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."
Given the history of japan, this may not be the ideal technology of choice.... :(
No insult intended by mentioning the past, but japan has not had good fortune when it comes to matters involving radioactive materials
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 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
me, the Rubberband Man.
Hand me down my walkin' cane, hand me down my hat
Hurry now and don't be late 'cause we ain't got time to chat
You and me, we're goin' out to catch the latest sounds
Guaranteed to blow your mind so high, you won't come down, no
Hey, you all prepare yourself for the Rubberband Man
You've never heard a sound like the Rubberband Man
You're bound to lose control when the Rubberband starts to jam
Oh Lord, this dude is outta sight
Everything he does seems to come out right
Once I went to hear them play at a club outside of town
I was so surprised, I was hypnotized by the sound this cats put down
When I saw this short fat guy stretch a band between his toes
Hey, I laughed so hard 'cause the man got down
When he finally reached his goal
Hey, you all prepare yourself for the Rubberband Man
You've never heard a sound like the Rubberband Man
You're bound to lose control when the Rubberband starts to jam
Got that rubber band up on his toes
And then he wriggled it up all around his nose
Guaranteed to blow your mind
Playin' all that music yet keepin' time
Where in the world did he learn that, oh Lord
Oh, help him get away
Hey, y'all prepare yourself for the Rubberband Man
You've never heard a sound like the Rubberband Man
You're bound to lose control when the Rubberband starts to jam
Rubberband Man, Rubberband Man
How much of this stuff do he think we can stand?
So much rhythm, grace and debonair for one man, Lord
And then he had the nerve to wiggle his left toe
To his knee got the feelin' in his head, y'all, ah, come on, baby
Hey, you all prepare yourself for the Rubberband Man
You've never heard a sound like the Rubberband Man
You're bound to lose control when the Rubberband starts to jam
Rubberband Man starts to jam
Movin' up and down across the land
Got people all in his ways
Everything about him seems outta place
Just move it, just move it, just move, move, move it, just
Rubberband, Rubberband Man
Just move it, just move it, just move, move, move it, just
Rubberband, Rubberband Man
Get down, oh, get down, lover
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 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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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."
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
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?
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.
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.
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
$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.
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
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.
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!