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Fukushima Nuclear Plant Cleanup May Take More Than 40 Years
mdsolar writes "'A U.N. nuclear watchdog team said Japan may need longer than the projected 40 years to decommission the Fukushima power plant and urged Tepco to improve stability at the facility. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency team, Juan Carlos Lentijo, said Monday that damage at the nuclear plant is so complex that it is impossible to predict how long the cleanup may last.' Meanwhile, Gregory B. Jaczko, former Chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said that all 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology."
Why didn't he do anything when he had the chance?
Land uninhabitable for generations, 40+ years cleanup, trillions in compensation - yeah, I'd say it all went fairly well!
Maybe the could us it as a setting and roll out another Matt Groening show, call it Fukurama
i'd watch it
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If this is honest and true permits should be issued post haste.
One caution.... newer is not better as Apple Map users found.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Is nuclear power really more cost effective per megawatt if you incluse the cost of long term storage and clean up after a disaster? Those numbers never make it into the calculations because they are inevitably paid by taxpayers.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Moving away from the first & second generation light water reactor designs is definitely something we should be doing, but simply going to smaller plants is a dubious plan.
From TFA:
> Dr. Jaczko cited a well-known characteristic of nuclear reactor fuel to continue to generate copious amounts of heat after a chain reaction is shut down. That “decay heat” is what led to the Fukushima meltdowns. The solution, he said, was probably smaller reactors in which the heat could not push the temperature to the fuel’s melting point.
Actually innovating, bringing something like the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor to reality, is more along the lines of what we should be doing.
Also, it was the tsunami that actually caused the meltdowns. Fukushima had appropriate backups for cooling the reactor, and were well under way when the reactors were shut down after the quake, they just didn't design for the eventually of a tsunami to come and categorically knock them all out.
$0.02
We'll finally get to see where Leela's ancestors grew up, before moving to the big city :)
It would be good if other areas of industry had the strong safety regulation that nuclear has. for example fertiliser plants.
Canadian reactors overheat if the outside temperature exceeds 25C.
Any large industrial accident can take decades to clean up. More than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez accident, there are still lingering effects. There are many Superfund toxic waste sites that have been on the Superfund list for 30 years (the list was started 30 years ago or many would have listed longer)
all 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology. But that costs money, and we're not going to spend it.
So fuck you future people. Your problem. Sucks to be you.
To be fair, the problem is not just money, but also political. Many people want no new reactors, even if a new reactor will replace one of an older, less safe design.
Can't they just encase the plant in concrete/dirt and say fuk it? Seem to remember reading about Chernobyl being dealt with in similarly crude but effective fashion. Sure it would cost a lot to heap up that much rubble but hey, beats sitting on the thing for decades on end attempting to carefully spoon out all the nasties.
Concrete doesn't last forever, nor does a big dirt pile when you're in an earthquake and tsunami zone. Burying it just makes it even harder to clean up when whatever containment method you used fails the next time.
Land uninhabitable for generations, 40+ years cleanup, trillions in compensation - yeah, I'd say it all went fairly well!
Luckily, there is a solution! When our man Larry Summers was chief economist at the World Bank, he did a little writing...
In this case, we can't really export the pollution(gathering the radioactive particles simply isn't plausible or cost effective); but we can import the population! Other than the carcinogenic fallout, it's a nice piece of real estate. Plenty of people live in places that are much ghastlier, even without fallout. All we have to do is find the wealthiest tenants who still live in a place with higher mortality(eg. from tropical parasites or malnutrition from marginally arable land) and offer them an attractively priced 50 year lease. The new occupants overall mortality goes down slightly, Japan makes some money back, and everyone basks in the warm glow of the human spirit, and gamma radiation.
How could this possibly be a bad plan?
Can't they just encase the plant in concrete/dirt and say fuk it? Seem to remember reading about Chernobyl being dealt with in similarly crude but effective fashion. Sure it would cost a lot to heap up that much rubble but hey, beats sitting on the thing for decades on end attempting to carefully spoon out all the nasties.
The plan at Chernobyl worked so well that we are now constructing a bigger, better, new sarcophagus to enclose the reactor and the current leaky and structurally unsound old sarcophagus...
1. Send the best minds in Japan to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Study the tools and methodologies used. Interview all the engineers participating in the cleanup effort. Learn absolutely everything you can about waste recovery techniques, environmental stewardship, and safety protocols.
2. Do exactly the opposite.
Groundwater.
Who cares if the containment fails. It's buried.
Oh sorry, I thought the problem was radioactive elements leaking out into the environment. As long as no one is worried about the containment failing and allowing radioactive contaminants top leach into the soil and groundwater, then sure, just put an umbrella over the current reactor and call it a day.
No, Chii. That's the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.
Retirement homes; what are the old of developing cancer in 20 years when you are already 80?
That actually did figure into common cold war protocols for dealing with contaminated food and water sources: prioritize less-contaminated ones for the young(both because they are of greater economic use, and because they have more time to accrue chronic radiation damage) and leave the more contaminated stuff to the old people...
Plus, an excellent reason not to take the kids to visit that old relative you never liked much anyway!
The problem is that there were supposed to be other types of reactors that would "burn" the waste. That would generate even more power while getting rid of the "spent" fuel. Problem is those reactors never got approved due to proliferation risk. But of course they keep renewing licenses for the existing ones to create more waste and IIRC even allowing some more to be built.
I'm not sure why this doesn't come up when they talk about where to bury the waste - building a reactor to make use of it IS an option. Of course the longer we wait, the more spent fuel will be contained in giant blocks of cement that can't be used as fuel either.
that would be a very dirty "ground burst" with incredible amounts of fallout contributed by the plant....let's not
Ever see what happens when someone tries to remove a whale from a beach with explosives?
We'll finally get to see where Leela's ancestors grew up, before moving to the big city :)
And the natural owner of the new Fukurama II nuclear plant would be Monty Burns-san!
hai! ehhhxcellent
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
LFTR will solve these problems -- but YOUR help is needed
Imagine a nuclear reactor so safe you can walk away from it or shut its internal power and it will mechanically drain its operating fluid into a vessel where it will just sit there.
Imagine that this process will be scalable from local megawatts to nation-wide terawatts by a simple replication of standard industrial components, with no increase in risk or change in the overall safety factor --- because it is not just an 'improvement' over present plants, risk of explosion or radiation leakage into the atmosphere is nil. Light and heavy water reactors operate at high pressure. This one doesn't.
Imagine that it has no need to be near a body of coolant water at all. No need to site it near a lake or stream or coastline. Imagine that it can (slowly, productively) help to turn all that spent fuel presently at nuclear plants into electricity. All of it.
Imagine that it can be manufactured here in the USA. Now (my fellow Americans) imagine that it should and must be manufactured in the USA, soon, to make us completely self-sufficient for grid energy, power a new era of electric transportation. And because I would (respectfully) prefer this technology we have conceived developed here --- rather than purchase it from the Chinese.
LFTR is the golden ticket. Perhaps the thing that could transform humanity.
But your help is needed... why?
Because for one reason or another, all of the people you'd "expect" to jump on this idea are not doing so. And more tragic still, most of us are merely "expecting" to hear more about it some day. Without your help, that day may never arrive.
One hundred years ago a great many people did not have running water, access to reliable transportation or grid electricity. Even though news travelled slowly on paper, people took an active interest in the science, process and product of infrastructure building.
Today that basic aging infrastructure is in place, we enjoy our electronic gadgets, expect electricity to arrive, wait for good things to happen. We expect our politicians to be generally informed about emerging technologies (they aren't, really) and we expect smart money to go after smart ideas in the marketplace (it does not, always).
You cannot expect the people who have invested so much in water cooled nuclear reactors to drop everything and work up completely new designs. They're not doing it! With LFTR they cannot sell their solid-fuel solutions. Which is not to say that they are incapable of adapting. But why should they? So long as LFTR is not a household word their mindset need not change.
You cannot expect environmentally conscious people who are (rightfully!) afraid of Chernobyl happening in their backyard to understand how different LFTR is at first. They must be pointed in the right direction, encouraged to research it on their own.
You cannot expect big philanthropist money to deliver miracles either in any reasonable time frame. Bill Gates is backing Travelling Wave Reactors, a type of Integral Fast Reactor that is cooled by (dangerous!) liquid sodium. It is the right idea (nuclear) wrong horse (approach) but he just does not know it yet.
But the biggest issue here is the urgency with which this idea needs to be pursued. These things need to be funded --- through your active interest and by mentioning it to at least two other people. At least ten thousand people from all walks of life (such as you) need to devote a little bit of time to get up to speed on this technology.
I nominate you! I am no real expert on the subject, I've only recently begun to research LFTR and in the material available on the net I see the idea proposed directly and succinctly five years ago, but so little has happened since then... well, it's shameful. I used to assume that good things just happen. They don't. A real eye opener.
So I am reaching out to you. It begins right here: Thorium Remix 2011
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You get the idea.
They should have rushed for the Pyramid wonder to improve the speed of their workers.
Pretty obvious lies. Why do people still bother spouting this garbage?
There have been several studies done showing that the Prius has a significantly lower environmental footprint than the average car.
Fukushima, in short, has cesium contamination like Chernobyl (because cesium is volatile at low temperatures) but basically none of the heavy isotope contamination. So we can fast forward about 20 years on the recovery (virtually the entire open-air dose rate near Chernobyl is now Cesium decay). So while the radiation levels at Chernobyl have decreased from lethal to sorta-dangerous relatively quickly, it will still be another 120 years or so until they go from sorta-dangerous to pretty-much-not-dangerous.
Personally, I'd guess that around 2040 (one more Cs half-life) enough of the radiation from both Chernobyl and Fukushima will be gone, either truly due to decay or apparently by diffusing into the ground away from the surface, that there will be significant human return to much of the exclusion zones, although monitoring will have to be ongoing for a long time.
In defense of "bury it," the sarcophagus at Chernobyl was built using late-Soviet era materials, under unbelievable constraints of time and construction difficulty. You try "doing it right" when your welders can literally work for about 15 minutes before they have to leave and never return, building structurally sound walls to support your dome is impossible, and all while knowing that every single vehicle and piece of equipment you bring in will have to be abandoned and left to rot because it's now Contaminated.
Any sarcophagus built at Fukushima will be as if construction at Chernobyl were to begin today: "This area is somewhat contaminated. Mind your dosimeter, wear your protective clothes, take a shower after every shift and don't lick your tools and you'll be fine. Oh, and smile for the tourists."
| will mechanically drain its operating fluid into a vessel where it will just sit there.
Until the rain and floods come in after the accident in which case you have steam explosions and radioactive waste in a highly water-soluble liquid combing to make all sorts of fun.
A LFTR is a chemical reprocessing plant with astonishingly racdioactive liquid (since it just came out of the fission core) circulating at hundreds of degrees with caustic chemical properties. There will be leaks. There will be breaches. Every drop is a huge problem. There will be----well anything that can go wrong in a hot chemical plant---now add in the fact that humans even in suits can't go in there for decades if something is wrong.
Nuclear reprocessing plants are the nastiest ones, because of the combination of liquids and radiaoactivity. I do not trust a utility with such an installation, and only want a tiny number of them, not every power plant to be one.
Personally, I'd guess that around 2040 (one more Cs half-life) enough of the radiation from both Chernobyl and Fukushima will be gone, either truly due to decay or apparently by diffusing into the ground away from the surface, that there will be significant human return to much of the exclusion zones, although monitoring will have to be ongoing for a long time.
Well, there is this thing with natural laws and the source of radiation.
You can have a long decay time or high radiation but not both.
The whole "being inhabitable for hundreds of thousands of years" means that you have extremely large amounts of something that is stable enough to be safe to handle.
| will mechanically drain its operating fluid into a vessel where it will just sit there.
Until the rain and floods come in after the accident in which case you have steam explosions and radioactive waste in a highly water-soluble liquid combing to make all sorts of fun.
The salts are not water soluble, and have no violent reactions with either air or water. Contrary to your claims of "all sorts of fun", ORNL even dumped some in a pool at one point, and it did little more than create some steam. Fluoride salts are among the most chemically stable substances on earth, and both the fissile and fission products remain safely dissolved in just about any imaginable circumstances. Even so, keeping water out is not an issue, as there is no need to site the plants anywhere near water.
A LFTR is a chemical reprocessing plant with astonishingly racdioactive liquid (since it just came out of the fission core) circulating at hundreds of degrees with caustic chemical properties. There will be leaks. There will be breaches. Every drop is a huge problem. There will be----well anything that can go wrong in a hot chemical plant---now add in the fact that humans even in suits can't go in there for decades if something is wrong.
The sort of reprocessing done for a LFTR is very different and far simpler than conventional nuclear reprocessing, and the rates for continuous processing are also very modest. The entire reprocessing system will fit along with the core in a small hot cell. The most dangerous volatile fission products are continuously off-gassed, and do not build up as in solid fuels. Thus even in the event of an accident, there is a very small amount of residual radioactivity, and still no driving force to push it into the environment.
Nuclear reprocessing plants are the nastiest ones, because of the combination of liquids and radiaoactivity. I do not trust a utility with such an installation, and only want a tiny number of them, not every power plant to be one.
If the continuous processing bothers you, there are variations of molten salt reactors like the DMSR that leave all of the fission products dissolved in the salts, and only require processing every 10-30 years. By the tone of your post though, it sounds like you are only interested in fear mongering, and not rational discussion.
Until the rain and floods come in after the accident in which case you have steam explosions and radioactive waste in a highly water-soluble liquid combing to make all sorts of fun.
I cannot much that isn't covered in Kaitiff's reply to your concern last December --- aside from pointing out we're talking about fluoride not sodium salts.
Even the most complicated designs for LFTR are simple at the bottom. Drains in the containment floor after a pipe rupture --- or at shutdown through a melted freeze plug, the liquid comes to rest in a vessel where it is already sub-critical.
Yes it's temperature-hot, for awhile. While the salts are not chemically reactive with water (or air), as long as they are hot water will flash to steam. This is days, perhaps.
The steam risk for an active or recently-dumped reactor would be related to how much water intrudes.
This industrial process like many must be sensibly contained and kept away from water. Fukushima had generators in a basement without water-tight doors. A superior level of engineering is called for. Shouldn't be too hard.
Water solubility is another matter, you're right. Actual residual waste from normal LFTR operation is extremely small in volume compared to waste from water reactors, and should be vitrified into glass for storage. Here is another area where LFTR shines, for it would take ~300 years to decay to the harmless level of natural uranium. Small volumes of 300-year waste in glass is a can-do solution..
But would the temperature-cold solidified salts abandoned in a concrete and steel LFTR drain tank pose a threat to the water table, soil?
Eventually, slightly. Does that seem like an uncomfortable answer?
Often discussions of nuclear accidents take on some "Life After People" flavor, where the person posing the challenge to waste (or disaster!) management seems to get free license to presume no attempt at cleanup or rescue.
I challenge that license. A position of zero tolerance for risk, especially for existential issues such as energy, is a luxury we can no longer afford. Especially when it comes to the due diligence we should bring to bear to assess new technology. I hope you can agree with that, because we are all so dependent on this modern way of life. It has its good moments.
At Chernobyl radioactive graphite presented a horrible challenge, to be near certain places is deadly.
Radioactivity from fissile elements in LFTR materials will be uniform (completely mixed as liquids are) and relatively low dose, predictable in characteristic and risk. There will be no danger of 'hot pockets' and unknowns as those which plague Chernobyl and Pripyat today.
Because it's just glop in a large bucket. It will stay in the bucket, and regardless of the nature of the mishap the glop will not explode all over the biosphere or fission forever. It will wait patiently until people clean it up and recycle the useable salts into other reactors.
This is "Life With People". We should always keep our thoughts centered on that because life is fun and people are cool.
Check out this documentary on George Westinghouse to glimpse what it was like when we were building infrastructure. Then please help give Thorium the chance it deserves.
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"public-to-forget-about-it-within-40-months"
40 months? How about 40 weeks. When is the last time you heard anything of substance about Fukushima?
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Bullshit. This nonsense has been refuted countless times.
Hit by a fricking wall of water several times larger than anybody had ever planned for and if it weren't for the fact that they put the generators in the basement there is a good chance it wouldn't have had an accident at all?
Yeah I'd call that pretty damned good, especially when our choices are that or burning fossil fuels..no renewables will NOT cut it, even the most pie in the sky estimates won't give us even 30% of the energy we are using NOW, much less give us jack shit for growth.
Does that mean we shouldn't build safer nuclear plants? Or sink money into R&D on renewables? Of course not, in fact I think we should be sinking more money into both instead of blowing cash playing the world's policeman, but you have to face reality and the reality is unless you are gonna wipe out a good 70% of the population on planet earth you are gonna need power and so far we haven't come up with anything that fills that need as good as nuclear.
Of course that is ignoring the fact that the USA has been crippled by the NIMBYs, you name it they cockblock it, in fact China will have a couple of dozen plants built before we can even get a single one built thanks to the NIMBYs. You name the source NIMBYs will find a reason to bitch, nuclear? "It'll make us glow in the dark ZOMG!" hydro? "ZOMG you'll kill teh fishes!" wind? "ZOMG its noisy and you'll kill teh birds!" and so on and so on. This is why I actually enjoyed watching California suffer their "energy crisis" and get buttraped by Enron because they have more NIMBYs per square mile than any place on the planet. I mean where do the NIMBYs think all that power they are blowing on their little laptops and AC units is gonna come from if they don't allow any plants to be built? Its just gonna be dropped by the power fairy?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The whole "being inhabitable for hundreds of thousands of years" means that you have extremely large amounts of something that is stable enough to be safe to handle.
It depends a lot on the contaminant. Something like tritium is a problem, for example, because it has a relatively short half life, but it will bond to oxygen and form water and if you drink it then it can cause serious problems. Radon gas is also a problem (present in a lot of places with granite) because it is heavier than air and so accumulates in any enclosed space: if you breathe it in then it is quite dangerous.
There's also the problem that a lot of the byproducts of a nuclear reactor are only mildly radioactive, but highly toxic for other reasons. The low decay rate means that they remain toxic chemicals for a long time. On the other hand, this isn't too different from any other chemical plant if there's an accident.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"Land uninhabitable for generations, 40+ years cleanup, trillions in compensation - yeah, I'd say it all went fairly well!"
Not to mention that all the radioactive waste has to be guarded for thousands of generations.
"So basically, actual real world experience tells us 40 years is far longer than is actually required for 'safety' once you pull your head out of your ass and base your world view on actual science."
So you bought some real-estate real cheap there for your retirement?
Yes and no. It's true that isotopes with longer half lives are less radioactive in a prompt sense, but it also matters what the type of decay is and what it decays into.
If you have something that undergoes fission slowly, but gives off gamma radiation and splits into a chain of very nasty stuff that has half-life measured in minutes, you've got a problem.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Greens want to move to more modern technology. Nuke nuts want to stick with a very inefficient method to boil water. The solid state tech in solar panels is much newer and much more elegant that trying to hold a bunch of poisonous fuel right on the edge of disaster, fuel that is so fragile that the temperature has to be kept low to avoid damage and the thermodynamic efficiency is much lower than for coal or gas plants. No, it is the nuke nuts who want to impede progress.
At the current accident rate, in sixty years there will be enough area in permanent exclusion zones that all world nuclear power could be replaced using solar power on that area alone. Seems like a better use of land would be to avoid the future accidents and replace nuclear power now. It would be cheaper. http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-Center/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly
It wasn't due to proliferation risk, it was cost. All the LSFR reactors ever built were research testbeds and experienced major problems. None ever recycled fuel successfully in the way that would be needed for them to be commercially viable.
The cost of development would be huge and the potential risks to the ROI are worrying to investors. It would make sense for the government to try to build one, if it were able to see beyond the next election or two and didn't have better options like renewables and fusion to throw money at.
These things are just not commercially viable I'm afraid.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Remember that they kill off whistle-blowers in the nuclear industry. Just mention the name Silkwood and chuckle and no one is going to say anything. The example of Tommy Hook helps with the intimidation.
Oh, I don't doubt that they could do a better job(both because it isn't as hot, and because we probably now have access to robots that are even more radiation tolerant than soviet conscripts...); but the sarcophagus is just the most notable example of the fact that actually encapsulating something properly(so that it doesn't just keep bleeding contaminated rainwater forever) gets surprisingly tricky if you have to build the enclosure under radiation constraints, and you can't necessarily just send in a maintenance guy whenever you feel like it.
Given the number of "TEPCO reluctantly announces that local seawater radiation levels suggest that they've got another leak, they just have no idea where" stories, I'm less than 100% optimistic about their ability to encapsulate something for long term storage, though the conditions are certainly more favorable than Chernobyl.
Not really. Anything that is very dangerous in a radiological sense has a short half life. Anything with a half life in the millions of years is not highly radioactive. Plus, a lot of nuclear waste could be reprocessed. We just choose not to.
There are valid concerns with the above points. Heavy metal poisoning can kill you as easily as radiation. Reprocessing nuclear waste has its own issues. But nothing is perfect. Solar tends to kill more people from falls during installation than nuclear does overall.
If you are interested in costs, Amory Lovins' book "Reinventing Fire" goes into great detail. http://www.rmi.org/ReinventingFire Large scale renewables with new transmission turns out to be the cheapest approach. He still prefers smaller scale methods owing to their robustness to large scale disruption. Nuclear is the most expensive option.
French ones actually do when the temperatures get into the mid 30s. A few summers ago they had to shut a load down and dump hot water into rivers (killing the fish living there) when ambient temperatures got too high and the cooling systems were unable to cope.
Keep in mind the French are supposed to have the best and safest nuclear plants in the world, but apparently forgot to account for warm weather.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Hit by a fricking wall of water several times larger than anybody had ever planned for
We knew tsunamis could be that large. The plant owners were told the wall was not adequate, but to save a few pennies, they opted to ignore the warnings and lean hard on any balky engineers and safety inspectors to accept it. They also used propaganda to discredit and minimize the warnings. Took nature to show the world how very wrong they were. Then, it turned out that the failsafes also hadn't been maintained, to save a few more pennies. Don't buy their bull about the "unprecedented" size of the tsunami, and that no one could have predicted it. There was precedent, it was predicted, and the predictions were correct. There's no excuse for the reckless gambles they took. Fukushima was entirely a human failure.
no renewables will NOT cut it
Ultimately, renewables will have to cut it. Or what do you think we will do when the non-renewables run out? And they will run out, that's why they are called non-renewables.
I'll happily accept nuclear power as a stopgap the moment someone figures a way to stop criminally reckless and irresponsible disregard of safety. Same goes for offshore oil drilling. We will decide how much risk we will accept. We should not allow a few greedy fools to take far higher risks than known or agreed to. If we cannot be sure nuclear power operators will behave responsibly, then we shouldn't use it at all. And there is another reason not to use nuclear power. It's too easy to turn power plants into bomb factories. How else can you explain the preference for uranium and plutonium reactors, over thorium? I'd rather see the nation awash in small arms easily obtained by mentally disturbed people, than see idiot politicians and gung ho generals with easy access to nuclear bombs.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Except that when you buy a Prius, you're probably throwing away a perfectly serviceable vehicle. What's the environmental cost of that?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
it's more a problem with proliferation than "we don't like Canadian designs."
CANDU designs, through their use of heavy water, produce Tritium, which can then be used in a "boosted fission" weapon design. Is the amount of Tritium enough to hold back adoption of CANDU? No, but it is a concern that comes up.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
That incident you are referring to was the result of an idiot bureaucracy with a culture of unaccountability that decided it was the Highway Department's responsibility to clear it, because the whale wasn't within the border of a State Park, and at the time, Oregon classified the beach as highway. And guess what's in the Highway Department's toolbox for clearing large obstructions? Big yellow excavation equipment, and TNT.
So, they used half a ton of dynamite.
More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_whale
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Fukushima is not done yet. While it is true that the chain reactions have stopped, there is sufficient decay heat being generated that managing its festering corpse is an on-going problem: structures are continuing to deform and fuel rods may still be rupturing. The potential for steam or chemical explosions capable of breaching the containment is still there. And might be for decades. No one has any experience in handling a zombie nuclear plant.
Persons who read only the simplified nuclear industry reports and analyses are neglecting the incredibly complex chemical problems that are happening in that environment of intense heat and multiple reactants, many of which have behaviors under those conditions that have never been explored in the laboratory. You could write a book about the chemistry happening in a candle's flame; what is going on in Fukushima is much more complex than that.
Hell, we don't even know how to handle the canned waste at Hanford; we don't even know how to figure out what is going on in those tanks. Fukushima is many times more complex than that.
Will
I agree with your stance on everything except this point: A position of zero tolerance for risk, especially for existential issues such as energy, is a luxury we can no longer afford.
A position of zero tolerance for risk, especially for existential issues such as energy, is a fallacy, an impossibility, and has never existed and is not obtainable.
FTFY
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Another FUD article by the mdsolar troll. He would rather have us go back to the stone age than have electricity.
Hey Soulskill, when will you grow up and recognize the troll posters rampant on this site?
And by the way, 40 years is nothing in the nuclear industry. The "clean-up" period for a typical reactor is something like 50 or 100 years. They leave the core in place to "cool off" before they remove it. And no, mdsolar, leaving a core in place for years will not cause another Fukushima or Nagasaki. Yeah, buddy!
There is a lot of merit to parent post.
Basically there is nothing at all wrong with fission power technology; we know how to do it and we know how to do it safely (and we could probably figure out a safe way to store the waste, too).
But there is something fundamentally wrong with human beings since in any large undertaking you can be sure that some of them will NOT do the right thing for whatever reason: personal profit, or just plain stupidity. That's okay for a lot of things where failures are acceptable. It is not okay with nuclear power plants. To make good use of fission power we need to make better human beings who will not fuck up.
And we don't have a clue about how to do that.
Will
So you bought some real-estate real cheap there for your retirement?
That would make a lot more sense if:
1. There was actually land available for sale 'cheap' - the Ukraine government has basically nationalized all of it and turned it into a state park.
2. It was somewhere I'd otherwise want to go. Not speaking Ukrainian or even Russian, the language barrier is a bigger obstacle than the price
Same holds true for Japan, really.
I don't read AC A human right
I'm not sure why this doesn't come up when they talk about where to bury the waste - building a reactor to make use of it IS an option.
Follow the money. Who would profit if we did build such reactors? Who is profiting from the current situation? Producers of nuclear fuel profit, who else?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
.
Ultimately, renewables will have to cut it. Or what do you think we will do when the non-renewables run out? And they will run out, that's why they are called non-renewables.
We have reserves for thousands of years of economic nuclear power, and we haven't even explored all that much for it. The problem I have is that right now Natural Gas and even COAL is expanding faster in the USA than renewables are, as an absolute metric.
I'll happily accept nuclear power as a stopgap the moment someone figures a way to stop criminally reckless and irresponsible disregard of safety. Same goes for offshore oil drilling.
Oddly enough, the USA and France seem to be doing pretty good in this regard. I remember hearing reports that one of the critical safety updates(a hydrogen burn-off system), was declined by the Fukushima authorities, which would have prevented the explosions. It was uniformly installed in stateside plants over 30 years ago.
What I'd like to see is a new generation of nuclear plants here in the states - shut down the nastiest coal plants and the oldest, least safe nuclear plants.
One thing that I like to point out was that of the 3 nuclear plants to suffer a major disaster, Fukushima was actually the oldest.
It's too easy to turn power plants into bomb factories. How else can you explain the preference for uranium and plutonium reactors, over thorium? I'd rather see the nation awash in small arms easily obtained by mentally disturbed people, than see idiot politicians and gung ho generals with easy access to nuclear bombs.
Uh... Especially when you're looking at countries like the USA, we're already 'awash' in nuclear weapons, which makes the 'easy access to nuclear bombs' already a given. We ended up finding easier ways to make nuclear weapons than scavanging nuclear plants for the materials. Still, at that point the Uranium chain was better known and had fewer problems. I'd LOVE to see a serious attempt to build a power generating liquid thorium plant here in the states, even as I'd also like to see solar panels on all roofs in the south... We still need a variety of power sources.
I don't read AC A human right
Fusion reactors don't exist and renewables are so absurdly expensive that relying on them would collapse what's left of the economy. Meanwhile, fossil fuels are running out and fission is scary.
We might have to accept that the time of cheap energy and with it the high point of human civilization is past, in which case the relevant questions are: how orderly will the transition back to pre-industrial agrarian poverty be? Can we keep relatively peaceful nation-states intact in the face of increasingly costly communication and transportation? How will we re-educate the vast majority of population who's skills are completely useless in a primitive society? And how will we deal with the inevitable die-off as agricultural output plummets?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/04/14/1858811/is-70-renewable-power-possible-portugal-just-did-it-for-3-months/ Clueless you seem.
What, you mean the one that my wife was working in the fields around 40 miles downwind from, for a week following the "event", and she didn't die an immediate, screaming, horrible death. In fact, she still hasn't died a screaming, horrible death. In fact, we're not sure if there have been any adverse health effect that can be unambiguously laid at the door of that "event", because her health is within the normal range of health variations.
Radiation is dangerous. So is driving fast, being a member of a species that lives on one planet without adequate meteorite deflection technologies, or breathing oxygen. As for eating too much of the wrong stuff - positively lethal!
Because radiation (and all those other things) is dangerous, doesn't mean that it is instantly utterly lethal. Don't let your "dread" (which the characteristics of radiation are undeniably good at triggering) overrule your head!
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Doses far too low, and more importantly, undirected.
Doses ridiculously too low.
Errr, you do know that X-rays, gamma rays, and positrons are three different things? It's written on the back of your Geek card, somewhere in one of the microdots. What do you mean - you've left your electron microscope in your other leather-elbow-patched jacket?
Doses far too low for effective sterilisation, so it'd actually be negatively effective because of the increased birth defect rate.
No, I don't. Are you trying to be sarcastic, but haven't made it to chapter 2 of "Sarcasm for Dummies" (chapter 4 of the American edition)?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
So, what do you advocate? Killing them all, or just killing the profit motive? Destroying greed and venality? Good luck on getting those turkeys to vote for that Christmas!
Back to the primordial slime for vertebrates then! I hold out fairly high hopes for the cephalopod molluscs, particularly if you use the ones with external skeletons, eyes, good brains, and at least some potential for getting out of the water.
See the signature line. I haven't changed it for ages.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Just what we want to look forward to, fluorine to melt your bones before the radiation could damage them.
No radiation problem at all.
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Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The problem with TEPCO is that their top management has been late 10 years to their hanging. Their disregard to safety, their countrymen and even to investors is appalling.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Perhaps the management could be used to mitigate the risks to innocent construction workers in the creation of a suitable sarcophagus... I wouldn't trust their competence; but I'd be willing to let them keep working, without dosimeters, until they drop...
Doses far too low, and more importantly, undirected.
Doses ridiculously too low.
Errr, you do know that X-rays, gamma rays, and positrons are three different things? It's written on the back of your Geek card, somewhere in one of the microdots. What do you mean - you've left your electron microscope in your other leather-elbow-patched jacket?
Doses far too low for effective sterilisation, so it'd actually be negatively effective because of the increased birth defect rate.
No, I don't. Are you trying to be sarcastic, but haven't made it to chapter 2 of "Sarcasm for Dummies" (chapter 4 of the American edition)?
Sorry. Next time I'll try to dial it down a few notches so you can understand.
Suppose a windmill lasts, on average, 20 years before needing replacement. That means you need to replace 1/20th of them every year just to keep the production capacity where it is. This means a huge, permanent money sink. And the same goes for solar panels too, of course.
The problem is that renewables are quite dispersed, so you need lots and lots and lots of infrastructure to gather them, which needs lots and lots and lots of maintenance. Also, to actually perform this maintenance you need roads (which also need to be maintained) and you also need to transmit the power somehow.
But at a cost.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Sorry for the late response. I didn't mean LSFR. Breeder reactors work. France uses them to recycle spent fuel. The official reason not to use them in the US is proliferation risk. It's not a technical problem, and the cost of "disposal" this way should be passed on the plants generating the waste. Simple as that.