Slashdot Mirror
Fukushima Decontamination Cost Estimated $50bn, With Questionable Effectiveness
AmiMoJo writes "Experts from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology studied the cost of decontamination for the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, estimating it at $50 billion. They estimate that decontamination in no-entry zones will cost up to 20 billion dollars, and in other areas, 31 billion dollars. It includes the cost of removing, transporting and storing radioactive waste such as contaminated soil. The central government has so far allocated about 11 billion dollars and the project is already substantially behind schedule. Meanwhile the effectiveness of the decontamination is being questioned. NHK compared data from before and after decontamination at 43 districts in 21 municipalities across Fukushima Prefecture. In 33 of the districts, or 77 percent of the total, radiation levels were still higher than the government-set standard of one millisievert per year. In areas near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, where decontamination has been carried out on an experimental basis, radiation levels remain 10 to 60 times higher than the official limit."
That's all?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
really? japan.. you could have created a mega gigantic mecha with that $50,000,000,000
$50bn buys a lot of wind turbines and container sized sodium batteries to even out the load.
[author's note: this is not meant as a troll, $50bn DOES buy a lot of them]
There are places where the natural background radiation levels are ten to twenty times the official Japanese limit. And still people happily live there.
The incident handling has done a stellar job of scaring people but not so much of giving useful perspective. Given that the plants were forty year old designs and due for closure and how they help up regardless, the political fall-out remains much, much worse than the actual impact. It's still being labeled "disaster" by some, when in reality what happened is entirely incomparable with, say, Chernobyl, in environmental inpact. A little perspective would do us good here.
This is dumb, insensitive, and offensive. Nuclear accidents have nothing to do with people lobbing atomic bombs at you, especially atomic that are redundant and being lobbed for the sake of doing a live test. Maybe it's the US who have a bad record with responsible use of weaponry...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
This is a 50 billion dollar (or yen equivalent) public relations exercise. The government wants to look like it is actually doing something about an issue it has zero control over now.
The Japanese government doesn't want to admit the truth that these areas are going to remain uninhabitable for hundreds, if not, thousands of years - because it promised the Japanese people that they would be able to return to their homes. The technology doesn't exist to clean up all this contaminated land. TEPCO continues to cover up how bad the situation is at the plant, just like they did from day 0 of the disaster.... and the mass media in Japan continues to sweep all the depressing problems under the carpet and out of view of the public as if the nuclear contamination can be cleaned up with a big enough vacuum cleaner and enough time.
They don't want to admit the ugly truth, and want to keep perpetuating this lie that people will be able to safely return to their homes..... one day.
If they ever return, they'll all get higher risk of cancers and the government and TEPCO will disavow that the reactors had anything to do with it because they "decontaminated" the area.... most likely. Just an excuse to try and dodge legal culpability.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
You should probably stop being offended on the internet and read a few history books regarding the WWII atomic bombs; particularly the stance taken by Japanese leaders in the face of defeat prior to the bombing.
Over 50% of my town is over 1mSv/yr and nobody is campaigning for it to be decontaminated. My suburb is at about the .97 mark so I must be safe... I'm about a 1/4 of a planet away from Fukushima and not downwind.
Whats the bet that most of these areas have been above 1mSv/yr since the solar system formed. How many of these 77% are actually contaminated and by how much?
Nuclear power is still the cheapest and best option there is! /greed
I mean... It's not like the power company has to pay that 50 billion right?
Nuclear is not a good option until it can be run completely seperated and insulated from the failings of humans and human greed. The money we've spent cleaning up the few nuclear problems we've had in the short time nuclear power has been around could have gone a long long LONG way to something much cleaner and safer.
How many wind farms could you build for just 50 billion? How many solar panels would that buy? 50 billion into fusion research would be neat.
Don't get me wrong tho. Nuclear could be perfect. If it were run by robots or something... Who don't cut corners, build on the cheap, get lazy, forget maint, take bribes or any of the other silly shit humans do.
But so long as it's humans.. And more precisely human businesses that run nuke plants.... We shouldn't do it.
When you talk about technologies that have brought suffering, lots of suffering was caused in Japan (and other places) by incendiary bombs made with napalm, which is petroleum derived. Should Japan not use petroleum products either?
When we evaluate algorithms we consider all cases, with probability and outcome. We should start doing that for nuclear power too.
But I am no optimist, it appears the objective is not cheap energy for everyone (or the focus would be on alternative reactor kinds and reactions), but poisoning the environment (a much more profitable scheme for those who control therapies).
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Except that a nuclear bomb and a nuclear reactor are only the same in that they have the same Joe Sixpack/media stigma attached to both of them. Here, let me use an analogy.
Not building a nuclear reactor in Japan because of the previous use of the atomic bomb due to concerns of insensitivity is roughly the same as the United States of America not building the Saturn V because the use of rocket propelled grenades against troops in Vietnam. Completely different devices for completely different ends.
You should read a history book that wasn't written in the U.S. by a nuclear bomb apologist.
The negotiations for Japans surrender started before the bombs were dropped. It is stipulated that one of the reasons the bombs were used anyway was to demonstrate the power of them to scare Soviet.
Regardless of the reasons both the targets were selected because they had a large population around them surrounded by high ground for the extra oomph. There were stronger military targets that could have been chosen, the amount of civilian deaths were intentionally high.
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." - Dwight Eisenhower
"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons." - Admiral William D. Leahy
"...the Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945...up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped; ...if such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to drop the [atomic] bombs." - Herbert Hoover
"...when we didn't need to do it, and we knew we didn't need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn't need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs." - Brigadier General Carter Clarke
Don't get me wrong, I don't try to defend Japans atrocities during/before the war, I'm just saying that one atrocity doesn't justify another.
I don't believe they should have huge petro based power plants that should something go amiss incinerate exceptionally large areas and make them un-livable well beyond your life span, causing slow deaths to large populations with birth defects years to come.
That statement is just as silly as if you said 'OH, well bullets kill, and are made of metal, maybe no one should use metal there either?!'
I disagree with nuclear reactors in populated areas that should the worse happen would kill / destroy people's health. /huge/ accidents. I don't object to nuclear technology on small scale, submarines, space craft etc, where the risks
Most people ignore potential problems because it's never happened. Some people don't lock doors until something is stolen from them, as an example.
Japan had first hand experience with how deadly radiation is.
They should know the risks better than anyone, and I think the risks weren't worth it. Clearly it's hindsight now but I know I wouldn't want
a large scale nuclear reactor anywhere near me.
Accidents happen, but these become
are significantly lower.
I would mod you up if it weren't for your insensitive use of a offensive font.
This is dumb, insensitive, and offensive.
You know it, you admit it, and yet you use the monospaced font anyway.
Ezekiel 23:20
Where are all those guys that said there was no contamination now? How about the ones that wrote here that containment would never be breached - right up until the point where the roof blew off one of the buildings?
It's an interesting exercise to look back at the comments posted here during the week of the disaster.
Another thing the fanboys cannot tell is the difference between not liking a 1970s era nuclear power plant run badly and not liking nuclear power in general. Calling for safer reactors is not cheering blindly for the team so is an enemy in their eyes.
I don't think that's quite the same.
Both nuclear bombs and reactors go through a process known as fission. /only/ difference is the enrichment process and rate of decay.
Both can use uranium 235, most do.
The
Enriched uranium allows it to react faster to the decay which promotes more neutrons, which causes more decay, which causes even more neutrons,
and the process continues.
Chernobyl - That's what happens when it gets out of hand and goes too fast. Too much heat is generated, melts casing, destroys reactor roads, metldown.
This is also what happened in Japan due to the tsunami, just not a complete failure like Chernobyl (Thank god / science / whatever you believe in that's good)
Nuclear bomb does the same thing. Just more enriched, faster reaction (Well, multitudes faster) and you get a massive thermal release, shockwave
and radiation spread.
I don't think it's more of a sensitivity thing as more as of 'Actually, we know exactly how devastating this is, not something simulated or based on statistic, we actually know first hand, and maybe shouldn't do this'
Analogy? I wanted to have something really clever to compare it to. But really, I don't. It's a terrible thing that happened.
Much like many things in history, we should do our best not to repeat it.
A significant group of Japanese army officers tried to stage a coup to prevent the emperor from surrendering. After the bombs dropped. You underestimate how insane the people running the country were at the time.
That is nothing, Sellafield clean up cost stands at £67.5bn as of February this year, with no sign when the cost will stop rising.
A coup that failed and that wasn't predicted before the bombs were dropped. It was completely irrelevant to the justification for dropping the bombs.
As far as anyone could tell it was just as likely the overaggression of the bombs that caused the officers eagerness to not surrender.
I wondered why electric bill for my Tokyo apartment suddenly 10.000.000 yen per month! All I use is little LED light to read comic and charger for cell phone, not even rice cooker because can't afford rice to put in it!
That statement is just as silly as if you said 'OH, well bullets kill, and are made of metal, maybe no one should use metal there either?!'
Well, that's pretty much the statement that you made.
I happen to live in Tokyo. The amount of actual damage from Fukushima is pretty small. They currently have a radius of 20 km from the plant closed off. That's not very big. Let's not forget that the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami killed over 30,000 people. No one has died as a result of the radiation from Fukushima to date and current estimates are that it's not going to be very many, even when you look at the lifetime increased risk from cancer.
The comparison to petroleum is reasonable. BP claims to have spent, so far, $11B cleaning up the Deepwater Horizon spill and may wind up spending $37B which is in the same ballpark as the Fukushima mess. Is it acceptable? No. There were a number of ways that the Fukushima disaster could have been avoided. However, in the scale of industrial accidents, it's not that far out of line and it's killed a lot fewer people than other notable disasters, like Bhopal, and in the context of the overall disaster, it simply grabs the most headlines.
Your statement "Japan had first hand experience with how deadly radiation is. They should know the risks better than anyone, and I think the risks weren't worth it." is just as silly as your original point and is just as silly as the statement you yourself called out as being silly.
Yes, that's silly. Just as silly that because of the A-bomb they should not use nuclear powerplants, for exactly the same reasons.
You know, the problem with oil-burning power plants (and in Japan that's what they are using to substitute the currently off-line nuclear power plants) that nothing has to "go amiss" for them to cause slow deaths and birth defects (and, I should add, currently there's nothing to suggest that the Fukushima incident will result in slow death or birth defects).
Real life is overrated.
On the other hand, what are the alternatives? Coal releases more radioactivity than nuclear (plus other nastiness). Japan doesn't have terribly much space so large-scale land-based wind and solar might not work. I think they also don't have enough large rivers for hydro. I'm not sure whether offshore wind parks would be feasible but given the fact that the area is tsunami-prone they might be tricky to maintain.
That essentially leaves us with geothermal (nice but only works in few areas), oil (doesn't have a good track record either) and nuclear.
Nuclear can be safe, you just need to treat it with the proper respect. The largest nuclear accidents happened because people were dangerously irresponsible. The Fukushima accident could've been avoided if a) TEPCO had listened to the experts and installed higher flood walls, b) TEPCO hadn't decided to build the backup power infrastructure in such a way that it would be guaranteed to fail once a likely threat to the plant's safety occurred and c) Japan had ensured that all offsite backup generators were actually compatible with all reactors in the country. There were other screwups involved but avoiding any of these would've made the plant flooding a non-issue.
Yes, nuclear power can be immensely dangerous if not done right. So can petrochemistry and a lot of other industries; nuclear power is just harder to clean up and thus we need to be more careful around it. I get that. But really, we can make safe, reasonably clean nuclear work if we just make damn sure that the people involed aren't idiots or willfully negligent. For instance, we could install third-party oversight committees with the power to make unannounced inspections, ask uncomfortable questions and shut down a plant if they don't like what they hear. Also, add extra-strict anti-corruption laws for eveyone involved. In case of falsified safety records (also something TEPCO did, although as far as I know not directly relevant to the disaster) launch a full-scale investigation against the entire company and jail everyone who knew of it and didn't report it, piercing the corporate veil.
Nuclear power is not somehing you dick around with. We're in agreement on that. But the way forward is not to assume that there are no responsible people on Earth and thus we can't ever use nuclear power, it's to instate harsh rules that force people to behave responsibly. That means fewer nuke plants because running one will be more expensive and will take actual effort. But those plants we get should be acceptably safe.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Do you take X-Ray exams? Do you fly with an airplane? Do you eat bananas? You should start to get your facts straight. The effect of nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors are significantly different. We had very little real nuclear catastrophes and on total the casualties are low, if you need the info, Wikipedia can help you out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents
Let's compare Deepwater Horizon to the Fukushima Daiichi.
Fatalities: 11 vs 0 (no significant increase in cancer risk projected, except two worker with added 10%)
Effect on Environment: the Gulf flora and fauna where almost fully eradicated vs minor radiation pollution, not more than some natural sources
If you think people should stop using nuclear power in japan. Well then start to advocate that all bordering the Gulf of Mexico to stop using cars.
No-one has any idea how many people this disaster has, or will, cause. Just as the exact number of deaths and disabilities from the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan, or for that matter from the use of agent orange in Vietnam.
All I know is that I will NEVER trust people to run fission power stations as people cut corners and lie. They do so when government owned, and they do so when owned by a company.
TEPCO have consistently lied about the details of this problem, including denying leakage into the ocean, and denying that there had been meltdown (or two). Two years later there is still unexplained steam rising from parts of the plant. At one stage they were pumping in huge amounts of seawater to cool the thing down. Where do you think it went?
So, they may have a 'radius of 20km' from the plant closed off, which by the way is 600 square kilometers (assuming a half circle), but would you trust that statement with your life?
This often causes me to go against the grain slightly but I don't believe that adding fuel to the fire is okay because someone added more fuel prior.
Just because you can find things that have reportedly killed more people doesn't mean things that kill less people should be encouraged.
The problem with radiation is that the full effects are never measured, or at least avoided.
Quite frankly they don't want people to be afraid of nuclear power plants because let's face it, they're profitable and ignoring the safety risks, an excellent way
to generate electricity, cheaply.
I don't people should exactly fear them either, but I'm certainly against them being anywhere near me.
I still stand by my statement about experience.
I used to leave change in my old car (It was a junker anyway) visible in the middle section. So someone busted my window and stole my change.
I was told it was a bad idea to do that, I was told someone would break in, and I ignored it until it happened.
I try not to do that anymore, if something is likely to happen, I really think about it and try to avoid it, instead of waiting for it to happen, then avoiding it in the future which is the common response.
I would think that having delt with radiation prior people would be 'No way'
Japans government also tries very hard to maintain a positive image. I really do hope things aren't that bad as they say.
Given the history of spills I also believe that going after oil is dangerous and is something we need to step away from as well as it keeps happening.
I'm a firm believer in developing alternative renewable energy sources as we can to increase safety. I don't believe in any energy source as 100% safe,
but when something goes wrong with a hydro dam, somewhere as far as Japan, you don't end up with radiation in the snow on the west coast of Canada.
Sure, maybe it's not so bad for Tokyo, but even if no one "dies" from it, it's reached out pretty far. Setting up for events like this to happen
again and again sounds like a bad idea (And the definition of insanity - performing the same action over and over yet expecting different results)
I don't mean just Japan either, I don't rather much like the idea of large scale nuclear reactors period, anywhere.
People get , maybe radiation caused it, but they'll definitely tell you 'Well, you could have gotten X anyway so it might not be the radiation and these other no radiation things could have caused it' time and time again. Call it safe, build another plant.
P.S No the radiation levels weren't lethal or expected to cause any health concerns, but just a point at how far that stuff travels. Given how much radioactive water was dumped into the ocean....
As I commented to someone else actually I'm a firm believer in alternative energy sources. I would love to see more hydrogen powered cars because I believe there is significant risks with oil drilling and the deaths it causes. I don't believe any power source is 100% safe, but I do believe in reduction of risks.
I don't think you should tote the ,line though. People have always feared radiation and for good reason. Governments and corporations do love
nuclear power plants as they're a cheap profitable way to generate electricity. Deaths are always downplayed.
You can get yet you will be told every other thing that can cause it, and that psht...radiation probably had nothing to do with it,
unless you have hard proof.
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/07/22/12884007-reports-workers-told-to-underplay-fukushima-radiation-dosage?lite
Probably should have a read at that too - that's just the things we find out about. People often do not get the full details of the true risks.
People cheating to hide radiation dosage levels and so on. So it might be a little worse than you think.
OK, coal is not a replacement, agreed.
... is Japan like Belgium?
But Japan is a series of north-south islands with an enormous coastline on an ocean, and lots of mountains where probably not much agriculture is possible. It sounds absolutely ideal for wind power to me.
Yes of course offshore wind park repair costs will be large after the next tsunami, but maybe it will flow past the wind pylons (there was something weird with how a tsunami propagates under water). However, I don't know if Japan has much of a continental shelf under water, so it may be impossible to have the same kind of offshore wind parks as in the North Sea and Baltic Sea off Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany and the UK.
I also read that Japan has two different electrical nets, it sounds to me that they would benefit greatly long-term if they were unified at whatever cost. Unless the Hokkaidians (sp?) hate the Kyushians (sp?), of course
fritsd
And the malfeasance IS NOT possible to remove from the equation until the management all live by law above the nuclear reactor with their family, meaning that one company can only be running one nuclear power station, which means not possible.
Think of this: if the plant were making fluffy coverlets for people in the North, would the same level of malpractice be causing $50bn of clean-up costs?
No?
So what is causing that?
Oh, it being a NUCLEAR POWER STATION.
I guess we CAN blame this problem on it, then.
Your "figure" is complete and utter hogwash.
Meaningless.
Because the radiation is different. If it were the same radiation, Denver would have been evacuated 50 years ago: the USA's limits are the same.
1mg of sodium will be unpleasant.
1mg of strychnine will kill you.
Both weigh EXACTLY THE SAME.
YOU would be trying to say they're the same.
YOU are wrong.
those in power in the US
Here, insert this into your post instead of implying strongly that there's a huge segment of the US population that doesn't exist...
Enriched uranium allows it to react faster to the decay which promotes more neutrons, which causes more decay, which causes even more neutrons,
and the process continues.
Chernobyl - This is also what happened in Japan due to the tsunami, just not a complete failure like Chernobyl (Thank god / science / whatever you believe in that's good)
What are you on about? The Fukushima reactors were scrammed minutes before the tsunami arrived, in response to the original earthquake. The meltdown was the result of the cooling system failure and the residual decay heat. Absolutely nothing like Chernobyl or an atomic weapon.
The comparison to petroleum is reasonable.
Not really as no-one is suggesting it as an alternative to electricity generation. I'm sure someone will mention coal but that isn't what people opposed to nuclear power are arguing or either. Before someone else mentions unicorn farts let me remind them that Germany is 40% renewable now and still far from finished transitioning. Germany is not a sunny, warm country either.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Germany is NOT 40% renewable. It's about 15% renewable and falling rapidly, because of all that nice new shiny coal-burning powerplants.
Some other troubling news: TEPCO reciently admitted that Fukushima has been leaking radioactive water into the sea for the last two years:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/11/world/asia/japanese-nuclear-plant-may-have-been-leaking-for-two-years.html?_r=0
"Until recently, Tokyo Electric, known as Tepco, flatly denied that any of that water was leaking into the ocean, even though various independent studies of radiation levels in the nearby ocean have suggested otherwise. In recent days, Tepco has retreated to saying that it was not sure whether there was a leak into the ocean.
Mr. Tanaka said that the evidence was overwhelming.
âoeWeâ(TM)ve seen for a fact that levels of radioactivity in the seawater remain high, and contamination continues â" I donâ(TM)t think anyone can deny that,â he said Wednesday at a briefing after a meeting of the authorityâ(TM)s top regulators. âoeWe must take action as soon as possible."
Er exactly like Chernobyl but contained better, sort of, at least in the air.
20k limit...Chernobyl only has a 30k radius, without even having ocean to dump it into.
Chernobyl - Meltdown
Fukushima - Meltdown
You'll see they share the same word.
Chernobyl's cooling system failed to prevent a chain reaction too.
Key differences - Chernobyl did not have an ocean nearby to cool it / dump radioactive water everywhere.
It's like saying you were in a car crash. If you crash at 10 kmh/mph or 30 kmh/mph, you still crashed.
Chernobyl's radioactive crap was blasted into the air when it blew off a 1000 concrete seal.
Fukushima was dumped into the ocean.
Literrally. They even admit they believe it drained out into the ocean.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/japan/130722/fukushima-radioactive-water-leaking-pacific-ocean
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/05/fukushima-meltdown-manmade-disaster
3 reactor meltdown.
So hopefully less damaging by spreading out the radiation through the ocean, hopefully the dillution prevents any adverse affects.
P.S We got radio active snow / ice on the west coast of Canada now, northern side. Not anywhere considered lethal or suspected to be harmful, but uh, yeah.
P.P.S Or you can say 'We detected an increased level of radiation in the snow' Vs whatever levels they are normally at from previous incidents/natural sources.
Another idea could also be not to build the traditional nuclear-plants that where designed for producing material for nuclear weapons..
Thorium reactors can be one alternative but there are more variants that can also be safe.
The point i'm trying to make is that there are ways to build reactors so they are basically impossible to go critical.. As long as the containment building can survive anything that we or nature can throw at it we are pretty much safe, talking about no need for human oversight or even electricity...
But really long for the day when fusion-reactors will be the standard..... Or maybe if someone could in a cheap and effective way do direct conversion from radioactivity to electricity, this would allow for low radioactive sources to be used and it could be deployed to extract energy from the already existing depots of discarded fuel.
This often causes me to go against the grain slightly but I don't believe that adding fuel to the fire is okay because someone added more fuel prior.
I disagree. Argument via reduction to absurdity is a valid and useful tool, especially for the sort of argument we're seeing in the comments to this story.
but when something goes wrong with a hydro dam, somewhere as far as Japan, you don't end up with radiation in the snow on the west coast of Canada.
But you do on occasion end up with a lot of dead people which is a considerably worse outcome than being able to detect slightly larger trace amounts of radioactive isotopes in Canadian snow. And hydroelectric dams displace more land than nuclear reactor accidents do.
I really do hope things aren't that bad as they say.
For people who make a career of crying "wolf", it almost never is as bad as they say.
Well, nuclear causes less death's than any other energy-source..
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/
http://www.geekosystem.com/coal-oil-nuclear-deaths-chart/
Or you could do a google yourself on "number of deaths coal oil nuclear"
The thing with nuclear-power is that everything happens at the same place and affects more people in one go..... And i prefer something that kills ~90 people per year over for example Oil that kills ~36000 per year... Or natural gas that kills ~4000 per year.. Even wind-power kills ~150 per year....
The problem is that it's public opinion that drives the direction of how we generate power, but the problem is that the general population don't have the knowledge to actually make an informed decision, and neither can i fully.
The thing is that nuclear-power, and there are many types of technologies, is probably the only thing that will be able to sustain the human population for the next 50 years until we can perfect fusion-power or something else that do not have the same impact.
If nuclear-power would still be seen positive by the general population we would also build new reactors that are safer instead of staying with the old reactors that have known safety issues.
I don't think that's quite the same.
No offense, but your words indicate you aren't thinking. The previous poster gave a great example and all you can talk about is radioactivity.
The /only/ difference is the enrichment process and rate of decay.
And intent. One device is used to power cities. The other device is used to destroy cities and other infrastructure. Conflating the two is irrational.
I don't think it's more of a sensitivity thing as more as of 'Actually, we know exactly how devastating this is, not something simulated or based on statistic, we actually know first hand, and maybe shouldn't do this'
I take it you're not actually paying attention to the actual damage from Fukushima. I think there's a great case to be made to decommission or refurbish old nuclear plants to make them safer, but Fukushima demonstrates that at least Japan is responsible enough to run nuclear power.
Analogy? I wanted to have something really clever to compare it to.
And you got it.
didn't RTFM: looks like the nhk links have been decontaminated first. ... this should UP the cost significantly. ... why are they moving it around? the MOST contaminated place is obviously the source -aka- the nuke .. at least until no.4 fuel pool is secured.
always looking for a way to "make" (ear-mark) more money, they should study the
decontamination possibilities of decreasing radioactivity by shipping the glowing stuff
once around the earth AGAINST the equator
on a side note:"It includes the cost of removing, transporting and storing radioactive waste such as contaminated soil."
i don't get this
*boom*plant. so just retrofit some bulldozers with GPS and plot a straight line from the periphery
of the no-go zone and bulldoze a straight to the source. this should give a nice new man made mountain.
-or- just "share the load" and spread it around. *shrug*.
good luck and may the earthquake god look benevolently on your thrifty island
Maybe it's a bit of nimbyism on my part.sort of.
I won't be killed by a coal related incident as I don't work in a coal mine. I could live in the city that is near the coal mine, and be fine.
Coal mine goes, people die. Terrible and tragic (Not sarcasam, it really is sad when this happens).
People in the city live.
Coal miners etc, are generally aware that it's a dangerous job they're accepting.to do, like many dangerous jobs, generally higher pay etc.
Nuclear plant goes critical near a city people are living in.....I know radiation sickness is NOT a way I want to go.
Before googling something simple like coal oil nuke deaths etc, you should be very aware of this kind of thing
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1367776/UK-Government-covered-nuclear-reactor-blaze-caused-death-cancer.html
Radiation deaths have been downplayed consistently, I doubt we can get a true accurate number.
"Two years later there is still unexplained steam rising from parts of the plant. At one stage they were pumping in huge amounts of seawater to cool the thing down. Where do you think it went?"
Perhaps those first two statements are related?
It's like saying you were in a car crash. If you crash at 10 kmh/mph or 30 kmh/mph, you still crashed.
But the difference in speed is material. You ignore here material differences between the two accidents. Similarly, I could slip down the stairs. That's an "accident". So:
Chernobyl - accident.
Me slipping down stairs - accident.
Key difference - nobody is going to be that concerned about me.
Now, what highly alarming deduction am I supposed to be drawing here? You seemed to have difficulty articulating that.
Why do you make up numbers and trends? In 2012 25% of electricity generation was using renewable energy. The goal is to reach 30% by 2020. Current trends indicate it will be at 45%+ in 2020. It is rising more rapidly than previously planned. This numbers are not difficult to find. Why do you insist in living in a fantasy world? See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erneuerbare_Energie for Details.
The negotiations for Japans surrender started before the bombs were dropped.
No, they didn't. As the other replier noted, there were factions at this point. Some members of one faction were attempting negotiations for surrender, but they didn't have the authority to surrender. And if one looks at actual battles at the end of the war, where whole Japanese forces fought to the last few men, one doesn't see a propensity to surrender.
So, cleaning up after a Level 7* disaster is hard?
(*Only two ever recorded, the other being Chernobyl )
Not surprising, although perhaps they should be targeting 'hotspots' rather than trying to get the overall levels down to an unrealistically low score.
Of course, if only a small fraction of this amount had been spent on the plant before the accident, then it could have been avoided.
Whilst I'm generally for nuclear power, this is a sad example of why much higher standards should genuinely apply to nuclear than to other industries.
Well done, as proven by the US Navy and, *gasp* the French, nuclear power can be safe, convenient and *double gasp* low-polluting and profitable.
But corners must not be cut, since the consequences are so severe.
Image if some "terrerist" [sic] group had managed this amount of contamination.
There would be massive and lasting outcry, and the guilty soon found and punished.
I don't see any Tepco Execs swinging from the trees...
So how much is that per kilowatt hour?
A coup that failed and that wasn't predicted before the bombs were dropped. It was completely irrelevant to the justification for dropping the bombs.
As far as anyone could tell it was just as likely the overaggression of the bombs that caused the officers eagerness to not surrender.
It wasn't completely irrelevant to the soldiers who participated in the Iwo Jima and Okinawa landings. None of whom are quoted in the series of quotes above.
They knew, for example, that the IJA was quite willing and capable of fighting to the last suicidal charge, and would encourage/conscript civilians to do so, as well. See Okinawa. That attempted coup represented that mindset, all the way up to the Japanese Cabinet level. It was hardly a spark of resistance to some "overaggression", that would imply that the IJA, in particular, was a restrained actor in the war, and anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Pacific campaign knows that wasn't the case. It was fortunate that the Emperor, whatever his other failings, didn't share the hardliner's view.
There's a reason that the purple heart medals distributed to wounded soldiers even today are of WWII vintage. Downfall and Olympic would have cost hundreds of thousands of allied casualties, and possibly millions of Japanese.
In the calculus of warfare, I'd trade that out for two cities.
As a result, Germany imports a lot of its power from elsewhere, such as French nuclear plants or Polish coal burning plants.
Saw Edwin Lyman from the Union of Concerned Scientists several times on the TV after the disaster. He used it as an opportunity to call attention to regulation and safety procedures for reactors in the United States. He said current evacuation procedures for evacuation zones for nuclear reactors were insufficient. Physicians for Social Responsibility have a useful map for checking your proximity to a nuclear reactor http://www.psr.org/resources/evacuation-zone-nuclear-reactors.html From their site, "Current NRC regulations stipulate a 10 mile evacuation zone around nuclear plants. This is clearly insufficient and 50 miles has been recommended." They also note that 1/3 of all Americans live within 50 miles of a reactor.
The official result for 2012 is 21.6% of energy generated from 'renewable' sources. Except that 25% of that was from the classic hydro, and without hydro it's 15% as I've said. Look it up: http://www.ag-energiebilanzen.de/componenten/download.php?filedata=1357206124.pdf&filename=BRD_Stromerzeugung1990_2012.pdf&mimetype=application/pdf
And the goal for renewable energy use won't be met. It won't be even close. German government knows this just fine - so the official target for renewable electricity got lowered down to 35% by 2020. And it will be lowered down even more in future.
Do you see any protests from Greens? No? Yup, because these fucking hippies are the direct cause of this.
Hydro is renewable. What are you talking about?
If renewable energy is such bad idea, you don't have to lie about it, like GP did, to make your point. That was all I was commenting on. Germany's outsourcing of energy production to France et al point to real problems with Germany's approach. GP's stupid lies just muddy the water.
Classic hydro is not what people usually think when they talk about 'renewable'. It's also not without environment issues - flooded lands, CO2 emissions from rotting organics, etc. And all of the German investments into renewables (about $300bn so far) could have been _easily_ beaten by 6 modern nuclear power plants.
In short, renewable energy in Germany is a total failure. It provides only feel-good feelings to fucking eco-hippies and not much more.
Fukushima disaster could have been minimized much cheaper and faster with more resilient back up power. The tsunami height concerns were not well understood until a few years before incident and an expensive proposition to build quickly. Yes in hindsight construction plans should have been considered and initiated but unlikely would have been completed on time. Instead they sat around contemplating what todo. Coincidentally that was cheaper and better for bonuses. They should claw back pension, bonuses from the SR Execs. Won't amount to much but send a msg.
My understanding of this was that much if not most of that "We didn't need the bombs" from those guys was actually them being worried about being downsized. IE The were thinking "Oh crap, if we have nukes we can get away with a much smaller army/navy. Shit, I'll be way less important if I'm in charge and we have half the number of guys as before."
Firstly, coal plants release more radioactivity than nuclear plants.
Secondly, citing the Daily Mail as a source gets you slightly less credibility than citing The Onion.
Oh, and finally: hydrogen is not an alternative energy source. It is an energy transport medium, and a pretty crappy one at that. IT would increase, not decrease, reliance on coal/nuclear/whatever energy source is in use.
Hydrogen isn't a primary energy source. It has to made because it doesn't exist in a useful form ready to use on earth. The process to create H2 involve processing methane gas. Hydrogen can be useful as a fuel cell, however you should never believe it is a replacement for any other primary energy sources, it is just a mean to convert primary energy into something handful.
Achille Talon
Hop!
In 2012 Germany imported 43,8 TWh and *exported* 66,6 TWh.
So we have a net *export* of 22,8 TWh.
http://www.tarifometer24.com/news-energie/strommarkt/stromhandel-deutschland-2012-wieder-mehr-europaischer-export-als-import/45298/
Germany is NOT 40% renewable. It's about 15% renewable and falling rapidly,
That's a lie.
http://www.iwr.de/news.php?id=22764
"In 2012 haben regenerative Energien nach den Daten der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Energiebilanzen rd. 137 Mrd. kWh bzw. 23 Prozent zum Brutto-Stromverbrauch beigetragen (2011: rd. 20 Prozent) und sind damit zweitstärkster Energieträger nach der Braunkohle."
So renewables climbed to 23% in 2012 - up from 20% in 2011.
Japan was interested in a negotiated surrender which would protect some of their interests, the USA wanted an unconditional surrender and it's fair to say that was part of the reason for using the bombs -- though keeping the USSR from having the piece of post-war Japan it would've gotten as part of an extended war was a big reason too. Not to say that those are sufficient reasons for using weapons of mass destruction against civilians, but they are reasons.
This space intentionally left blank
Here we go again with the Chernobyl example. The reactor at Chernobyl wouldn't have been licensed in USA, Japan, France, UK, Canada, South Korea, etc. It doesn't have a containement vessel, which is a basic requirement by all modern countries regulatory bodies, it was operating with a positive feedback which is forbidden by all the regulatory bodies in modern countries, the staff wasn't trained properly to operate such a device badly designed and finally the bureaucratic administration was just not concerned and don't care about it.
The Chernobyl accident couldn't happen in modern countries.
Now, back to Fukushima, anyone noticed the tsunami itself made many more victims and fatalities than the reactor accident? In fact, so far, Fukushima hasn't claim a single life.
As other said, a single coal plant is generating more nuclear waste in the atmosphere than all the nuclear reactors together. Geothermal is also generating nuclear waste due to well drilling, the mud from deep wells drill contains radioactive isotopes.
Achille Talon
Hop!
BTW, the only difference is not in the enrichment process. A nuclear reactor cannot produce a nuclear explosion even if it is going supercritical. It will melt and as long as it is in a containement vessel, damages are mitigated. The Chernobyl reactor didn't have any containement vessel. Fukushima's reactor is having such a vessel and radioactive isotopes released are not coming from the reactor core itself which is still contained.
Achille Talon
Hop!
"All I know is that I will NEVER trust people to run fission power stations as people cut corners and lie. They do so when government owned, and they do so when owned by a company."
You'd best get back in your cave then... Seeing as your more than likely trust people every day to provide food, clean water, medicines, transport, power and many other essential necessities. In every country there are people with the power to do you huge amounts of harm in ways that are far more subtle than by running a Nuclear power plant, and yet every day they tend not to. You trust a whole chain of people, from waiters not spitting in your soup to sheikhs not shutting of your oil supplies. You trust drivers not to run you down and you trust pilots not to mistake your house for a runway. Every so often that trust is breached, I agree, and that is a bad thing, but unless you live in complete isolation (which you don't - I've seen you posting on the internet!) you are ignoring all the other ways people could harm you every day and worrying about one that, statistically at least, is very unlikely to do you any harm at all.
Classic hydro is not what people usually think when they talk about 'renewable'.
Of course it is. What are you talking about?
It's also not without environment issues
Nothing is without issues.
And all of the German investments into renewables could have been _easily_ beaten by 6 modern nuclear power plants.
Maybe. But we don't build those because we don't know what to do with all the nuclear waste. We still have no idea what to do with the amount we already have! See 'environmental issues' above.
In short, renewable energy in Germany is a total failure.
It's not.
To add to the not surrendering point, there were Japanese soldiers being found/recovered/captured from pacific islands well into the 1970's, ready to fight on in the service of the emperor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_holdout
emt 377 emt 4
Nuclear can be safe, you just need to treat it with the proper respect. The largest nuclear accidents happened because people were dangerously irresponsible. The Fukushima accident could've been avoided if [...]
Also add (d): if power companies were allowed to build new/er generation nuclear facilities and retire old/er ones.
Fukushima was set to be retired a number of years ago but their license was extended because the process for building a new one is quite expensive and onerous. If things can be streamlined so that we have a regular turn over of technology then we don't have to run things with duct tape and twine (and then complain when they break).
The amount of actual damage from Fukushima is pretty small.
Still leaking. Enjoy your radioactive seafood. Unfortunately, all the world's oceans are connected, so we all pay the price for Japan's failure. Even more unfortunately, there's shitloads of plants just like that one... here in the USA
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Of course it is. What are you talking about?
Hydro received very little funding in the recent 10 years in Germany, almost all of the investments went into solar panels and wind generators. So it's only fair to compare them to nuclear.
All the current nuclear waste if properly reprocessed can be buried in a couple of Olympic swimming pools. We can then bury it in deep salt deposits or (my favorite) in ocean subduction trenches. Or we can just continue keeping it in temporary storage for the next couple of centuries. It's a NIMBY problem, not a fundamental one.
"overaggression of the bombs that caused the officers eagerness to not surrender"
In my youth, I read a great deal ( all my high school library had on the subject, plus some ) on WWII, This idea that the bombs lead to the offices not wanting to surrender distinctly does not match that reading. The Japanese were flying airplanes into ships, the pilots knowing/intending they would die in the effort.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze
They created airplanes ( and ships, apparently ) specifically for suicide attacks. The fanaticism was widespread and went top to bottom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinyo-class_suicide_motorboat
http://b-29s-over-korea.com/Japanese_Kamikaze/Japanese_Kamikaze05.html
You may note that the Germans also considered ( and used ) such tactics, but not nearly to the same degree.
It was distinctly harder to find ( even in nazi Germany ) the same indoctrination and willingness to die.
emt 377 emt 4
No one has died as a result of the radiation from Fukushima to date
O RLY? Hey, this might not be Fukushima-related. But I had to dig to find that story, because of all the claims that people are linking to saying "no one has died because of Fukushima radiation" as if you could prove a negative. You can't, so you should just stop trying. We can't prove that an unexplained cancer is from Fukushima either, which is what you nuclear playboys depend upon. You can't track a particular cancer back to a particular carcinogen. Hundreds or thousands have to die before you will admit statistical significance.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why don't you go find some cock to take up your ass,
you retarded subhuman loser.
"There are voices which assert that the bomb should never have been used at all. I cannot associate myself with such ideas. . . . I am surprised that very worthy people—but people who in most cases had no intention of proceeding to the Japanese front themselves—should adopt the position that rather than throw this bomb, we should have sacrificed a million American and a quarter of a million British lives."
Winston Churchill, leader of the Opposition, in a speech to the British House of Commons, August 1945
More people die in coal mining accidents every year than have died from reactor meltdowns in the last 20.
Maybe we should reconsider coal?
Source: (modified to bullet form)
Comparing the historical safety record of civilian nuclear energy with other forms of electrical generation, Ball, Roberts, and Simpson, the IAEA, and the Paul Scherrer Institute found in separate studies that during the period from 1970 to 1992,
The thing is, coal is rarely as "exciting" or "spectacular" as nuclear: nuclear plants go down in a big way, and so when someone dies everyone sees it. Coal mining deaths (never mind the "on the job" coal plant deaths) are a fact of life, and noone notices that sort of thing.
The amount of actual damage from Fukushima is pretty small.
According the the government and mainstream media, however there's more than enough evidence that suggests they're completely full of shit.
You keep on sucking down those blue pills, though. We know; they're comforting. :)
Troll, troll, troll your boat...
No-one has any idea how many people this disaster has, or will, cause.
Im pretty sure radiation experts know what the dosages were in, around, and at a distance from the plant, and it is well documented what levels of radiation do what to the human body.
There were two workers who went into the plant during the meltdown to access the core who got doses that could be described as "concerning"; they were treated at a hospital and I believe released the same day. Only 3 workers (including the two I mentioned) recieved a dose over 100mSv; Wikipedia notes
In 2012 the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation stated that for typical background radiation levels (1-13 mSv per year) it's not possible to account for any health effects and for exposures under 100 mSv
The amount of hysteria here is unbelievable. For the record,
10 to 30 mSv -single full-body CT scan[17][18]
68 mSv -estimated maximum dose to evacuees who lived closest to the Fukushima I nuclear accidents
Classic hydro is not what people usually think when they talk about 'renewable'.
All people that use that newfangled thing called internet seem to disagree with you.
On the other hand, what are the alternatives?
Pebble-bed and thorium salt designs would be a good start. The nuclear "pros vs cons" argument has become far too polarized, with both so-called "sides" generally possessing flawed notions and failures to see big picture:
Inconvenient fact: Industry [run by MBA's] has repeatedly proven that it can't be trusted to safely maintain conventional reactor designs, and government (controlled by industry via regulatory-capture) has proven that it can't be trusted to regulate industry.
Inconvenient fact: We've done far more to upset the balance of nature by damming-up vast watersheds (for hydroelectic usage) than we ever have by being sloppy with our atomics and scattering isotopes to the breezes.
Ok, sure, whatever. Let me restate my point: "Investment in photovoltaics and wind power so far has been an abject failure in Germany". Biomass-based renewables are OK, but they are already maxed out as they are limited by the availability of biomass to process.
Maybe. But we don't build those because we don't know what to do with all the nuclear waste. We still have no idea what to do with the amount we already have! See 'environmental issues' above.
Solved problem. Dig a hole and bury it. Yucca Mountain would have worked just fine. The only technical issues identified were 10,000 years in the future. We don't hold anything else to that kind of standard. It was just politics, nuclear hysteria and NIMBYism.
Enjoy your mercury contaminated seafood. Thanks coal fired power plants!
Go take a trip through NE Japan and tell me how Fukushima was the biggest problem. Compared to the rest of the damage from the tsunami, Fukushima was nothing.
No, the surrender conditions that were offered _after the first bomb had been dropped_ were completely unrealistic. The people proposing them knew they had no chance of being accepted, given how weak their position was. It was an act of defiance, rather than a true attempt to bring the fighting to an end. They were hoping that the Americans only had the one bomb, and that they would still be able to mount their horrifyingly bloody defense with their entire population.
Among the conditions in their proposal was that Japan would handle investigations of Japanese war crimes on its own - blanket immunity, effectively.
The goals of the investments were to significantly increase the percentage of renewable energy used in Germany and to give German companies a head start in the international renewable energy market. It is arguable if these goals have been met to the levels that were intended. "Abject" failure on the other hand is just another stupid lie.
I've actually lied. The total amount of investment into PV and wind energy was close to $450bn. And for that Germany got about 100TWh/y of generating capacity. For that price it could have built about 15 modern 5GW nuclear power plants, producing about 500TWh/y of energy.
Yeah, paying 5 times more than nuclear is certainly an unqualified success.
Oh, and I really hope all those hippies get cancer from the new coal power plants that are being built.
I'm suddenly reminded of something I think I learned in History class. Back in Ancient Greece I think, after an arch was finished being built, the master builder would stand underneath the arch while the supports were taken down. Kind of gives you a pretty good incentive to not fuck up when the quality of your work determines if you live or die.
Perhaps we could reintroduce something similar to that, require that the owners of the construction company building the plant live within 1 mile of the plant for X years.
What we need to do is have a Manhattan Project type effort to make fusion a reality. No waste. When you turn it off, it is off. We have to get off carbon for our progeny's sake. Ethanol and Biodiesel are worse than what they displace. Wind and Solar are fine but there is nothing like a 1 or 2 or more Giga-Watt power plant.
No hour on a horse is ever wasted. Winston Churchill
You say you don't want a nuclear plant next to you... Do you prefer a coal-fired plant? Oil-buning plant? Natural Gas? Wind Turbines (those things seem to be noisy like hell)? Want your backyard full of solar panels and still need a secondary power source? Want to live in a valley that will soon become a lake, courtesy of the new dam?
I'd love a miniature nuclear reactor for my neighborhood: free electricity and hot water, in essence.
"unqualified success" is just another stupid lie. The real world takes place between the absurd extremes; the latter seem to be everything you are able to think in. As for your closing sentence, I'm sure you, as basically everybody else, has a family member who suffers from cancer. For a fun time, ask him what he thinks of your wish.
$50B sounds like a lot, but for perspective keep in mind that Fukushima I generated on the order of $800,000 worth of energy every HOUR. (Assumptions: 4 GW * $0.20/kWh.)
At that rate, $50B works out to about 7 years worth of energy production.
I don't think that's quite the same.
Both nuclear bombs and reactors go through a process known as fission. /only/ difference is the enrichment process and rate of decay.
Both can use uranium 235, most do.
The
A side point; most modern nuclear weapons undergo both fission and fusion.
I think the following point needs to be reinforced, though.
Nuclear power plants are not nuclear bombs. In any way shape or form. Plants can have catastrophic failure modes, like any industrial complex, and they should be planned for and mitigated, where possible. But they cannot produce the blast of a nuclear weapon.
Er exactly like Chernobyl but contained better, sort of, at least in the air.
Exactly, but sort of? Right.
Chernobyl's radioactive crap was blasted into the air when it blew off a 1000 concrete seal
Would the fact that Chernobyl didn't have any kind of concrete encasement at all, make you stop and think that maybe you don't have a firm grasp of what happened there, or the risks thereof? I would hope so.
Because it seems to me you're scrambling for any equivocation you can find.
Saying something isn't bad by comparing it to something worse is a logical fallacy - false dilemma.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy/False_dilemma
As I have said before on this topic, Nuclear technology may be one of the safest power generators IN THEORY, however our (as humans) implementation and management of nuclear power has been flawed in many cases. Running reactors over operating lifetimes, building them on the edge of the sea in an earthquake zone, etc.. Solar, hydro, wind, tidal, are all safer than nuclear power. Including any flawed implementation of those systems. A breached hydro electric dam does not contaminate the land for 100 000 years.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
The negotiations for Japans surrender started before the bombs were dropped.
Not credible ones. It took two bombs and six days after the second bomb for Japan to surrender.
It is stipulated that one of the reasons the bombs were used anyway was to demonstrate the power of them to scare Soviet.
This is one reason, but as usual complex decisions in the real world are taken for many reasons, including others such as shortening the end of the war in the Pacific.
There were stronger military targets that could have been chosen, the amount of civilian deaths were intentionally high.
BS
From Wikipedia: Hiroshima, was an embarkation port and industrial center that was the site of a major military headquarters; [Kyoto was purposely dropped from the list of targets because its low military value]. The city of Nagasaki had been one of the largest sea ports in southern Japan and was of great wartime importance because of its wide-ranging industrial activity, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials. The four largest companies in the city were Mitsubishi Shipyards, Electrical Shipyards, Arms Plant, and Steel and Arms Works, which employed about 90% of the city's labor force, and accounted for 90% of the city's industry.
More importantly, the targets of highest military value had already been bombed to hell (e.g. Tokyo) this meant that to be most effective the atomic bombs had to be dropped on B-list cities, this is not out of a murderous want for civilians, but rather reasonable war time tactics.
[...] Gen. Dwight Eisenhower [...] Admiral William D. Leahy [...] General Carter Clarke
Let's give a bit of background to those quotes shall we. Conventional war generals hated the fact that the war was won from the air by one Mj. Gen. Leslie Groves. He wasn't even promoted to Lt. Gen. during his active career in spite that a cold look at the facts seem to warrant five star-hood.
Herbert Hoover was a retired Republican ex-president who knew jack squat about where Japan was or wasn't, criticizing the decisions of a Democrat president.
In the calculus of warfare, what worth do you place on the American lives lost because the war was prolonged until the bombs were ready for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki field tests?
No one has died as a result of the radiation from Fukushima to date
O RLY? Hey, this might not be Fukushima-related. But I had to dig to find that story, because of all the claims that people are linking to saying "no one has died because of Fukushima radiation" as if you could prove a negative. You can't, so you should just stop trying. We can't prove that an unexplained cancer is from Fukushima either, which is what you nuclear playboys depend upon. You can't track a particular cancer back to a particular carcinogen. Hundreds or thousands have to die before you will admit statistical significance.
Not to be too cold about it, but isn't that what statistical significance requires?
I still prefer it to the "ready, fire, aim!" approach to policy.
The Chernobyl reactor didn't have any containement vessel. Fukushima's reactor is having such a vessel and radioactive isotopes released are not coming from the reactor core itself which is still contained.
Um, wrong. Yes, Fukushima's reactors were enclosed in containment vessels. Those vessels subsequently failed in two or three of the reactors, and the cores are no longer contained. Remember when TEPCO proudly announced that all reactors had reached cold shutdown? And when they later had to withdraw that statement, since upon further examination they did not find the reactor core in the vicinity of the temperature sensors, which explained the low temperature being measured? As in they did not know where the reactor core was (if it even still existed), they only knew that it was not in the place they left it.
Where do you think the radioactive releases come from? A couple of smoke detectors that fell to the floor in the earthquake and cracked open?
In the calculus of warfare, what worth do you place on the American lives lost because the war was prolonged until the bombs were ready for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki field tests?
You suggest this as if the war was actually prolonged for that purpose. That's nonsense.
What? The Battle of Okinawa only ended in June '45, the atomic bombings happened 6 weeks later.
Operations Olympic and Downfall were planning for Nov 1 '45, and not slated to finish until spring of '46 (Operation Coronet). The war was far from over!
Well, I actually contribute to fighting cancer at my $DAYJOB. While Green hippies actively promote it, it's so fun to stop trains with nuclear materials.
Fighting against new cancer-causing coal power plants? Nah, that's not fun at all.
As for "unqualified success" - how else would you call a program that is guaranteed to fail to meet its goals, while using many times more resources than alternatives?
To start with you should read up on this. Radioactivity from coal-plants are actually quite high in comparison.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation
And about the linked article.
To start with i do not believe their statement of 15CPS they stated since they said that this was about double the normal amount, but normal backround radioation is ~20-80CPM so they are off by a factor of altleast 80.
If it would really be 15CPS that would be 900CPM or about 9microseivert per hour and that would be quite huge... But even at those levels
And as they write they found areas with up to 50CPS and that would be 30microseivert per hour and that would be spectacular if nobody except one small paper would have picked up on...
But on the other hand, even with those extremly blown up figures you still only have an increase of cancer risk of 1 in a 1,000 per 12.5 milliSievert (mSv) (or 12500microsieverts) so that would still take about 416 hours to increase the risk by one in 1000 at the most extreme value they reported.
But then the next question is quite important.. What type of radiation is it? Gamma/Beta/Alpha??? Gamma can be quite bad, but Alpha is quite safe unless you manage to inhale highly radioactive material that i doubt exists on that beach with those levels, even if there was 15CPS.....
Just a few simple things that can bring up the background radiation:
- Soot/ash from coal-plants, actually it can be quite high in really bad stuff.
- Spill of potassium (fertilizer)
- Concrete
- Stone from a quarry that contained a bit higher PPM of uranium.
"That is double the amount of radiation normally found in the atmosphere in Britain" this is comparison is also completely invalid.. You don't measure the atmosphere, you measure the ground or material around you.
Normal background radiation is between 25-75 in the US, so 15 CPM is nothing...
Read http://xkcd.com/radiation/ and then take into account that 100 cpm is about equal to 1 microseivert per hour.
From above poster: ...
A trip from NY to LA would give you 40microsieverts/hr
During a normal day you will recieve about 10microsieverts/hr...
Germany is a nett exporter of electricity, and is exporting more than ever before. German solar PV in the south is reportedly greatly aiding the French, who are being asked to conserve power in the middle of winter. http://www.renewablesinternational.net/german-power-exports-to-france-increasing/150/537/33036/
No-one has any idea [of] the exact number of deaths and disabilities from the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan
Of course no-one knows the exact number, but the data is amenable to statistical analysis and the rules concerning dosages (such as here : www.hse.gov.uk/radiation/ionising/doses/) are based on extremely pessimistic interpretations of those statistics. The levels allowable even to regular nuclear workers are far below any that have been detected to have any effect whatever on a person, and the 1mSv/y for a member of the public is significantly below that and even below natural radiation levels.
All I know is that I will NEVER trust people to run fission power stations as people cut corners and lie.
I find that a pretty offensive accusation, and just shows how little you are aware of the culture within at least the UK nuclear power industry. I have been an engineer in several areas where public safety is involved, and the nuclear industry is the most conscientious of the lot - almost painfully so. I have never seen corners cut - more like people holding their trousers up using belts, braces and rawlbolts too. In fact I tend to argue against some of the excessive precautions, not because I am after profit (makes no difference to my salary) but because they are simply wasteful and unnecessary - sounds to me like some of the Fukushima measures are just that.
......... would you trust that statement with your life?
As someone else said, you had better find a cave. Let's assume you do not trust me despite (or because of) this post. FWIW, I was previously in the railway industry and one of my responsibilities was to derive a method to calculate margins against train derailment, which fed into the design of certain trains in use now. I also did the stress calculations for certain railway vehicles on which you could be riding - so avoid trains entirely if I were you. Also I did the stress calcs for a certain railway over-bridge in North London - so don't drive under any railway bridges in that area. I also did the stress calcs for certain road vehicle designs - so don't get into any road vehicles in case they are one of mine. And if you don't trust me, how about trusting someone else you don't know instead?
BTW, I sleep perfectly well at night, in case you were wondering.
Back in Ancient Greece I think, after an arch was finished being built, the master builder would stand underneath the arch while the supports were taken down. Kind of gives you a pretty good incentive to not fuck up when the quality of your work determines if you live or die. Perhaps we could reintroduce something similar to that, require that the owners of the construction company building the plant live within 1 mile of the plant for X years.
Funnily enough, the Ancient Greeks never discovered the arch. That is why their temple interiors were a forest of columns holding up beams.
As for the "owners of the construction company" living within one mile, you should think more of the designers and those who run the plant. In fact the people who run these plants do tend to live close by and think nothing of it, and as an engineer myself who has been involved in heavy engineering projects, no doubts about the integrity of my work, of the sort that would make me hesitate to "stand under it", ever cross my mind. It is not any threat of "danger" that motivates me to do work well (or money as some here seem to think), but pride in my job.
Not to be too cold about it, but isn't that what statistical significance requires?
I still prefer it to the "ready, fire, aim!" approach to policy.
The latter is how we got a bunch of shitty nuclear plants all over the planet. I'm not saying they're all crap, I'm just saying that a lot of them are.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Classic hydro is not what people usually think when they talk about 'renewable'.
It's not? I live in New Zealand. We love our hydro power here, and it's the first thing we think of as renewable. Wind second (but catching up rapidly).
Yes, it has environmental impacts. But it's not coal.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Miniature - sure. I don't have a problem with the technology itself. I just have issues with large scale deployments that can have chain reactions causing large damage radiation zones.
OK... let's push this a bit more: guns are made of steel. Lots of people (in Japan and everywhere) got killed by guns too, like by atomic bombs. We should ban steel then ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
We can then bury it in deep salt deposits or (my favorite) in ocean subduction trenches.
Can't you see how stupid that idea is? This is an article about Fukushima, a nuclear disaster caused by human factors. You want to trust people whose primary concern is either money, getting re-elected or both, to safely store this waste for 100,000+ years. Under the sea, where a leak could carry it a long way and do massive amounts of damage.
The nuke-u-like brigade are always shouting for more of the same, without offing any solution t the existing problems.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The money spent on the research and advancement of renewable energy is a tiny fraction of the money spent on nuclear energy. The outcome of research is always open, "guaranteed to fail" is - I hate to say it - just another lie. If you can overcome your hate and anger you might find that the results are actually pretty impressive.
Nuclear plants, by the way, are not economically feasible. The only way to run a nuclear plant is to get indemnification for catastrophic failure from the state. The operators can not get insurance for that. They still have to socialize their cost and privatize their profits.
Building coal plants on the other hand is just plain stupid. No argument here. That's the reason for investing in renewable. The alternatives suck.
Building coal plants on the other hand is just plain stupid. No argument here. That's the reason for investing in renewable. The alternatives suck.
No, building coal power plants is not stupid - it's a necessity. There's no way renewables can provide enough of the baseload for Germany. It was known from the start (except for cretinous Greens) that Germany has to do it if nuclear powerplants are to be closed, and no amount of renewable funding can alter it.
The total amount of high-level waste is small enough to make public control pretty easy. And subduction trenches are not simply "under the sea", it's very deep under the sea. There's no circulation there, so "leaks" (and all feasible plans require vitrification of the waste) won't carry far in the worst case.
Besides, waste will then be buried in short (1km or so) shafts. It will then be carried inside the Earth mantle where it'll be slowly (over millions of years) dispersed in convection flows.
Someone already posted that comment and it was an easy retort.
If steel is going to explode, spread steel in a 20KM death radius where no one can live anymore, spread steel all around the globe and have untold effects, while people have lives shortened by steal sickness and increased cancer (We have lots of things that do that already, why add more?), then yes, we should stop using it.
Cities are made of this stuff and would destroy the world many times over.
Especially if steel is going to become invisible and impossible to detect by humans without special equipment, so that you don't even see the hazard, get
sick from it, and start to die.
Like biological warfare. Using engineered viruses to kill your enemy. I'm against that too.
Just say no to resident evil.
http://rt.com/usa/sailors-japan-fukushima-radiation-878/
http://enenews.com/japan-and-iaea-grossly-downplaying-fukushima-cesium-releases-audio
The amount of radiation released by the way, was CHERNOBYL level. Japan keeps trying to hide it, came out years later, guess what, yeah, level 7 reactor meltdown in several reactors.
Good thing they had ocean to dump on it, which another news article says, guess what, leaked into the ocean.
I think one of my biggest problems with radiation, is that you don't even know. You see a fire? You know you get close to it, it will burn you.
You see sharp metal? Or a gun pointed at you? You can see and know the danger.
Radiation? You only know when it's too late.
If you're close to something extremely radioactive, so that your skin starts blistering like a burn. Even if it just starts and you get away, it's too late.
You're dead, not even the best medical equipment currently in use can save you.
You'll die from radiation sickness at much lower dosages that cause instant blistering etc.
And as for the government's targets - do you want to bet money against me?
What is my opinion on the government's targets that you want to bet against?
Firstly, coal plants release more radioactivity than nuclear plants.
Bullshit! The world's coal plants release about 800 TBq per year. During the last 25 years the world's nuclear power plants have released >500000 TBq into the environment, i.e. 625 years' worth of radiation from coal. If you believe that electricity generation from nuclear outnumbers coal by 25 to 1, you're wrong.
Not to be too cold about it, but isn't that what statistical significance requires?
I still prefer it to the "ready, fire, aim!" approach to policy.
The latter is how we got a bunch of shitty nuclear plants all over the planet. I'm not saying they're all crap, I'm just saying that a lot of them are.
Whatever. You can't admit to statistical significance, where there is none yet to develop.
OK, enough preliminaries. First example: Let's start with the same amount (5.84 x 10^-12 moles or 1.28g x 10^-10 g) of pure Na-22 injected in the patient (for reference that's the amount in 3.35 x 10^-10 g of pure Na-22 salt). Allow it to decay inside the body until 5.71 x 10^-12 moles have decayed, and then remove all the remaining isotopes (the removed part is only 7.96 x 10^10 isotopes or 1.32 x 10^-13 moles or 2.3% of the total so before you come back with this please realize that this is small peanuts compared to the total). As explained above, the Na-22 and F-18 isotopes that decayed inside the body deliver the same amount of potential damage, as they are both positron emitters. That is, they deliver the same dose. (Yes, the biodistribution of glucose and sodium is not the same, yada, yada, that's beside the point).
The difference is that the F-18 bombarded the body with all that radiation in just 10 hours while the Na-22 took 14 years! In reality for the Na-22 the cells have more time to cope with the low intensity damage, even if it is very, very long-lasting. A good analogy is this: Go to the beach in the middle of clear summer days and expose yourself to the sun with no sunblock or other protection from 10 am to 3 pm for two days. You will almost certainly get severely sunburned in those 10 hours. But if you go there at noon under identical conditions every day for 14 years, but stay only seven seconds every day (same total exposure of 10 hours) you will not have any harmful effects at all.
Lesson #1: If you are starting with a fixed number of radioisotopes trapped inside your body, a longer half-life is not worse for you, contrary to what you think. In fact, a shorter half-life is actually worse (all other things kept equal).
No, I don't think so. When you finish high school you will find it isn't quite so petty and that pretending to be an idiot won't have quite the same effect that you seem to be expecting.
Above you pretended that the contaminated areas were less radioactive than Denver. Now you've got a verbose bit of distraction to pretend you wrote something other than what I objected in the first place. It's a blatant bait and switch that you should be ashamed of. You've shown you are a liar so why should I believe your current post anyway?
This sort of shit defending badly run 1970s plants with adhoc onsite waste storage is the sort of stupid shit that is holding back the advance of civilian nuclear technology. You raving fanboys seem to think perfection happened years ago so there is not point actually trying to improve the technology. It's the sort of shit that killed the thorium project. It's the sort of shit that held up Synroc for thirty years because people pretended nuclear waste was not a problem. You are an enemy of the very thing that you are blindly cheering for.
Call it what you want. It wasn't intended that way.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!