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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
Punctuation, not so much.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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
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).
What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan.
...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.
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.
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.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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.
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.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
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
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.