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"

[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!

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?'

[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?'

[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?'

[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?'

[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?'

[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?'

[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:Should be Fukushima not Fukishima

[ColdWetDog]

Spelling counts

Punctuation, not so much.

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.

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

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.

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.

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: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.

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.