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."

Comments

"Fukushima Springs Water"

[korbulon]

"I'd buy that for a doller!"

Re:"Fukushima Springs Water"

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

"I'd buy that for a doller!"

Step right up!. A time-tested restorer of vitality.

Re:"Fukushima Springs Water"

[treeves]

I was gonna say, is Fukushima Springs some new resort or day spa? Hope they fix the water leak so people can use the bathroom while they're waiting for their bird poop facial.

Re:"Fukushima Springs Water"

[lordofthechia]

is Fukushima Springs some new resort or day spa?

It's a hot springs. Come in and let the steamy hot water melt away all your stress!

Re:"Fukushima Springs Water"

[petertrapasso]

My take here - Fukushima emergency: Radioactive water still leaking into Pacific (Video) http://www.examiner.com/article/fukushima-emergency-radioactive-water-still-leaking-into-pacific

Re:"Fukushima Springs Water"

[jamesh]

"I'd buy that for a doller!"

That was my first thought too. Lots of potential for advertising! - "Fukushima Springs Water - bring out your inner super hero!"

" these types of disasters need to be eliminated."

[Anonymous Coward]

Industry doesn't make mistakes, it makes profit. Risk is for the beancounters to calculate and recalculate after the fact.

WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[CanHasDIY]

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.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[ColdWetDog]

It's French! How do you think it got this outrageous accent?

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[Anonymous Coward]

They use the becquerel in the news because it gives much larger units than the curie. It's not as nice a headline if they said Fukishima had released 1100 curies of radiation. PS you can't measure contamination (becquerels) as radiation (sieverts) they are two different but related animals.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[Waffle Iron]

Using terms that the layman can hardly spell, let alone understand, isn't helping to raise awareness. Kinda the opposite.

Actually, the Becquerel is probably the easiest measure of radiation to understand: It's simply one decay per second.

No arbitrary scale factors based on grams of some rare element that most people have never even seen, and no complicated biological models. Just decays per second.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[djupedal]

We can sure, but this is Japan we're talking about. Where they have their own earthquake scale, based on destruction of property, meaning if no buildings are in that area, the quake was minimal, regardless, and where you're not counted as a highway fatality unless you die within 12 hours of the accident.

Because safety.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[MachineShedFred]

Ionizing radiating is a complex subject, thus it has a complex set of measurements that mean specific things.

Dumbing it down doesn't do anyone any good.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[washort]

you left out football fields and Libraries of Congress.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[pj2541]

Actually, this is a relatively small amount of radiation, a Curie is 3.7 * 10^10 becquerels, or roughly 40 billion becquerels, roughly 1/1000 of this leak. If this were a point source, and you were 1 meter away, your dose would be 1000 rem per hour, which would reach a 50% probability of being lethal (300 rem) in roughly 20 minutes. Since it is a disseminated source, and there's no one anywhere close to that near it, I'd say this is pretty much overblown hype. I used to work in the radiation measurement industry, and the preceding is pretty much quick and dirty shortcuts (ignoring quality factors and the conversion to rads, for instance,) but it's close enough for government work.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[Dynedain]

It's an easy technical measure, but horrible for expressing meaning. I read up on the definition of a becquerel, and while I get it, I still have no basis of understanding what 20-30 billion becquerels means.

Plus, even in the explanation page, it seems that the becquerel is usually expressed with per-volume or per-weight measure. So using the unit by itself is useless to the lay person. How many becquerels to the banana?

It sounds to me someone used this unit with the express intent of making it sound big and scary, and that's disingenuous even if accurate.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[LordLimecat]

Also, we should stop using this complicated "ASCII"; good old binary is much simpler.

Sometimes layers of abstraction are necessary to make sense of things. How much exactly is 1 beq, in terms of health effects? This is where "complicated biological models" are a lot more useful.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[Shimbo]

They use the becquerel in the news because it gives much larger units than the curie. It's not as nice a headline if they said Fukishima had released 1100 curies of radiation.

Becquerel is the standard SI unit; the BBC would generally use those unless the non-standard unit is widely used. Although quoting GBq or TBq rather than the big scary numbers would be best IMHO.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[Remus Shepherd]

I like this idea, because we can then begin developing products like Rad-X and Radaway.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[camperdave]

But how do you measure seconds?

(And to follow up that: how do you measure distance?)

I click to the stopwatch function on my Timex and press start.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[Waffle Iron]

How much exactly is 1 beq, in terms of health effects? This is where "complicated biological models" are a lot more useful.

Only if you have a proposed exposure mode, which in this case is all future speculation, and which will inevitably be based on politics as much as on science. The raw number of decays, OTOH, is a relatively precise quantity.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, ASCII is a binary encoding.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[Anonymous Coward]

Using terms that the layman can hardly spell, let alone understand, isn't helping to raise awareness. Kinda the opposite.

I just went through airport security for the first time in a decade.

The machine was labelled, "Millimeter Wave Scanner"

I wonder how calm the line would be if it said,

"Microwave Scanner".

The party I was with opted for hand search when I told them how it worked. Otherwise, clueless like the rest.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[Applehu Akbar]

A becquerel is the breakdown of A SINGLE atom per second. News reports have standardized on the becquerel because the numbers are so much larger and more impressive. Just the background radiation going on inside you and I and each of us is about 4500 Bq. And yes, any one of those Bq going off inside you at exactly the right place and time could have a mutagenic effect on your offspring.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[Waffle Iron]

Plus, even in the explanation page, it seems that the becquerel is usually expressed with per-volume or per-weight measure.

For radiation release events like this, it's simply the overall amount released for the whole event. You don't need per volume or weight.

The per volume amount will eventually depend on how much the contamination gets diluted, but that's location dependent and probably unknown right now.

It sounds to me someone used this unit with the express intent of making it sound big and scary, and that's disingenuous even if accurate.

More likely, they used it because it's a standard SI unit, unlike the curie. Using curies would be more like quoting distances in furlongs because you think that meters sound "too scary" due to the bigger numbers.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[Nemyst]

Except the rad is a deprecated, non-SI unit. The most useful unit for humans is the sievert (Sv), since it describes the effective absorbed dose regardless of source. 1Sv of alpha radiation does the same damage (give or take, obviously) as 1Sv of gamma radiation to the human body. It's a much more complicated value to compute (since it takes into account all those elements mentioned and more), but it's also much better to use as a comparison. The gray (Gy) is an absorbed dose measurement, which doesn't take into account biological interactions. Therefore it can be matched to other SI units in the form of 1 J/kg. Sieverts are derived from grays using a quality factor.

By comparison, the becquerel (Bq) can be computed straight from information like the half-life and mass, making it a much more theoretical measurement. It is equivalent to the reciprocal second. From what I gather, the becquerel figure is used because it's an estimate from the quantity and type of radioactive material, as opposed to a measurement done on the field.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[Meeni]

The chemical form of these release also matter. That changes completely how they will come back in the food chain later down the road.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[Shimbo]

>

The anti nukes seem to love bigging up the true technical measures by splitting them into smaller units (i.e. turning 1Sv into 1000 mSv). Exaggeration without actually exaggerating anything. It's rather clever actually.

You're reaching a little here; you have a point with the trillion Bq thing but doses are usually quoted in mSv, because it's a convenient size. 1mSv is the recommend maximum annual dose for members of the public, for example. I don't see quoting doses in mSv as any more unusual than an engineer giving a length as 1200mm.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[Talderas]

Three supersized happy meals of plutonium?

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[CanHasDIY]

Ionizing radiating is a complex subject, thus it has a complex set of measurements that mean specific things.

Dumbing it down doesn't do anyone any good.

Talking above people's heads doesn't either.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[bjb_admin]

Easy explanation.

How many banana equivalent doeses is this?

5 trillion bananas (8 Bq per banana)

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[CanHasDIY]

I dig it!

Brings a new meaning to the phrase, "Hey, Mr. tally man, tally me banana..."

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[david_thornley]

So you're saying becquerel means radiation-hertz?

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[khallow]

Tritium is bad in that it is readily accepted into any cellular process involving water. It is good in that there's no natural concentrating mechanism. A fish's liver or the human body isn't going to concentrate tritium, like it would mercury. I'd be a bit more worried about the radioactive iodine and strontium isotopes.

Given how diluted the tritium leak is (being dumped into the ocean), I'm not concerned.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[Zynder]

It's mother was a hamster and it's father smelt of isotopes!

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[delt0r]

You seriously thing that using terms that convey no more meaning will help with understanding? Really? You don't try explaining things to the laymen very often do you.

Also 99.99% of people have turned off their logical part of the brain at the first mention of the work nuclear anyway.

Now for some better considerations. There is no indication of how dilute this is, and its likely quite dilute. Its tritium which is very low energy beta emitter and only poses a risk when ingested. In fact it could well be so dilute that drinking nothing but this water would not increase your does significantly from background levels. I doubt this is the case... But the fact remains, that the relevant facts are missing. At least from the summary.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[delt0r]

For radiation release events like this, it's simply the overall amount released for the whole event. You don't need per volume or weight.

Yes you do. If that leak was a cubic meter of water or a cubic kilometer has a massive impact on the relevance and effects of the leak. Without that information you simply cannot gauge anything relevant from a risk point of view.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[delt0r]

In this case the exposure model is fairly simple (assuming it was only tritium). Since tritium is a very weak beta emitter, it only matters when ingested and has a short biological half life once you start drinking non contaminated water. It does not accumulate in any particular organ. If its already dilute enough (possible technically), then it would pose very little risk compared to background.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[delt0r]

Its also good in that its low energy beta, and that it has a fairly short half life (both nuclear and biological) and will dilute with natural water to below background levels fairly fast.

The bad is I don't see how water with tritium in it won't also have other stuff in it....

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[AmiMoJo]

The problem with sieverts is that it doesn't differentiate between types of exposure. You have to get down to effective dose to know the effect of a given level of radiation on specific organs, and you have to know the type of radioactive material and how it can get inside the body to do that. So far no-one has invented a device that can make that kind of determination automatically, so it is very difficult to set an acceptable limit for exposure and background levels which is safe since you can't just whip out your tricorder and take a reading.

People often complain that the limits around Fukushima are too low and that higher levels would be perfectly safe. That might be true if the measured radiation was from certain substances, but the type of material emitted from Fukushima is known to accumulate inside the body and damage organs over long periods of time so the limit was set appropriately low. Even with such a low limit evidence of damage to children's health is starting to emerge, but of course we won't know anything with certainly for a few years yet.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[MrKaos]

A list of some scientific studies on the effects of tritium, with references, in case there is any doubt regarding Triated water's effect on living beings.

Tritium is biologically mutagenic *because* it's a low energy emitter. This characteristic makes readily absorbed by surrounding cells. The available evidence from studies conducted journal a list of effects. From those works;

Tritium can be inhaled, ingested, or absorbed through skin. Eating food containing 3H can be even more damaging than drinking 3H bound in water. Consequently, an estimated radiation dose based only on ingestion of tritiated water may underestimate the health effects if the person has also consumed food contaminated with tritium. (Komatsu)

Studies indicate that lower doses of tritium can cause more cell death (Dobson, 1976), mutations (Ito) and chromosome damage (Hori) per dose than higher tritium doses. Tritium can impart damage which is two or more times greater per dose than either x-rays or gamma rays.

(Straume) (Dobson, 1976) There is no evidence of a threshold for damage from 3H exposure; even the smallest amount of tritium can have negative health impacts. (Dobson, 1974) Organically bound tritium (tritium bound in animal or plant tissue) can stay in the body for 10 years or more.

It's often said "of all the elements in nuclear waste tritium is one of the more harmless ones" and while it's more benign than most other radioactive effluents it's toxicity should not be under-estimated.

Tritium can cause mutations, tumors and cell death. (Rytomaa) Tritiated water is associated with significantly decreased weight of brain and genital tract organs in mice (Torok) and can cause irreversible loss of female germ cells in both mice and monkeys even at low concentrations. (Dobson, 1979) (Laskey) Tritium from tritiated water can become incorporated into DNA, the molecular basis of heredity for living organisms. DNA is especially sensitive to radiation. (Hori) A cell's exposure to tritium bound in DNA can be even more toxic than its exposure to tritium in water. (Straume)(Carr)

First, as an isotope of hydrogen (the cell's most ubiquitous element), tritium can be incorporated into essentially all portions of the living machinery; and it is not innocuous -- deaths have occurred in industry from occupational overexposure. R. Lowry Dobson, MD, PhD. (1979)

References;

Komatsu, K and Okumura, Y. Radiation Dose to Mouse Liver Cells from Ingestion of Tritiated Food or Water. Health Physics. 58. 5:625-629. 1990.

Dobson, RL. The Toxicity of Tritium. International Atomic Energy Agency symposium, Vienna: Biological Implications of Radionuclides Released from Nuclear Industries v. 1: 203. 1979.

Hori, TA and Nakai, S. Unusual Dose-Response of Chromosome Aberrations Induced in Human Lymphocytes by Very Low Dose Exposures to Tritium. Mutation Research. 50: 101-110. 1978.

Straume, T and Carsten, AL.Tritium Radiobiology and Relative Biological Effectiveness. Health Physics. 65 (6) :657-672; 1993. [This special issue of Health Physics is entirely devoted to Tritium]

Laskey, JW, et al. Some Effects of Lifetime Parental Exposure to Low Levels of Tritium on the F2 Generation. Radiation Research.56:171-179. 1973.

Rytomaa, T, et al. Radiotoxicity of Tritium-Labelled Molecules. International Atomic Energy Agency symposium,Vienna: Biological Implications of Radionuclides Released from Nuclear Industries v. 1: 339. 1979.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[delt0r]

I never asserted that it was harmless. But the amounts here, given that from a nuclear fission plant, its typically quite dilute, and that it will almost never be alone without other contaminants, its not clear at all there is something to worry about or not. All sea water is Triated to a parts per trillion level because of nuclear testing. That doesn't make it unsafe.

And note the lots of "may .." and "could .." in these studies. Also note these are really old studies. I am sure i have read more recent ones, including more recent work on threshold models that involved nuclear plant workers.

Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?'

[MrKaos]

I never asserted that it was harmless. .... I am sure i have read more recent ones, including more recent work on threshold models that involved nuclear plant workers.

Not saying that you did, just presenting the info I have. If you have access to more recent studies let me know what they are so I can check them out.

Should be Fukushima not Fukishima

[Anonymous Coward]

Spelling counts

Re:Should be Fukushima not Fukishima

[ColdWetDog]

Spelling counts

Punctuation, not so much.

Re:Should be Fukushima not Fukishima

[Anonymous Coward]

Romanji isn't an exact science and the rules for it has changed many times.
Regardless, neither Fukushima nor Fikishima is correct but slashdot doesn't really support the correct spelling.

Re:Should be Fukushima not Fukishima

[Anonymous Coward]

Romaji. Not romanji. Romaji.

Tepco is suicidal or insanely stupid

[vadim_t]

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.

Re:Tepco is suicidal or insanely stupid

[Waffle Iron]

Welcome to the real world.

Re:Tepco is suicidal or insanely stupid

[Joining Yet Again]

tl;dr Your two choices are balance and destruction.

Centralise it all, and you'll end up with one massive monolithic corrupt power structure.

Leave it to the market, and each entity will abuse every other in the quest for profit.

Stringently regulate a marketplace in the interests of the country, and everyone except the megalomaniacs and the stupid Is happy.

Re:Tepco is suicidal or insanely stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Can it be because nuclear energy is not economically and ecologically viable?
If it were, it'd not need enormous amounts of spending, negative economic balance on every fracken scale and require concentrated efforts for the next 5.000 - 10.000 years.

Captcha: saving

Re:Tepco is suicidal or insanely stupid

[krovisser]

Nuclear energy is the most ecologically viable option in existence. The problems with not being able to build shiny, reliable new ones is a governmental and societal problem, not a nuclear one.

Or do you think pumping radioactive coal ash in the air is more ecologically viable?

Re:Tepco is suicidal or insanely stupid

[pixelpusher220]

Coal pollution 'could' be stopped - we choose not to due to cost.

As this accident demonstrates, nuclear radiation from a failed plant can't be contained very well.

As for ecologically viable? Please, renewables are far and away more ecologically sound. Not quite ready for grid scale yet, but just because nuclear has better 'operational' characteristics doesn't make it 'good' since it will fail at some point. And there's all that waste lying around in spent fuel ponds we still haven't figured out what to do with.

Re:Tepco is suicidal or insanely stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I think stacking spent fuel rods on roofs, in leaky casks and in underground caves lying in seismically-unstable area is the way to go.

After all, leaving stacks of deadly poison metals lying around (and increasing their number every year) is most ecologically viable option in existence. Solar, geothermal, wind, ocean wave, etc. are all liberal hippy plots to get us to be jobless, hummus-eating, pot-smoking slackers.

Re:Tepco is suicidal or insanely stupid

[camperdave]

But we have figured out what to do with it. Bury it in Yucatan. However, once again, government and society have gotten in the way.

Re:Tepco is suicidal or insanely stupid

[Waffle Iron]

Bury it in Yucatan.

I suppose that there are plenty of pyramids available there in which to store it, but don't you don't think that the Mexican drug cartels might dig it up and sell it to The Terrorists?

Re:Tepco is suicidal or insanely stupid

[GarethIwanFairclough]

Coal pollution 'could' be stopped - we choose not to due to cost.

We don't choose not to, but the people who can choose not to don't. A sad situation.

As this accident demonstrates, nuclear radiation from a failed plant can't be contained very well.

Actually, the vast majority of the radiation from the reactor was contained and most of the material is still inside. I don't know about you, but that tells me that the containment system did it's job pretty well given the circumstances.

here, allow Rod Adams to explain http://atomicinsights.com/more-accurate-headline-would-be-fukushima-containment-worked/

As for ecologically viable? Please, renewables are far and away more ecologically sound. Not quite ready for grid scale yet, but just because nuclear has better 'operational' characteristics doesn't make it 'good' since it will fail at some point.

*Everything* fails at some point to assume otherwise is nothing short of idiotic. But reactors that were licensed 40 years ago are being re-licensed for another 20 years and from what I hear there is little reason why those reactors couldn't go on for another 20 years after that. How long does even the longest lived turbine last? 10 to 15 years? Solar panels? 20 years maybe, assuming that the panel will continue to operate as well as it did when it was first installed, which is absurd.

There's also the matter of reactors being far more predictable than so called 'renewables'. Sometimes pixelpuller, sometimes operational characteristics DO matter. For your beloved 'renewables' the name 'unreliables' may be more apt. Why? Because that's what they are, unreliable.

And there's all that waste lying around in spent fuel ponds we still haven't figured out what to do with.

Uh-huh, so reprocessing hasn't been invented yet? What utter garbage.

http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/te_1587_web.pdf

As I recall (and have mentioned on /. more than a few times) the "'waste' problem" in the US simply did not exist before a certain US president decided on dubious "non proliferation" grounds to halt and ban any further reprocessing research.

Hell, even just sitting there in the pools it's not doing any harm other than wasting away, denying the people the clean, abundant and reliable energy that can be extracted from it!

Re:Tepco is suicidal or insanely stupid

[dj245]

But we have figured out what to do with it. Bury it in Yucatan. However, once again, government and society have gotten in the way.

The nuclear industry is getting pretty irritated about this. They (and their electric ratepayers) have paid into a disposal fund for decades. That money was supposed to be used to dispose of their waste. But if they decommission their plant, they get stuck with the disposal bill and have to store the materials on site for decades.

Re:Tepco is suicidal or insanely stupid

[camperdave]

Sorry, I meant the Yucca Mountain Range.

Re:Tepco is suicidal or insanely stupid

[Joining Yet Again]

People, as properly represented by the government.

(And, no, not all governments throughout history have failed to represent the people, before someone gets on their youthful high horse.)

Re:Tepco is suicidal or insanely stupid

[jez9999]

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

Remember that you're looking at the worst example in today's nuclear industry - don't ask me how TEPCO manages to be such a bunch of incompetent morons, but France, the UK, China, India, and (these days) Russia for example have nuclear power pretty well licked, safety-wise. No major problems for decades. US nuclear power is probably worse because US nuclear politics (actually, US politics in general) is so dysfunctional.

Re:Tepco is suicidal or insanely stupid

[MrKaos]

Actually, the vast majority of the radiation from the reactor was contained and most of the material is still inside. I don't know about you, but that tells me that the containment system did it's job pretty well given the circumstances.

A microgram of ingested pu-239 is fatal. It's irrelevant how much escaped since it is an analogue of iron and in the ocean iron is readily taken up by biological processes and will end up in the foodchain. As for doing its job it failed exactly as predicted when it remained unpowered in a SCRAM condition and according to the design flaws in its design basis that dictacted its operational characteristics. In laymans terms, TEPCO is criminally negligent for taking a risk (via nonfeasence) that would mean the Reactor could ever be unpowered.

But reactors that were licensed 40 years ago are being re-licensed for another 20 years and from what I hear there is little reason why those reactors couldn't go on for another 20 years after that.

Embrittlement of the pressure vessel dictates the lifespan of the reactor. This is the primary limitation to the net energy return of a Nuclear Reactor.

There's also the matter of reactors being far more predictable than so called 'renewables'.

Also irrelevant as the reliability of baseload power is a function of the grid, not the energetic source. Even so Reactors have notorious availability issues mainly becuase they were rushed to their current day outputs without proper development processes, which I think was mentioned in the article in passing.

As I recall (and have mentioned on /. more than a few times) the "'waste' problem" in the US simply did not exist before a certain US president decided on dubious "non proliferation" grounds to halt and ban any further reprocessing research.

Sept. 25, 1976 speech in San Diego, Jimmy Carter raised concerns about proliferation and promised that he would stop Barnwell until it was"needed" and safe, and only ever allow it to operate if it were on a multi-national basis.

President Ford initiated a secret study to set a nonproliferation policy. Ford's statement was finally presented in a campaign speech at Portsmouth, Ohio, just five days before the 1976 election. He said that control of nuclear proliferation had to take precedence over commercial and national economic interests. He called for a delay of up to three years in starting the Barnwell reprocessing plant. Some argue that it was Ford who actually stopped reprocessing, not Carter.

On April 7, 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would defer indefinitely the reprocessing of spent nuclear reactor fuel. He stated that after extensive examination of the issues, he had reached the conclusion that this action was necessary to reduce the serious threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, and that by setting this example, the U. S. would encourage other nations to follow its lead.

President Carter's Executive Order also announced that the U. S. would sponsor an international examination of alternative fuel cycles, seeking to identify approaches which would allow nuclear power to continue without adding to the risk of nuclear proliferation. In early 1982, President Reagan rescinded the Carter policy, allowed programmatic (as opposed to case-by-case) approvals for reprocessing of U.S. origin fuel by the Euratom nations and Japan, and even said that reprocessing could again be considered in the U. S.

So Carters policy was rescinded by Reagan just 5 years after it's inception. Any argument and gnashing of teeth about Carters decision has been a moot point for well over 2 decades. Arguments about reprocessing must be carried out on the basis of the merits of the technology which is known to be costly to implement and very hard to run safely.

Units!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Units!!

[Nemyst]

Yes, because using a deprecated, non-SI unit is better. The article could've said 20 to 40 terabecquerels, but that would've confused people just as much.

Re:Units!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you talk about Mercury dumped into the environment from coal in number of atoms or do you belittle that number and use kilograms or grams instead?

The reason to use things like Ci and not Bq, is because normal people can relate to them. It is akin of talking about about grams of sodium in your diet vs. atoms of sodium you consume. Or why we talk in years not megaseconds.

For example, 1 Curie of radioactive material in one place can make you sick over long-ish period of time.

1000 Curies is a dangerous amount - you do not want to be next to that amount for any period of time. 1000 Curies is amount of radiation that exist in things like cancer treatment machines (although those have something like Co in them, not tritium).

If you want to talk about Gigacuries, read the following link. Very informative.

http://www.umich.edu/~radinfo/introduction/natural.htm

There is over 20,000,000 Ci of tritium in the oceans. Another 500 is not significant to alter concentrations. Now, if we dumped 500,000 every year, that would be cause for concern, but we don't. We keep radiation contained. If only we did that to Carbon or Mercury, we would be able to fish in the lakes we have and there would be no global warming.

Re:Units!!

[Anonymous Coward]

There is over 20,000,000 Ci of tritium in the oceans. Another 500 is not significant to alter concentrations

Just to add, this means that every hour there is about 120Cu of tritium added to the oceans via natural means for the said concentration to be at the above number. So cosmic rays dump the equivalent of the story's amount into the oceans every 4-8 hours...

So do we have the proper perspective now?

The crisis is local and it only affects local human environment. That's all.

Re:OK, Einstein

[Joining Yet Again]

I'd rather see nuclear energy than reliance on oil, but humans have managed to fuck it up on many occasions.

Everything can be made 100% safe in theory, and any disaster can be optmally managed in theory, but in practice every system is designed and implemented by humans, and this must be taken into account at every stage of, well, everything.

Nuclear power must be managed carefully in the interests of the people, IOW strong independent oversight to the exclusion of both unaccountable stagnation (Chernobyl) and regulatory capture (Tepco).

It already did

[Hentes]

If Nuclear energy is ever to move forward, these types of disast that should've dismantled decadeers need to be eliminated.

Fukushima is an old BWR, nuclear energy has moved quite a lot since then.

Re:once again

[Inconexo]

What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan.

So, worst case...

[CrimsonAvenger]

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.

Re:So, worst case...

[Sique]

Hm. Similar argument: Adding 100 grams of sodium chloride to your drink will add about 0.000,000,000,000...1% to the world's sodium chloride supply. But for some reason, it will kill you if you drink it anyway.

Re:So, worst case...

[CrimsonAvenger]

Bad argument. Noone, except perhaps you, is suggesting that it's even possible to drink enough of that tritium to be lethal - it's being diulted in an OCEAN.

Wow. 20-40 TRILLION becquerels...

[jeffb (2.718)]

...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.

Re:Wow. 20-40 TRILLION becquerels...

[Joining Yet Again]

I think only strawmen are panicking so far?

Re:Wow. 20-40 TRILLION becquerels...

[camperdave]

Wrong measurement. Becquerels are a rate: decay events per second. Saying Chernobyl was 5.2 million trillion Bq is like saying that the noise at a Van Halen concert was upwards of 440 Hz.

Re:Wow. 20-40 TRILLION becquerels...

[Mt._Honkey]

It's an appropriate unit of measurement, and also your analogy is off:

Yes, Bq is a unit of rate of decay. So measuring a release in Bq is saying "this is the rate of radiation the stuff is emitting", and that's what you need to know to know if you're getting a dangerous dose over your lifetime. If they said "atoms" or "kg" of material, it would tell you nothing useful by itself. 1 kg of U-238 is virtually harmless because it is so long lived, so it is infrequently emitting radiation, while 1 kg of Co-60 will just murder you.

As for your analogy, measuring the noise at a concert in watts is telling you the rate at which acoustic energy is emitted, and so is analogous to Bq. What you're advocating is equivalent to stating the integrated sound energy of the concert in Joules.

There's no perfect general unit for radiation, because the effect on a person will depend on the dose rate, the dose duration, the damage done by the type of radiation, where the contamination resides and moves over time both in the environment and in your body, etc. Bq is a good first unit for a general idea in this kind of situation.

Re:Wow. 20-40 TRILLION becquerels...

[jeffb (2.718)]

So, have you got some pictures from all the times you helped clean up coal slurry spills?

Re:Wow. 20-40 TRILLION becquerels...

[jeffb (2.718)]

No, I'm pretty sure it's the right measurement.

One becquerel is one decay per second -- or, to put it another way, the activity of a quantity of radioactive material sufficient to produce one decay per second. While it may not be perfectly proper from a unit-analysis perspective, reporting quantities of radioactive material in becquerels is widely accepted, and quite unambiguous.

So, the original article, and my list of comparisons, are using Bq as a measure of activity -- from the potassium in one human body or all human bodies, from one kg of Ra, from all the radioactive gas released from TMI, and from all the devil's cocktail spewed from Chernobyl. And, of course, from the current Fukushima leak.

Re:Wow. 20-40 TRILLION becquerels...

[camperdave]

So... the decay rates of materials are constant? The kilo of radium always emits at a rate of 37 trillion decay events per second? What about density? Will it still emit at 37 trillion as a sheet of radium foil, and as a solid ball? Maybe it will. Maybe it won't. I don't know. Is temperature a factor? Does hot radium decay faster than cold radium?

Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were events. They spanned a period of time. Was the 481 thousand trillion Bq you have listed an instantaneous rate, or is it the total number of decay events divided by the total number of seconds of the catastrophe? Or was it perhaps an increase or decrease?

It seems to me that the number of decay events is more important than the frequency of those events. If the 40 trillion Bq radiation only lasted for a trillionth of a second, that's 40 decay events.

Re:once again

[Joining Yet Again]

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.

Alternate Solution

[ThatsNotPudding]

Can we just start measuring radiation in Rads now? Sure would make things simpler to explain...

Given that it's Japan, how about expressing it in units of Gojira. Or possibly monkey barrels.

Re:OK, Einstein

[pixelpusher220]

being lucky isn't exactly a selling point.

How much radioactive water is leaking?

[camperdave]

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.

Re:How much radioactive water is leaking?

[rkww]

No, because you've forgotten that there are two tritium atoms to a molecule, and you're assuming all the tritium atoms delay in the first year; the halflife is twelve years so each year 0.94 remains (since 0.94 ^ 12 ~= 0.5). So you're out by a factor of eight or so, I reckon.

I don't understand the secrecy

[EmperorOfCanada]

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.

Re:I don't understand the secrecy

[Jeremi]

Hiding the truth does nothing to help them look good, and in the long term adds to their list of mistakes

The truth is that in many cases they don't really know what is going on. So they can either say "don't worry, everything is fine" (and rightly be accused of spinning), or they can say "this is what we think is happening" (and be unjustly -- but inevitably -- accused of lying when it turns out to be something different).

The third option, where they come out and say "we honestly don't know what's going on down there", is probably the most problematic for them, as it would result in responses like "well if you don't know what's going on, maybe you're not qualified to run a reactor", and then the political problems would make solving the technical problems even harder. (Which isn't to say that such a response is necessarily incorrect; only that the technical people are trying to concentrate on the technical problems at hand, and aren't terribly motivated to create new political problems for themselves on top of that)

Re:I don't understand the secrecy

[BeCre8iv]

Corporate seppuku would be a good start.

Re:OK, Einstein

[pixelpusher220]

Everything can be made 100% safe in theory

Theories are nice, but reality is a bit more problematic.

While nuclear risks can be mitigated somewhat as can risks from other sources of power, the problem is what happens when they do fail. Every single other source of power is able to be cleaned up while walking the site in a matter of days. Nuclear makes quite a large area uninhabitable for decades.

Re:" these types of disasters need to be eliminate

[wmac1]

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.

Re:I know that name

[Dogtanian]

Scott Becquerel was awesome in Quantum Leap, shame he had to sully his name with Enterprise.

You idiot, that wasn't his name! It was Scott *Blacula*.

Sheesh.

I don't understand if 20 trillion is a lot.

[Demonantis]

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.

Re:I don't understand if 20 trillion is a lot.

[kqc7011]

I prefer the dental x-ray dose equivalent. But not the Barium enema dose equivalent.

O horns of dilemma on which we are impaled!

[Medievalist]

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.

Re:OK, Einstein

[Agent0013]

But, but, but. . . If there is strong independent oversight there will be less room for profits! We can't run a business without profits, so we must accept some amount of risk. Well I mean, you must accept some risk. The company will not accept any risk to the profits, they push that off to you.

Re:once again

[Talderas]

Which were probably manufactured in Mexico or the US.

Sensationalizing puds

[BitZtream]

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.

Re:once again

[Talderas]

The Toyota Corolla is manufactured in California, just to add on to my post.

Re:what's the worst that can happen?

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

s/Fukishima/Fukushima

[kenji.toyama]

Typo in title.

Re:what's the worst that can happen?

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:once again

[pakar]

Heavy! ;)

Re:OK, Einstein

[pakar]

Main problem we have with nuclear power today is that when we developed the technology is was to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, not only to supply the population with cheap power.

If we where to actually do a redesign and start from scratch today we can come up with much better things, but things that have not been proven on the same commercial scale as the current ones.

Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

And never take Chernobyl as an example that nuclear power is unsafe... It was freaking huge incompetence that caused that accident... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Conditions_prior_to_the_accident

Despite this postponement, preparations for the test not affecting the reactor's power were carried out, including the disabling of the emergency core cooling system or ECCS, a passive/active system of core cooling intended to provide water to the core in a loss-of-coolant accident. Given the other events that unfolded, the system would have been of limited use, but its disabling as a "routine" step of the test is an illustration of the inherent lack of attention to safety for this test.[29] In addition, had the reactor been shutdown for the day as planned, it is possible that more preparation would have been taken in advance of the test.

Re:OK, Einstein

[Joining Yet Again]

The whole point is that some activity can only be judged "safe" in the context that it is performed by fallible humans. You can't say, "This is safe because it would be safe if things were mostly done right."

IOW, no system should be engineered for which gross fuck-up by a few people can cause Chernobyl levels of disaster. The social hierarchy and technical measures were badly implemented, here as with Tepco - just worse in Chernobyl's case.

Re:OK, Einstein

[pakar]

You can build a 100% safe plant... And with safe i'm talking about the surroundings....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor#Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
Worst case with these would be that the plant would be unusable and would have to be rebuilt, but the surroundings would still be safe from contamination.

And other types of power-plants can be quite problematic too:
Coal - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill
Hydro-power - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_station_failures (Banqiao Dam in china did cause quite a bit of havoc)
Natural gas (pipelines) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pipeline_accidents
Natural gas (power-plants) - Found a few accidents on google but no list of them all or any big one.
Wind-turbines - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8948363/1500-accidents-and-incidents-on-UK-wind-farms.html (about 1500 accidents in the UK)

No power is safe... Nuclear power has the lowest death-rate per generated amount of power......

Biggest problem with nuclear power is the public opinion about it that is causing issues and resulting in that no new, not even the safe ones, will get built so we continue using the old ones re-licencing them for 20 years more at a time.. I would like to see that we would scrap all the old ones that have 40 years in service and then build new safer and more efficient plats.

Re:OK, Einstein

[pakar]

You can't say, "This is safe because it would be safe if things were mostly done right."

No, but i can say that if you have multiple trained people i could rely on them to handle the situation in the correct way.. Then of course you should design the system in such a way that you will never run into very strange situations (K.I.S.S method).. It should be similar to Do X, if fail press button to shutdown. And the shutdown should be designed in a way so it's impossible to fail, or at least only cause local (internal) damage.

The Chernobyl incident where many of people not having a clue. They did not have enough training to actually know the system and then disregarding the procedures to handle things that followed.

What i was referring to in my post where http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor .. It can be designed to be "fail-proof" in the way that it would be self-contained and not affect the surroundings.

Re:OK, Einstein

[Joining Yet Again]

Aye, I'm not disagreeing with MSR design, but a failsafe design would be *necessary* - just having competent personnel is not sufficient. Even Chernobyl had a good number of competent personnel, but not coordinated, not in charge, and/or not with the right priorities.

Most people are to dumb and irresponsible ...

[Qbertino]

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.

Re:And still no one has died!

[BeCre8iv]

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/387357/Two-years-after-the-Fukushima-nuclear-disaster-is-Japan-facing-a-cancer-time-bomb

"Most worrying are the results of tests carried out on more than 130,000 children who lived around Fukushima. More than 40 per cent have the early signs of thyroid cancer, while other forms of the disease may not become apparent for a decade."

And before you write of a source as radical, treehugging or liberal. I chose the express as a thatcherite newspaper with a pro nuclear history. Politics proven by poetry.
http://www.johncooperclarke.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=129:you-never-see-a-nipple-in-the-daily-express&catid=36:poems&Itemid=56

News filtering is silly

[StewartD]

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.

Re:OK, Einstein

[pixelpusher220]

Lets walk through these one by one:

Thorium Nuclear - Molten Salt. Not built yet. Sure we have prototypes that have worked for a few years, but molten salts are extremely corrosive. We don't yet have the metals that can keep it self contained and sealed for a plant lifetime. It's a chemical/mechanical problem so likely not impossible but it isn't available yet. Once that's solved, I like the concept - and unlike most people against something I'm more than willing to fund it's research because it does hold promise.

Coal, fly ash spill. EXTREMELY localized and entirely preventable. This is an operational issue, not a failure issue. Much like nuclear waste is an operational issue.

Hydro-power - um, don't allow building below the dam and/or provide stable high ground shelters; hell you could even build earth works into your plan to divert any failure flow to designated routes. It's entirely preventable. there are no 'safe places' when a nuclear plant fails.

Natural gas pipelines AND plants. As I said, when coal plants and by association these fail, you can still walk the site the next day. it doesn't render the place uninhabitable.

Wind turbines - seriously? From your link - "no member of the public had ever been hurt as a result of a wind turbine accident" So um, ZERO problems.

I'm amazed you didn't put solar up there too. People like to claim that it's dangerous because it's on rooftops. As if we shouldn't have roofs on our houses because people could die putting them up there. Manufacturing of ANYTHING has dangers, but we're talking about failure conditions to the surrounding area.

You've deliberately conflated construction and maintenance issues to try and prove that 'everything' is dangerous. well of course everything is dangerous, but absolutely NOTHING has the failure issues that nuclear does.

No new, not even the safe [nuclear plants]

You do realize that Fukishima was considered 'safe' once upon a time right? Are newer plants safeR? of course, but you can't say it's without risks. And those risks for nuclear are simply orders of magnitude greater than anything else.