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New Radioactive Water Leak At Fukushima: 300 Tons and Growing
AmiMoJo tips this news from the BBC:
"Radioactive water has leaked from a storage tank into the ground at Japan's Fukushima plant, operator TEPCO says. Officials described the leak as a level-one incident — the lowest level — on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES), which measures nuclear events. This is the first time that Japan has declared such an event since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. A puddle of the contaminated water was emitting 100 millisieverts an hour of radiation, equivalent to five year's maximum exposure for a site worker. In addition up to 300 tonnes a day of contaminated water is leaking from reactors buildings into the sea."
There was a significant leak back in April as well.
TEPCO is pleased to announce that additional capacity has become available in one of the radioactive coolant storage tanks, a development certain to ease fears of a capacity shortage.
Officials described the leak as a level-one incident — the lowest level — on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES)
first, i'd like to point out that the lowest level for nuclear leaks is LEVEL 0 - NO FREAKING LEAK.
Second, to the parent post - heroes in a half shell. turtle power!
Better check your arithmetic. It's giving off 100 mSv/hr = 876 Sv/yr (about 175x the fatal dose). If you flew in an airliner 24x7 you'd get 24 mSv/yr (a dose 36,500x smaller).
In parts of the US background exposure is 1700 mrem or 17 mSv per year. So the 5 year background exposure is 85 mSv.
In the US the normal power plant exposure limit is 50 mSv per year, and under emergency conditions it can be raised to 250 mSv per year.
According to the news report 100 mSv/hr was right at the surface of the puddle.
So don't go there.
Totally wrong on the puddle, not bothering with the rest.
http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/faqs/commercialflights.html
Nutshell:
"The corresponding annual effective dose, based on 700 hours of flight for subsonic aircraft and 300 hours for the Concorde, can be estimated at between 200 mrem for the least exposed routes and 500 mrem for the more exposed routes."
500 mrem is equal to 5 millisievert. So 100 msv is equal to 20 years of commercial airline employee exposure. In one hour.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
Well hey on the bright side the turtles won't have to go far to find a ninja master!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Things to consider:
A. How much radioactive water has actually leaked into the Pacific Ocean prior to the latest reports?
B. What is the true amount of radioactive water still leaking into the Pacific Ocean?
C. How long until the leaks are stopped?
D. Given A,B and C, what will be the total amount of radioactive water to be dispersed from the local site?
E. Given D, how may fish are likely to encounter this area, considering fish migrate thousands of miles?
F. Given E, How many predatory fish will each the contaminated fish, spreading radiation through the marine food chain?
G. What is the period of time the radiation will remain in the marine food chain?
I think I'll be testing my fish with a geiger counter for a while.
Things to consider: A. How much radioactive water has actually leaked into the Pacific Ocean prior to the latest reports? B. What is the true amount of radioactive water still leaking into the Pacific Ocean? C. How long until the leaks are stopped? D. Given A,B and C, what will be the total amount of radioactive water to be dispersed from the local site? E. Given D, how may fish are likely to encounter this area, considering fish migrate thousands of miles? F. Given E, How many predatory fish will each the contaminated fish, spreading radiation through the marine food chain? G. What is the period of time the radiation will remain in the marine food chain?
I think I'll be testing my fish with a geiger counter for a while.
H. Ignore A through G as you are probably more likely to win the lottery (even w/o every buying a ticket) than to suffer any ill effects from this unless you live in close proximity. And are more likely to get mercury poisoning than for this to affect you in any way.
300 tons of contaminated water doesn't seem like a lot when you consider there are (roughly) 784,430,000,000,000,000.00 tons of water in the pacific ocean alone. I think I'll still eat fish...
Make that 300 tons of contaminated water per day, something that Japan's environmental agency says has been happening since very soon after the initial accident in March of 2011. According to NPR, the next plan is to dig a bunch of cooling pipes into the ground and create an underground "ice wall" to stop the contamination from flowing out in to the ocean. No, really
You can trivialize all you want, but if I were you I'd avoid eating the fish from anywhere near the Japanese coast, and anything that eats there during annual migrations. Could be bad for your health. Radioactivity builds up in plants and animals over time, and it's been pouring in for 2 1/2 years now.
If that isn't bad enough, a newly stated concern is the proximity of melted fuel in relation to the Tokyo aquifer that extends under the plant. If and when the corium reaches the Tokyo aquifer, there will be 40 million people in the Tokyo area without access to safe water.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The first thing you should have asked is: What kind of radiation from what type of source?
"While it had been treated to reduce radioactive caesium, tests of the leaked water found it was still highly contaminated with beta-ray emitting substances including strontium, which has a half-life of about 30 years and can cause bone cancers."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-20/toxic-puddles-discovered-at-fukushima-nuclear-plant/4899844
Enjoy your fish and osteosarcomas.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Not nearly as reactive as this FUD however.
Interesting choice of words.
Why would you consider information about a radioactive leak which includes very bio-active beta-emitters to be FUD? The BBC article from TFA doesn't even identify bioaccumulation as the biggest risk factor in this current leak, despite strontium 90 being one of the beta emitters detected in the puddles.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
So yeah, if you decided, against all common sense, to bathe unprotected in the water leaking out of the reactor for an hour, then you would experience a statistically noticeable increase in cancer risk. Given that everyone knows there's radiation over there, nobody is doing this. That doesn't quite mean that it's 'safe' or 'trivial'... but it also doesn't mean you need to freak out and stop eating fish or anything.
Level 0 is called "deviation", an event with no safety concern.
"TOKYO, Aug 20 (Reuters) - Contaminated water with dangerously high levels of radiation is leaking from a storage tank at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, the most serious setback to the clean up of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.
The storage tank breach of about 300 tonnes of water is separate from contaminated water leaks reported in recent weeks, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co said on Tuesday.
The latest leak is so contaminated that a person standing half a metre (1 ft 8 inches) away would, within an hour, receive a radiation dose five times the average annual global limit for nuclear workers. After 10 hours, a worker in that proximity to the leak would develop radiation sickness with symptoms including nausea and a drop in white blood cells.
"That is a huge amount of radiation. The situation is getting worse," said Michiaki Furukawa, who is professor emeritus at Nagoya University and a nuclear chemist."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/20/japan-fukushima-leak-idUSL4N0GL16I20130820
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The nuke plant gets all the play, and it is an ongoing expensive headache, but there are 18,000 people who would have rather been in Fukushima that day.
Sigh, I KNEW there was going to be one of these comments here.... Guess what, I know you don't know this, but I feel it's important to pass this info on: NO MATTER HOW BAD YOU FEEL ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO DIED, THEY ARE DEAD.
People like you really piss me off because you seem to think that if all we do is throw a big pity party then the people who died in the tsunami will come back to life. But you have really BELIEVE they will, and only talk about them and absolutely nothing else. Guess what, it sucks that they died, it sucks hard, but there isn't a god damn thing you can do about, no matter how much you talk about it. But the people's friends and relatives DO have to deal with the nuclear issue. They DO have to deal with being kicked out of their homes for who knows how long. Unlike the dead people their situation can be changed(for better or worse). So yeah, unlike your self-righteous claims to the contrary, talking about the nuclear situation is in fact more productive than a constant pity party. Moron.
Monstar L
Each level is considered 10 times more severe than the level below, just like earthquake intensity scales.
I live less than 100 miles south the Fukushima plant.
On behalf of the people around me, I'd like to tell the Godzilla and Ninja Turtles-type of posters to go fuck yourselves. This isn't a fucking Internet meme to some of us.
Some of us who weren't killed or hurt in the earthquake or tsunami still have financial problems from the economic downturn in our businesses. We're not all in a position to just be able to pack up and move. We don't all live in trailers like some of you Godzilla-spouting fuckers.
Some of us have had to dig deeply into our savings.
To be honest, I'm more worried now than I was a year ago. We're back to trying to contain events instead of making any progress toward cleaning up and decontaminating.
I think a bigger problem is this:
How are they going to continue to find people willing to work at the plant? They quit after a while.
Would you work in a sealed decontamination suit and breathing gear outside in a heat index about 140F for about the same money the night shift kid-manager at Burger King makes? Just how smart and competent can someone like that be?
That's scary.
And the problem is not the engineers, it's the reckless, cost-cutting zealot-assholes from the accounting departments who become the presidents of utilities instead of engineers.
I heard a thing a while ago about coal-burning plants emitting more hard radiation from their smoke stacks than nuclear plants leak in real-life operation
Perhaps you heard this. But you can't just conclude on that alone that coal is bad. It is possible to scrub the output of the smokestacks. Coal ash is even easier to keep contained.
Despite the sarcastic tone, everyone, even you, realizes nuclear power is dangerous. It might seem that the main question is, are the benefits worth the dangers? On balance, the answer seems to be yes, nuclear is worth doing. But hang on. Costs and benefits should be the big question, but sadly there are some other factors to consider. Given human failings, which is the safer power source? Nuclear power can be generated safely, but will it? Such is the pressure to make a profit that operators will cut corners on safety to save a few dollars. We have careful analysis and fairly good consensus on the measures that must be taken to operate a nuclear power plant with reasonable safety, and then that all gets thrown out the window when a plant is built on the coast, with a wall that is not high enough. They gambled that a tsunami of enough magnitude to top the inadequate wall they built would not happen during the plant's lifetime. They were wrong.
It's even worse than that. The owners deliberately fudged the data on tsunamis. They had enough information to know that they needed a higher wall. Instead, they took a fool's course. They leaned hard on the engineers to approve a lower height for the wall. At a plant further south, the chief engineer bravely fought back and refused to authorize a wall he knew would not be adequate. The owners, being greedy fools, complained bitterly about the additional expense, and threatened to fire the engineer for not "cooperating". This kind of unfair pressure is very common in our capitalist systems. Might as well threaten to fire the universe for not being nice enough. Today, the result is that that other plant came through the tsunami intact. But it didn't matter, because Fukushima, where the engineers bowed to the pressure, failed spectacularly and now the entire nuclear power industry is teetering on the edge.
The owners did not trouble to understand the scope of the gamble they were taking on behalf of everyone, and it was their responsiblity to understand. Then, having upped the risk of a nuclear disaster to unacceptable levels that we the public would never have agreed to had we known, they went further. They skimped on the design and maintenance of various backup systems. Diesel powered emergency generators were located below what the water level would be if a tsunami should top the wall. If a tsunami happened, disaster was guaranteed.
I'm still pretty impressed by the level of punishment a badly designed,badly sited, badly maintained nuclear reactor complex could take
I'm not impressed. Ultimately, it couldn't take the punishment. Almost isn't good enough, not with something as dangerous as nuclear power.
Another bit of deliberate blindness too often paraded here is ignoring alternative power. When compared to only coal, nuclear looks pretty good. But coal is a low standard to beat. How does nuclear power stack up against solar, wind, and water? Not so well.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"