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.

Comments

Re:I like fish

[Curunir_wolf]

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.

It's been upgraded to a Level 3 Event.

[fullback]

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.

Re:Radioactive ooze!

[bzipitidoo]

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.