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Fukishima Springs Water Leak
sl4shd0rk writes "The Japanese Fukishima crisis took a turn for the worse this week as it was found a barrier built to contain contaminated water has been breached; a leak defined by 20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium. This is yet another problem on top of a spate of errors plaguing the 2011 nuclear disaster site. Nuclear regulatory official Shinji Kinjo has cited Tokyo Electric Power Company as having a 'weak sense of crisis' as well as hinted at previous bunglings by TEPCO as the reason one cannot 'just leave it up to Tepco alone.' If Nuclear energy is ever to move forward, these types of disasters need to be eliminated."
"I'd buy that for a doller!"
Industry doesn't make mistakes, it makes profit. Risk is for the beancounters to calculate and recalculate after the fact.
Can we just start measuring radiation in Rads now? Sure would make things simpler to explain...
becquerels == ORads (Outbound Radiation)
sieverts == IRads (Inbound Radiation) or ARads (Absorbed Radiation)
Or just "Rads" as a general term, i.e. "the leak is dumping 20-30 billion Rads into the ecosystem / Nobody can absorb that many Rads and survive! / Background radiation at 2,500 Rads, sir."
Using terms that the layman can hardly spell, let alone understand, isn't helping to raise awareness. Kinda the opposite.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Spelling counts
Scott Becquerel was awesome in Quantum Leap, shame he had to sully his name with Enterprise.
In principle, I think nuclear power is a perfectly sound idea that can be implemented safely and reliably.
But that's in principle. In practice somehow it turns out to be managed by complete morons that even after getting involved in the center of a huge scandal, still manage to show amazing incompetence and disregard for public safety, even when they know perfectly fine that the whole world is paying attention to them, and is already extremely distrustful.
And this state of affairs doesn't do their own industry any good. It's precisely crap like this what results in the replacement of nuclear with coal.
20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium
OK. This is embarrassing. At least use proper units.
500-1000 Ci of tritium (or Curies).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU#Tritium_emissions
http://www.nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/readingroom/factsheets/tritium.cfm
and here is more sensetionalist article, but with some numbers to compare,
http://www.ccnr.org/tritium_1.html
COMMENTS ON THE DUMPING OF 3500 CURIES OF TRITIUM INTO THE OTTAWA RIVER FROM THE NPD NUCLEAR POWER REACTOR ON JULY 19 1981
CANDU reactors emit more tritium than the so called massive spill above at Fukushima. Tritium is not very dangerous, especially in water. Even when exposed to tritium, your body has a biological half-life of only about two weeks - you pee it out along with water. Radiological halflife is 12 years so you get the idea.
Today most CANDU start to capture tritium instead of venting it, and then selling it.
Anyway, the story is not a very big story. There is a lot of worse things that could be leaked, like mercury. And mercury tends to poison things for much longer than a few years - just look at the state of oceans today and cry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease
" If Nuclear energy is ever to move forward, these types of disasters need to be eliminated."
Since the only way to eliminate the Fukushima disaster is to go back in time and shut the reactor down before the earthquake/tsunami... You had better get cracking on some sort of wormhole technology. Meanwhile, this rather poorly handled disaster still stands in contrast to thousands of combined years of flawless safety in other plants around the world.
I sometimes think that it's the anti-nuclear crowd who are responsible for the rules, regulations, and maintenance of our nuclear power plants.
Fuji is a mountain in Japan. Fiji is an entirely different place.
Fukushima and Fujishima are also different. Every child in Tikyo knows the difference.
Fukushima is an old BWR, nuclear energy has moved quite a lot since then.
Yes, because for the last 50 years or so American engineering has been doing a bang-up job with keeping people safe AND producing quality products. Products like ____________ and _____________ to name a few!
It's just inevitable that nuclear will move forward. There's enough sovereign states out there, and the properties of some of the new design in terms of safety, waste and non proliferation will lead to someone taking the first step. My guess is India will do thorium first.
I hope that the people who panic over anything nuclear will at least see the wisdom of using next-gen fission to reprocess today's 'waste' into new byproducts that have a much shorter half-life then what we have now.
What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan.
Another example why infrastructure shouldn't be privatised. Companies are too obsessed with profit to care about safety and regulations; thus they cannot be trusted to run something like this safely.
This is especially true when we're talking about biohazards.
This is going to add about 0.01% to the world's tritium supply. Which tritium supply represents a very small fraction of the radioactivity we are exposed to daily.
99.9% of which addition will decay away to nothing within the century.
I am singularly unimpressed by the panic.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Maybe TEPCO should hire some US Navy reactor specialists and nuclear engineering officers. There are bound to be some looking for jobs and they have a nuclear safety record most people would envy.
...actually means nothing to most readers not in the field. So, some comparisons:
Radioactivity from potassium in an average human body: 4000 Bq.
Radioactivity from potassium in entire human population of Earth: ~30 trillion Bq.
Radioactivity from one kilogram of radium: 37 trillion Bq.
Radioactivity released during Three Mile Island event: 481 thousand trillion Bq.
Radioactivity released during Chernobyl event: 5.2 million trillion Bq.
I'm thinking not to panic just yet.
The American electronics industry from Bell Labs to HP was absolutely awesome.
Then short-termism happened, where everyone at the top did just enough to make themselves and their kids rich.
Given that it's Japan, how about expressing it in units of Gojira. Or possibly monkey barrels.
And still no one has died!
One becquerel is defined as the decay of one atom of a radioisotope per second. So it's a rate. 40 trillion becquerel would be 40 trillion (4*10^13) tritium atoms decaying per second. Tritiated water (T2O) has a molar mass of 22.0315 grams per mole. A mole is 6.022*10^23 molecules. So 6.022*10^23 molecules of T2O has a mass of 22.0315 grams, therefore 40 trillion molecules has a mass of (4*10^13)*22.0315/(6.022*10^23) or 1.46*10^-9 grams. Assuming a density of 1 gram/ml and 1/20th of a ml per drop, we're talking super-heavy water gushing out of this leak at the incredible rate of just under a drop per year.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
This secrecy is just stupid. Even when the reactor was in full melt down they were saying "Don't worry, everything is fine, nothing to see here." But then the news were announcing the various radioactives that were being detected outside the plant. Those isotopes are only produced by a reactor in meltdown and only get out if the reactor is in full meltdown and is interacting with bits found outside the core. So long before they said how bad it was my Physics 101 was telling me Holy Crap! That reactor is way out of control! Not just "low on cooling water". That was like saying that someone shot through the heart was "Low on circulatory capacity."
Hiding the truth does nothing to help them look good, and in the long term adds to their list of mistakes. But if at this point they come clean with every bit of data people not only would know how far to run (and where not to fish) but a world full of engineers and physicists might contribute something helpful. For example, if they reveal that radioactive and water soluble product X is being produced some guy in the physics department in Argentina might say, "Hey if you put some cheap water soluble Y into the coolant it will not only precipitate product X out of the water solution but it will then absorb neutrons resulting in other stable isotopes of one of the atoms in chemical Y." This might be little known knowledge that the guy learned 20 years ago when he accidentally gummed up the university's reactor 20 years ago.
Also open information allows for people to write better case studies on how(and where) not to build a reactor.
It is just too bad if all this open information makes a few people look bad.
As for the choices before humanity. It's not Nuclear Fission vs Coal Power. It's much cleaner than coal Natural Gas vs Nuclear Fission where one has to worry about nuclear waste for thousands of years.
And extremely clean solar (including solar power satellites) vs Nuclear Fission waste. Also Wind and tidal power can replace nuclear fission power.
Furthermore, to deliberately choose a power generating technology knowing that the waste products from it have to be safely stored for thousands of years, when there are vastly safer alternatives, is fundamentally irrational.
I was thinking almost the same. Is it possible that the use the leak as a cheaper alternative to gathering/cleaning/storing of those materials?
I wouldn't be surprised. Japanese people proved to be disciplined, ethical and good while their companies (e.g. Tepco) proved to be irresponsible, corrupt and liar.
They do make pretty good cars I guess, except for the ones that take off uncontrollably and kill folks.
It would be nice to get the numbers in understandable units. I prefer BED which is banana equivelent dose. I can actually picture what that number will mean.
1.
a. A crucial or decisive point or situation; a turning point.
b. An unstable condition, as in political, social, or economic affairs, involving an impending abrupt or decisive change.
2. A sudden change in the course of a disease or fever, toward either improvement or deterioration.
3. An emotionally stressful event or traumatic change in a person's life.
4. A point in a story or drama when a conflict reaches its highest tension and must be resolved.
Does it match any of these definitions? No? THEN STOP CALLING IT A CRISIS.
If only there were some options other than nuclear fission and burning brown coal in an open pit!
Oh, wait, there are.
Here in reality, decentralized heterogenous power production would be inherently better for human culture and society, since it has less tendency to create economic disparities large enough to engender wholesale regulatory capture or militarization of power production, has fewer military vulnerabilities, and employs more working people gainfully (instead of funneling money to banksters), and would potentially allow a less expensive grid to carry more total power.
Solar, wind, hydro, and most importantly carbon-neutral biomass energy plants spotted all over the country on a true "smart grid" is the way to go. Solve dozens of social and economic problems while eliminating the pollution caused by burning petroleum.
Incidentally, I'm not the first to figure this out. Nikola Tesla talked about the idiocy of burning limited resources in 1915, before we compounded the problem by building terrestrial fission plants.
The correct English orthography is Fukushima.
Which were probably manufactured in Mexico or the US.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Becquerels ... REALLY?
What you did was found the smallest unit possible to try and describe the scary damage this has done. Why the fuck didn't you just use the atomic weight of the entire plant, thats about as useful and meaningful.
You're using an flow rate as a measure of volume ... and ignoring the whole time variable. You really don't have any idea what these things are you're converting about, do you?
You guys at slashdot are a bunch of douche bags without Taco around. No wonder he left.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The Toyota Corolla is manufactured in California, just to add on to my post.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
japan knows better than anyone that a little radiation never hurt anyone
If the radiation is from tritium, they are probably right. Tritium decays by beta emission, into He3, which is not radioactive. The emitted electron is less than 6kV. It does not bio-accumulate in preference to normal hydrogen. The half life is twelve years. I don't know what else is in the leaked water, but the tritium is not that dangerous.
Typo in title.
According to Wikipedia: The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission states that in normal operation in 2003, 56 pressurized water reactors released 40,600 curies (1.50 PBq) of tritium. So the 40 TBq in this leak, is about as much tritium as US nukes release every 10 days during normal operation. This all sounds a bit overblown.
"We suspect X, Y and Z and are working on determining what is going on."
* a few hours later *
"We discovered it is not Z, and are working on further identifying the issues so as to determine a remedy."
unless me getting upset helps those islanders, i'm not going to get upset. ...
what are these "dangers" the government speaks of? all i gather is that being able to
measure something they created in place they don't want to be able to measure it
is a bad thing. nothing officially so far as why this is bad.
the "badness" is mostly people getting upset about *unofficial* hear-say and
limited (non-proliferation issues) wikipedia entries.
according to google earth i'm typing this from +4000 kilometers away, so unless
i should pass a islander from there, i will not get upset (unless my emotional state
somehow changes the the situation in the subatomic world 4'000 km away. in which case
i'd gladly contribute positively by getting really upset.)
best to leave them islanders be. it think they like it that way
Heavy! ;)
Most people - I'd say way over 80%, perhaps even 90 or 95% - are simply to dumb and irresponsible to handle anything but the simplest of technology. To dumb to handle knives, cars or guns, to dumb to handle computers, to dumb to handle regular modern garbage correctly, let alone nuclear waste.
With computers the problems and trouble these people can cause is relatively limited, cars and guns not quite so but still in boundaries (allthoug these are quite big when looking at the problems with guns in the US or the death toll on the Autobahn).
However, there are few things invented by mankind that are equally or even more dangerous that nuclear technology. It is for this simple reason - the largest share of the general human population on this planet being to stupid for our technoligical advances invented by a very small minority - that nuclear power sources should be dismantled everywhere on earth, and not just in Germany. This tech and it's waste is a huge burden and mortgage for hundreds of thousands of years to come, and anybody seriously believing they can carry that responsibility should be looked away or at least kept away from making any meaningful decisions about anything technology related.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I've been reading a blog called Fukushima Diaries ever since the accident happened which is written by a Japanese man who posts information that is filtered or toned down in Japanese news, I don't understand why anyone would think covering things up will acually make the situation any better.
It's not a crisis. A crisis can only be a transient event. The word is derived from the ancient Greek for "decision" and is defined in English as "a turning point in the progress of anything". A continuing condition may be a problem, or even a disaster, but never a crisis.