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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."
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.
For clean-up outside the plant. Decomissioning the plan is extra. Paying compensation to ex-residents and farmers/fishermen affected is extra. Re-building towns that have been allowed to deteriorate is extra. Paying unemployment benefits is extra. Storing and disposing of the remaining waste is extra. Things like medical costs are as yet unknown, but will be extra. TEPCO has been pretty much nationalised with the government picking up the tab, so tax payers and energy consumers foot the bill.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
it's not even as much as the fed reserve wastes in a month
The fed is printing $85 billion a month just to keep the federal debt bubble from popping and bankrupting Earth.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
$50bn buys a lot of wind turbines and container sized sodium batteries to even out the load.
To put this in scale, the U.S. Department of Energy commands a budget of $30 billion per year, $10 billion of which is for their Nuclear Security division.
In spite of all that, I'm still pro-nuclear. I just don't think that we are doing it right. The only dangerous stuff at the end of breeder reactor chains has a half-life of only 91 years or less. Everything else produced has such enormous half-lives thats its nearly harmless.
"His name was James Damore."
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?
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.
If the regulators in Japan hadn't been so influenced by the utilities (as, unfortunately, they seem to be everywhere), the Fukushima reactors would have been shut down at the end of their operating life and been in cold shutdown at the time of the earthquake. Instead they were granted an extension and were running.
It just goes to show you that cheap usually isn't, as we all should know by now.
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.
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.
Japan is paying about that much per year for the additional LNG and coal they have to import in order to compensate for the missing nuclear energy
The cleaned areas have a radiation level of 1mS a year. To put that into perspective, people living in Denver get 11.8mS a year from natural sources. This area is NOT uninhabitable. Not that this makes TEPCO any less foolish...
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
There are places where the natural background radiation levels are ten to twenty times the official Japanese limit. And still people happily live there.
That's true, but I believe that these places rarely involve caesium, iodine and strontium. Isn't bioaccumulation the main issue here?
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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?
Its not gonna help as they have blown too big of a bubble and built entire industries on Wall Street around the bubble. Oh and those that are right wing may not want to watch that video as guess what started the bubble? Ronald Reagan with the 401K and 403B. Basically this "supercharged" the stock market with billions of new dollars flowing in, the market exploded in growth...then the jobs all got sent overseas, people stopped putting money into 401Ks and 403Bs because they didn't have it or it wasn't offered (the "temp job generation") and so the government rather than let the bubble burst started putting fed printed money straight into the market. at the end of the day it WILL burst and when it does it'll make the great depression look like a flash crash.
As for the cost to clean up Fukushima? Can we PLEASE stop blaming nuclear power for what is in reality a case of corporate and government malfeasance please? It was SUPPOSED to have been shut down years ago, it wasn't, it was SUPPOSED to have been well maintained, it wasn't, what you have is the government and the corp in bed together and running a plant WAY past its prime and not taking good care of it so no shit when something nasty came along it was fucked.
If you want us to get off fossil fuels there is really only ONE choice and that is nuclear, none of the renewables are capable of even scaling up to what we are using now, much less allowing for growth, so unless you are gonna just get rid of a large chunk of the population (which sadly I've met some greenies that would be more than happy to "final solution" the problem if it would "save mother earth") then we really have no choice, we MUST build new plants. If we reprocess and use the new designs frankly the risk of another Fukushima is extremely low and if we truly are gonna switch to all electric vehicles than all that power has to come from somewhere folks, and until we can get a HELL of a lot better with renewables there isn't much of a choice, its nuclear or keep on burning.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I agree, this number is a non-sense. In fact it is not that easy to find a place on Earth, where the background radiation is as low as 1 mSv/y. Average US value is 3.1 mSv/y, Japan 1.4 mSv/y, there are exceptional places reaching over 100 mSv/y. To reach the 1 mSv/y mark, they are aiming at something that seems impossible to achieve. They say it is 10-60 mSv/y next to a blown-up reactor. How much is it in a place where people actually live? 2, 5, 10? These numbers are perfectly acceptable (I live in a town with average dosage 5 mSv/y).
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.
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.
As for the cost to clean up Fukushima? Can we PLEASE stop blaming nuclear power for what is in reality a case of corporate and government malfeasance please?
What malfeasance? Can we please stop blaming corporations and governments for what is in reality a natural disaster?
It was SUPPOSED to have been shut down years ago, it wasn't
That's because the new reactors that were to replace Fukushima all were canceled in the decade around 2000. You can't replace a reactor with nothing.
it was SUPPOSED to have been well maintained
And evidence indicates it was well maintained.
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.
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!
"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.
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.
Except miligrams are not a comparable unit of measurement for lethal dosage. MiliSieverts are. Sieverts in general specifically indicate the effective dose of radiation which humans get, regardless of the kind of radiation or its source. Therefore 1 mSv in Denver is equivalent to 1 mSv in Fukushima.
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
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.
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.