! My, my.

Re:And the headline is self-contradictory

[symbolset]

Not sure what you're getting at here, nor who you're responding to, as we've reached max threading depth.

Of course lack of situational awareness is only a small part of your communication problem.

Re:And the headline is self-contradictory

[Forty Two Tenfold]

You can see whom I was replying to by clicking "Parent."

Of course lack of situational awareness is only a small part of your communication problem.

Re:And the headline is self-contradictory

[Dogtanian]

And the headline is self-contradictory. If there's a leak, then the container obiously doesn't hold.

Er, any normal reader knew damn well what it meant- it wasn't intended to mislead, and it didn't. You do realise that blatant pedantry is generally counter-productive towards one's case, since it looks like you have to resort to that rather than arguing the real issue.

That said, if we're playing that game, I'll point out that unless the tank emptied completely, then it's still holding *some* radioactive water... and it still has a leak. Ergo, it *is* a "tank holding radioactive water". :-P

Re:And the headline is self-contradictory

[Forty Two Tenfold]

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hyperbole

Re:And the headline is self-contradictory

[AK Marc]

How else do you describe a multi-billion dollar "oops" that was caused by a $10,000 oversight? Sealing the generators in the ground under concrete (waterproof) and running the intake and exhaust pipes up to 30 feet or so, and there'd have been no meltdown due to lack of local power. Simple, easy, and I've done it and seen it done a number of times. It's even been in the news as a "stupid" failure. The pumps in New Orleans were designed to work under water, but the generators that run them weren't. Much of the Katrina clean-up issues was caused by stupid design. Fukishima managed to repeat a common failure that was advertised world-wide.

The "helpful" is to point out it was a stupid mistake caused by "penny wise pound foolish" or something like that.

Re:And the headline is self-contradictory

[professionalfurryele]

Agreed. I also like to keep in mind that while we can be objective about the facts (almost all nuclear plants release hardly any extra radiations say, or that the rates of extreme failure modes (meltdowns, etc) have been repeatedly underestimated), we cant be objective when it comes to things like how much we value our children's future over our grandchildren's. These aren't really things which are objective and so even when we have all the facts we can still disagree about what the right course of action is.
We also have to deal with the how many 'facts' aren't facts because people more interested in getting their own way than in truth have distorted the issue (from both sides, although more harmfully from the nuclear industry in my opinion). Whether it is the nuclear industry failing to disclose the real nature of accidents or environmentalists producing misleading estimates of extra cancer cases it seems hardly anyone cares about the truth in this issue any more and leaves me with serious doubts about what I can and cant trust.

It's "Dai-ichi", not "Dai-chi"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ichi" being "one", "Dai-ichi" being "Dai #1", and "Dai-ni" being "Dai #2".

Disney and Paul Dukas come to mind.

[Anonymous Coward]

As I read about the details of how they are dealing with the hot cores of these nightmare wrecks of radioactivity, I hear the Sorcerers Apprentice and have a vision of Mickey Mouse trying unsuccessfully to deal with millions of buckets of water.

Radioactive Waste

[Anonymous Coward]

Idea: why can't we get rid of all of the radioactive waste by dumping it into the ocean? (No really) If you only increased the background radiation by 0.1% and you sprinkled the waste into the ocean (or land) how much waste would you be able to safely dispose of? The ocean already has a certain amount of radionuclides in it,

Re:Radioactive Waste

[TheTurtlesMoves]

This is being done.. sort of in england. The problem is that the oceans only turn over on very long time scales. On the order of a 1000 years or so. So your not mixing it with the ocean, but the local area, or at least a localized area which may or may not be that close to the dumping/dilution site.

There are other problems too. Some of the radioactive components bio accumulate. So that the waste is concentrated in the food chain.

Re:Fuckin' Racist Bitches

[Anonymous Coward]

If they don't get this shit under control we should just castrate the lot of 'em so they don't procreate. This is the first 'warning shot' bitches...

Solution: Energy from Thorium (LFTRs)

[ivi]

Whenever I see a new article on the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster,
I am reminded of the ADVANTAGES (better cost, safety, waste, political
implications, etc.) of Liquid Fluoride THORIUM Reactors (a.k.a. LFTR's,
already being developed around the world (in various phases of R&D, eg,
in China, India, Taiwan, & [privately] USA).

More people need to know about the opportunities of this -safer- green-
energy source, so they can decide for themselves whether it's time to
-push- for regulatory changes, that will -ease- the transition to Thorium,
in our time.

Introduction: Kirk Sorensen's recent TED-talk

More details: (search YouTube.com for
                                            "Thorium remix"
                                        and take your pick)

War Against Reality

[Anonymous Coward]

Hilarious. No, really. It's just so ironic.

You're talking about the most efficient way of producing power save for fusion, and saying "Nah, people will just not use that."

Every "fuck" I read there warms my heart. The war on nuclear energy is destined for all the long-term success of the war on glaciers -- global warming notwithstanding.

You probably have the delusion that hydrocarbon power isn't a global pollutant. It's so funny to see someone at war against reality. Keep at it, Canute.

Re:Solution: Energy from Thorium (LFTRs)

[thegarbz]

Whenever I see a new article on the aftermath of a 40 year old plant disaster, I am reminded of the ADVANTAGES of pretty much every modern reactor design.

This is much the same as when I look at cars which didn't have seatbelts, crumple zones. Imagine if we outright banned them rather than investing serious research into making it safe. LFTR is one solution. I like the idea of the design and using thorium for fuel in general, but it is far from the only safe solution. There are several passively safe reactor designs out there from the Westinghouse AP1000 (which is basically old school with passive safety systems added) to molten sold reactors which basically are like your LFTR expect without the thorium.

Thorium is just a fuel. Sure it's a safer one, but the principles of passive and inherent safety can be designed onto many other systems too, and a modern reactor doesn't generate anywhere near the waste of their ancient brethren.

Or switch to solar.

[Ecuador]

When solar was more expensive than nuclear there was a reason you would go for nuclear, but now solar has an advantage in most latitudes. Yes, it requires a large area for production, but it can just go over existing structures etc.

Offtopic but: why complain about the Chinese subsidies that make non-Chinese panels uncompetitive? Just BUY those cheap Chinese panels and have cheap power!

Re:Or switch to solar.

[IRWolfie-]

Renewable energies of this sort also require expensive energy storage like pumped storage hydroelectricity

Re:Or switch to solar.

[Ecuador]

I'm not sure why you would say this. It is true that you could not have a power network with ONLY solar power without any sort of energy storage, however the big advantage of solar power is that the production is high when it is required - i.e. during the day. So power companies can take advantage of that and increase their output during peak hours using solar PV energy.

Re:Or switch to solar.

[AK Marc]

No, they don't. Being from the US South, usage spikes during production max. Using it for peak only is good enough. Get enough in to be able to have over-production is a good problem to have. Then, worry about how to store it, while putting more in. Even if you don't store overproduction, it's still a good thing.

Re:Solution: Energy from Thorium (LFTRs)

[AmiMoJo]

The problem is that all the research reactors have had major issues and are still tens of billions of dollars away from being commercially viable. Even then people will want to see one running for at least a decade before investing heavily in new thorium plants because they will worry about unforeseen costs. In the mean time everyone will just take the safe bet and build the same old stuff they have been building for decades.

Things do not move quickly in the nuclear industry, especially when huge amounts of risk are involved. Remember that they will have to convince the government to subsidize and insure the plant as well, adding years to the process.

In the mean time renewables will rocket ahead, and now we have the somewhat risky (from an investment point of view, not safety) but still orders of magnitude better than nuclear shale gas. Even coal is cleaning up, unfortunately. Honestly, I think we will see commercial fusion before we see widescale deployment of thorium reactors.

Re:Solution: Energy from Thorium (LFTRs)

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to admit it, but you could probably be right. One thing is for certain, to build the first one would cost as MUCH as 23 billion, (similar to the Manhattan project if it was executed today. ) This is because some research is necessary before they can be deployed for low cost (lower than coal).

Not only would the cost be lower for each subsequent reactor, even lower than coal, but the lives of the plants would be extended from 25 years to 80 possibly 100 years.

Remember its cheaper to deploy LFTR reactors by building modular reactors (small ones 150 GW in size) than it is to build them from scratch or 500-1000 MW super sized ones because they can be built on an assembly line and are small enough to ship on only three rail cars.

It saves rebuilding by three times when their lives are compared to the lives of the coal plants that they replace.

Remember they don't need huge containment vessels like standard nuclear reactors, because there is no need to contain them.

For instance with one design, if they get too hot a freeze plug simply melts and the material spills into another container and the density of the reactants drop and it all cools. No worries about a melt down.

It is also important to note that there is several generation IV designs that consume our spent Uranium, at a higher rates than Thorium reactors due. Thorium reactors require only small amounts of Uranium to work, the rest of the fuel is the Thorium and it burns extremely efficiently ( not accounting for the loss in the conversion to electricity they are 99.9 percent efficient.) This leaves less than .1 % by volume of waste.

In my opinion, where they can be secured, Uranium fast breeders should be built to help consume the existing stock piles of spent Uranium for two reasons, one is that it nearly eliminates the Uranium proliferation risks, and secondly it recovers the storage space that is being used to hold it for housing the Thorium waste which lasts only 300 years.

The Thorium waste is easier to handle because you don't have to worry nearly as much about geological changes in the earth that might allow the waste to leak. 300 years on a geology time scale is insignificant where as 10,000 years is.

Make Jello of it!

[caspy7]

Maybe it's crazy, but would it be possible to inject something into the water to turn it into a solid or pseudo solid? Whether jello-like, plastic, or glue, something that keeps the water from leaving the containers and/or getting into the groundwater.

First thoughts that come to mind would be substances that solidify with time after having a chance to permeate or a combination of substances, one which permeates and the other which acts as a catalyst for solidifying.

Sure, you might need a lot of it, but it's a really bad problem and there will surely be more cracks in the future. Heck, maybe some day you could haul it off in blocks to a more appropriate location/facility.

If such a substance doesn't exist yet, now seems like a good time to invent it. :)

Re:Solution: Energy from Thorium (LFTRs)

[TheTurtlesMoves]

There is this false belief that LFTR is some magical totally safe fixes all things wrong with nuclear.

This is quite false.

Lets start with the basics. 232Th is fertile and is not a fuel. It absorbs a neutron to become 233Pa which, appart from being a neutron poison, decays after about 26 days into 233U which is the fuel in a Thorium fuel cycle. So now if we compare with a U fuel cycle we can only do so with a reprocessing fuel cycle, not as is often done with a once through cycle which Th can't even do. Note that with reprocessing the waste stream is reduced by about a factor of 65. Also fuel usage goes up by about the same factor.

Now note we are burning 233U rather than 235U in a traditional reactor. Turns out that is about the same in terms of fission products they are about the same from a waste management perspective. Of course you get less actinides since there isn't all this U238 sitting around causing problems. However its not the same as none, and actinides can be dealt with in a reprocessing cycle.

Because we are dealing with plain old Uranium fission we have all the same issue. We have decay heat. That is turn it off and the fuel still produces significant amount of heat for some time. So you still get all the same issues if you can't maintain cooling after a scram with Th fuel cycles as with U fuel cycles. Sure you can have passive systems. That doesn't mean they work when you need them too. There is more than enough decay heat to melt significant amounts of concrete.

For the same reason as above any core breach (you don't get to plan these btw). Would also be similar to traditional PWR core breach. It could even be worse since many designs have graphite moderators which would burn on exposure to water or air.

Now we come to the implementation issues. Th breeding ratios are marginal at best. A breeding ratio of 1 has never been shown. The theoretical models and numerical results seem to show it can be done. But its very close and is a show stopper if can't be managed. Note that the only MSRs ever run did not do any breeding whatsoever. This creates a very tight neutron economy and makes design more difficult and even more expensive. Even small traces of some elements in the materials used would simply mean they don't work as a complete fuel cycle.

The only big advantage of these things is the MSR part.ie molten salt. This is part of a larger class of reactor called homogenous reactors where the primary coolant is also the fuel. There are quite a few nice features with this type of reactor, but none of it has anything to do with Th and using U reprocessed fuel cycles look basically the same. The features include negative void/thermal coefficients (boiling/hotter slows down the reaction), potentially simpler passive cooling and scram systems (but these exist for PWR too...), load following (quick power response). Not under pressure. No fuel elements to compromise. None of these things has anything to do with Th.

But its not all pancakes and picnics. In particular the salts are either reactive with water (fluorides) or soluble in water (chlorides). Fluorides are pretty corrosive and that restricts material choice. The neutron economy makes this even more difficult. Any off design issue can cause serious problems just like at a pwr. And don't start with the "it can't happen in this design". That is what they said about pebble bed reactors. See the prototype for how well that turned out!

And last but not least we have particular issues related to just Th. MSR was suggested to overcome the many problems that Th fuel cycle has. But it doen't remove them. The neutron economy issues are mitigated with constant reprocessing and pulling out the 233Pa. You still get some 234Pa and so you still get 234U which is a nasty gamma emitter. Its so nasty that Th proponents claim that prevents or inhibi

Liquid radiation suit?

[Aereus]

I assume the weight issue makes using water or similar liquids impractical for a radiation suit? If 7cm of water cuts radiation by half, it seems to me, you could make a pretty effective radiation suit that way? Sure, it would be harder to move around, but better than taking a higher dose? Or I suppose they would rather people just work fast and get in and out quickly?

Who gives a flying fuck about coal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's an idea, idiot-boy, how about no nuclear and no coal?

Re:Solution: Energy from Thorium (LFTRs)

[AmiMoJo]

Cars are actually a pretty good comparison to make. We do everything we reasonably can but mistakes and outright stupidity still cause accidents. There are alternatives that are much safer (mass transport) but funding is an issue, not least because auto manufacturers have a powerful lobbying arm.

In the long run we are trying to get away from humans driving at all, to the much safer alternative of self driving cars. Turns out no matter how good the technology human beings will always be the weak link. Public transport, while much derided and hated by petrol heads, actually works really well when done properly and costs less than running a car as well.

Re:Solution: Energy from Thorium (LFTRs)

[bussdriver]

citations?
If Thorium is so great, where are these "flying car" power plants?

Re:Solution: Energy from Thorium (LFTRs)

[thegarbz]

Sorry what? How did you get from thorium to flying cars, and if you want citations just type any of the above model reactors into wikipedia and follow the citation trail, or just google passive nuclear safety and pick any link on the first page.

This isn't secret classified stuff.

Re:Idiot! Idiot!

[AK Marc]

When you talk about shutting down something, you have to replace it with something. So any discussion is always about the options. Just like pointing out Clinton was a good president, and hundreds come out to complain about Obama or how good Bush was or anything other than the original question.

Re:Solution: Energy from Thorium (LFTRs)

[AK Marc]

Not only would the cost be lower for each subsequent reactor,

That's the real reason nobody is doing it. If you could spend $30 billion to make the first plant and make $1 in profit over 30 years, or $10 billion to make the second for $20 billion in profit 30 years, which would you pick? Nobody wants to be first, but second has lower costs, lower risk and higher profits.

Re:Solution: Energy from Thorium (LFTRs)

[bussdriver]

Oh, so you don't have proof of a working Thorium Reactor then? Thought so. I've been hearing about these wonder reactors... as long as fusion. Nothing has happened yet. It could be a decade before anything workable is proven enough for others to build them.

Flying cars do exist but are totally impractical even if they work to some degree. Those have been almost promised since the 1950s. I know some baby boomers who've given up on science because every airhead dream they grew up with wasn't solved by science like they thought were promised; oddly, these people got big on religion (which hasn't delivered anything tangible...ever?)

The solution to all our problems (which are largely caused by technology) is more new technology just 5 years away from market! No, I'm not cynical as much as I'm realistic. We need working solutions yesterday not typical press releases promising a 5 year window... Solar beats nuclear TODAY; jet turbine power can do baseload TODAY. Grid storage solutions exist TODAY. Will the transition cost more? Yes, no matter what you transition to but it needs to start yesterday and ramp up quickly.

Re:Solution: Energy from Thorium (LFTRs)

[thegarbz]

Oh I have about as much proof as you have reading comprehension skills. Yes you're right zero. You also seem to have missed about the fact that I wasn't talking about using thorium as a fuel source. I was talking about tried and built reactors incorporating passively safe design using classical uranium as a fuel source or even breeding out the waste from previous generations.

Maybe actually type some of the reactors I mentioned into Google like the AP1000 and you'd realise that.

In the mean time the one thing that thorium reactors have going for them is that they are actively researched, and not only researched as nuclear fusion is researched but rather they are at the design stage as the principles of operation are both well understood and achievable with today's and even yesterday's technology. Hell a common CANDU reactor with a slight modification can run on thorium though it doesn't have the advantages of the LFTR that are being researched currently.

Re:Solution: Energy from Thorium (LFTRs)

[bussdriver]

I've never been against reprocessing spent fuel instead of storing it; I've not seen the numbers on this being effective but I believe that Carter banned it for safety reasons and if there wasn't anything else to it then it wouldn't have stayed after the industry ran out of new fuel some time ago (they import it now, or get it from discarded bombs.)

I don't care about passive "safe" designs. Retrofits that cost less than 1 billion (new plant) might be of interest. The error rate is not good enough; melt downs are NOT the only problems. Solving 1 problem doesn't fix everything. PR is the only really competent skill we seem to have. COST is also a problem, is it practical to spend more on nuke power when Solar is cheaper TODAY? The 10 years it takes to build one of those new $1 billion plants, solar will be much cheaper and likely with grid storage or baseline from other sources. We have jet turbines today that burn gas some use biogas and they start up extremely quickly - they don't have huge lag times... nor do they require massive corporate welfare during their whole existence.

BTW, IAEA is also the industry advocate. I wonder how long tobacco could have gone if the FDA was run by them.