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Fukushima Actually "Much Worse" Than So Far Disclosed, Say Experts
PuceBaboon writes "The BBC is reporting that experts are casting doubt on the veracity of statements from both the Tokyo Electric Power Company and the Japanese government regarding the seriousness of the problems at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Not only are the constant leaks releasing radioactivity into the ocean (and thus into the food chain), but now there are also worries that the spent fuel rod storage pools may be even more unstable than first thought. An external consultant warns, 'The Japanese have a problem asking for help. It is a big mistake; they badly need it.'"
Be optimistic about it. if it gets any worse, we'll be able to use sushi instead of toothpaste.
Good people go to bed earlier.
As I said here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4110983&cid=44626741
Yet nobody cares about your pride except you
I don't really understand what the levels mean, anyone want to enlighten me with a simple explanation?
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Any "bad" news from government should be assumed to be much worse, and any "good" news from government should be assumed to be not nearly as good. That's just common sense when dealing with an organization that takes money from you by force, promising to spend it on things which benefit you, and then turns around and spends billions each year on self-promotion.
When a corporation/government has no independent oversight and an interest in minimising the severity of a disaster the public should have no expectation of receiving accurate information.
Anyone that has lived and worked in Japan with the local engineers and agencies knows it's not a good idea to take safety statements and claims at face value. Trusting the boys with nuclear reactors is asking for incidents like Fukushima to be downplayed.
Example - the locals in our apartment building told us if there was a fire to order a pizza before calling the fire dept. and tell the fd to follow the pizza delivery guy - they now the neighborhoods much better than the authorities.
Other example - our R & D center had a super-efficient furnace that was supposed to burn trash at 900. The furnace operators decided on their own to run at lower temps so the equipment would 'last longer'...that coked up the 2nd combustion chamber. One day someone tossed a 5 gal. container of cutting oil into the trash, and when they tried to burn it, the whole thing exploded, sending thousands of confidential documents out across the neighborhood. Everyone had to run out and pick them up. The community gave our company an award for being so good at the cleanup. No mention of the explosion.
Yet another example - to be counted as a highway fatality in Japan, you have to die in the first 12 hours. This isn't how other countries tally such stats, leaving Japan to appear to be much safer.
Final example - fire drills in the company were typically over-organized. We were instructed to gather at a pre-detemined location with our assigned fire monitor, and then leave the building in order. We told them that in our country, we simply get the hell out...
'The Japanese have a problem asking for help. It is a big mistake; they badly need it.'" Wouldn't that be a cultural thing? Japanese are reserved and taught not to bother others with their problems even if it is apparent to the rest of us they probably need help.
Why don't they just nuke it from low earth orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
I, for one, can't wait for my new superpowers!
.... now! "Fukushima is just the same as eating ten bananas, see? I saw it on xkcd!"
See the articles (latest link included) by El Reg's Lewis Page :
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/21/omg_new_crisis_disaster_at_fukushima_oh_wait_its_nothing_again/
A lot of these isotopes are being shunted aside and stored (from which they are leaking), are useful ones. In particular, st-90 is a beta- and can be used to create long-lived batteries (20-50 years) without worrying about mechanical issues. These are ideal for putting on rovers on the moon/mars. Basically, a company should be filtering that water quickly and getting all of those isotopes out for use.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm not disputing that the situation is serious, given that even TEPCO agreed to up the incident level.
But this entire article reads like a piece of tabloid trash:
"It's really bad!" says a famous anti-nuclear activist (aka an "independent consultant").
"It's even worse!" says the same activist/consultant.
"It could be bad; we don't know. We should be prepared, though," says a former regulatory official.
"Holy crap, if that first guy's assumptions are right, then we're in deep shit!" says an oceanographer.
"I didn't even tell you the worst part!" continues the first guy. "This completely unrelated thing might possibly be happening and then we're dooooooomed!!"
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Mycle Schneider only has honorary, not the actual education, and has been a WISE(an anti-nuclear group) activist in France for 30+ years. He is the person who gets consult jobs from the government when they want to appear as showing both sides.
Two versions of his Wikipedia page:
http://i.imgur.com/y2dxdFo.png
http://i.imgur.com/XUS0duU.png
We showed you how to fix this with Thorium in the early 1970s.
...it should be keeping corporations from pulling stunts like this. It's not like you and I have the means to confront TEPCO over this.
I'm sure the Obama administration will continue to state a glass of milk has more radiation in it than what is escaping from Japan. Oh yes, and that nobody has died from nuclear poisoning. Then he will take off his jacket and bring out a napkin in each hand to wipe the imaginary sweat from his face and say we need more nuclear power to fight global warming. (While sending coal to the rest of the world and subsidizing their coal plants.)
After all this hard work, maybe take Air Force One for a spin to Hawaii. Well, not Hawaii, that is closer to the radiation.
Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I've been considering opening a side business called Fuk-u tritium enhanced water. Cancer patients will love it. People know that radiation also causes people to gain super powers. It will practically market itself!
So, do you have your rope handy and a tree picked out as well?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
those guys are woefully uninformed liars who have proven over and over they just don't get it. it's really time to cut the Japanese authorities out of it, except for writing checks, and bring in the RANET team of the IAEA to overhaul the whole containment/cleanup effort. it's really two years too late.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Perfect time for another "America Apologizes" tour of the Middle East, all while continuing to illegally fund an Egyptian military coup, er, wait, no, it's not a coup, so it's perfectly legal.
It's been years since the event, and Fukushima still doesn't have a radioactive water processing plant. The US has dealt with this problem before, both at 3 Mile Island and some Superfund sites. Water itself doesn't become radioactive (except for tritium, which has a 12 year half life); as with fallout, the radioactives are mostly solids in the water, and can be removed and converted to smaller amounts of solid waste.
With a processing plant, they could reuse the cooling water, instead of building more and more storage tanks.
When the Russians suffered the previous greatest (admitted) nuclear disaster, they moved as quickly as possible to entomb the site in actively cooled concrete, and used as much man power as possible IN THE FIRST INSTANCE to render the site as safe as possible for the foreseeable future. The Russians lost vast numbers of Humans to the consequences of radiation, but being a REAL nation, didn't feel the need to seed media sites across the planet with lies about the 'safety' of nuclear contamination and radiation.
Japan did the exact opposite. They employed ZERO real engineering at Fukushima to deal with the disaster. Instead, they launched, with the full co-operation of the owner of major media outlets across Asia and the West (Slashdot included) the world's greatest propaganda psy-op. Large numbers of people have died as a result of on-site radiation effects, but the Japanese government silences the families of the dead by linking compensation packages with confidentiality agreements. Filthy pro-nuclear power shills use this silence to claim that no-one died as a result of this 'accident' (if you consider extremely gross negligence to ever be an 'accident').
Unlike after Chernobyl, after Fukushima, governments in the West immediately switched off their public radiation monitoring services, so they could claim whatever lies they desired about the spread of radiation through the atmosphere. This meant that where, for instance, sheep from certain,locales in the UK were declared "unfit for Human consumption" for years after Chernobyl, the population of the Earth were informed that there was NO significant atmospheric fallout from Fukushima. And yet Fukushima actually placed hundreds of times more radiation into the atmosphere than Chernobyl.
Explosions at Fukushima actually vaporised an incredible amount of plutonium. This was the worst possible early outcome of a nuclear accident, but sites like Slashdot immediately declared that decades old scientific consensus about plutonium was 'wrong', and that ingesting such materials is actually 'good' for Humans. The usual industry lies about 'safe' levels of radiation exposure got trotted out too, and governments across the planet raised the 'safe' levels for public exposure to moronic degrees.
Radiation is like being shot at by bullets. ONE bullet can kill you, but if you are far enough away from a random shooter, it becomes a probability game. So, you might say after 1000 bullets, your chance of being shot is 50%, but that does not make ONE BULLET a 'safe' level. And yet, the people around Fukushima were definitively told by government scientists that radiation below a certain level was COMPLETELY harmless.
Why didn't the world insist that Japan, with its incredible industrial resources, neutralise the threat of Fukushima as well as the Russians did with Chernobyl? Here's why. Every major nation wanted the disaster to play out, so they could study the full aspects of an uncontrolled contamination accident. This area of Japan is one giant experimental research environment. The people living there are lab rats. Remember all those medical atrocities inflicted on blacks, orphans, prisoners, and other unfortunates in US history, in the name of 'research'? Fukushima is being used in the same way.
The only reason there are so many water tanks to begin with is the perfunctionary insistence that "no radiation must be released into nature". The problem is: It's too late. Any of the releases that are reported as if it were a disaster completely pale in comparison to what happened in the days after March 11th 2011.
The water from the reactor is being filtered and cleaned of Caesium and Strontium. The process is good, but not perfect. But since absolute perfection is being demanded, none of the water is allowed to be released into the environment. Hence it must be stored in thousands of tanks, safely, which is as impossible a task as the ludicrous targets for radioactivity in the water.
Those tanks are necessarily makeshift in nature. The tanks cannot be individually monitored 24/7 by a limited number of people on the ground whose time in the contaminated area around the nuclear power plant is further limited by the maximum radiation dose of 20mSv per year. Yet, the government, the media and of course the usual activist groups demand the impossible. Each for their own petty reasons.
How about asking people in Fukushima Daiichi to do the possible instead of the impossible? Clean up the water as much as possible and release it into the sea. Yes, there will be some Tritium and trace amount of residual Cs and Sr - it will be a very small fraction to what was released into the sea in 2011. This would allow the people there to concentrate on actually making sure that the core equipment is running and the site as a whole is making progress to being in a better more workable state - instead of setting up new water tanks every day and worrying about leaks.
It is a marvel all of its own that workers there were at all able to keep up with setting up all those water tanks. But you should keep in mind that this isn't actually what they should be doing. They should have concentrated to bringing the plant back into a stable stead state. This will include allowing for some minor emissions of radioactive water. Provided that this is done in a controlled and closely monitored manner, this does not pose any problem that even approaches the scale of rainwater washing Caesium from the countryside into the sea (thus being part of natural decontamination processes). It will be diluted to levels that will not be harmful to the population.
Dilution is a temporary solution to pollution. And I'm not saying this should be anything more than a temporary emergency measure. I'm very surely not advocating this to be a general way to dispose of radioactive waste. But given the circumstances, it is the most reasonable solution. You should remember that the old way of diluting pollutants was not in itself false. It was just the case that it done by everyone in ever increasing scale, to the point where dilution was perfectly meaningless. But as a temporary, local, emergency measure - instead of a permanent, global and general way of doing things - it is perfectly viable.
Nobody demanded that no oil must leak from the Cosmo Oil Refinery either and for some reason nobody demands that water below that refinery conforms to drinking water standards either, nobody asks wether any of the oil that contaminated the ground there will seep into the sea (it did and it will continue to do so) - while they do demand that the water below Fukushima Daiichi must not exceed limits for driniking water safety.
I was on food stamps once, and did anyone help me? FUCK NO! Like Ayn Rand herself, I had to pull myself up by my own bootstraps and line up for food stamps so that I could eat until society finally understood how great I was.
dumb question..... but why aren't they removing the radioactive rods or whatever from that particular site and storing them else where? or is it a giant melted mess?
Fukushima Actually "Much Worse" Than So Far Disclosed, Say Experts
"Water is actually 'much wetter' than ice," say Experts
Can someone give an estimate of how much more or less radiation is being introduced by the Fukushima plant than say... the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs? It could be more valuable and revelatory if someone could point to atmospheric monitoring data and could say something like, "well, our estimates are that X Roentgen's worth of radioactive material has been released, which is roughly 3.5% the amount released when Fat Man was detonated.. or the some such like?
I mean, we need to have a frame of reference for talking about this. It's like trying to have a conversation about what constitutes a healthy body-composition and body-fat percentage when the only women you've ever seen are Parisian underwear models. Can we get a comparison to some event people are familiar with?
Why do they still not know if the spent fuel pools are leaking?
From the article:
"There is absolutely no guarantee that there isn't a crack in the walls of the spent fuel pools. If salt water gets in, the steel bars would be corroded. It would basically explode the walls, and you cannot see that; you can't get close enough to the pools," he said.
1) It is trivial to determine if there is saltwater in a pool
2) People dive in those spent fuel pools to inspect the rods. So what do they mean by "you can't get close enough to the pools?"
3) When water leaks out of a container, you can detect the water level going down. Plus, it would increase the radiation that escapes the pools.
4) If there is a concern about spent fuel pools, move the spent fuel to another site!
Can someone explain what the article is trying to say?
This is all very reasonable, but TEPCO et. al. should first state that in "reality" disasters happen and that people must accept that nuclear plants will eventually create some number of nuclear disasters that exceeds 1.
Moreover, they should state unequivocally that further contamination of the environment around Fukushima is inevitable, and nobody has any choice other than hope for the minimum possible amount of damage.
Reasonable?
Of course, if people dealt with "reality", the nuclear industry will be done forever in any democratic country. That may not be a reasonable outcome, but we talking "reality" here, right?
Wouldn't it be possible to reuse the water stored in the tanks instead of using (and polluting) more fresh water?
we can count ourselves lucky that this leaking stuff isn't lead or mercury or cadmium.
those three are stable and remain in the environment as poison FOREVER.
with this "radioactive" stuff at least it breaks down into harmless stuff...
(me waits for trout slap.)
I remember all the neglecting comments about nuclear safety. Hmm.
Now listen up!
Nuclear power is unsafe!
It is not that nuclear material can't be safely maintained or stored.
The problem is we as a human race are just not up for it.
Nuclear material is stored safely on Earth by nature, inside bedrocks, deep below in the ground.
As soon as we start digging it up and start playing with it, that is when it starts to become a real problem.
So leave it where it is!
Don't eat any food products from Japan, especially fish, seaweed (yes, especially Sushi using Japanese ingredients); avoid Pacific food products (yes, including West Coast salmon and smoked.fish), prefer Atlantic seafood, especially European smoked salmon (lox). Spring $500 for a Geiger counter with meter that can do object measurement, not just atmospheric measurement. Be suspicious of Western US propaganda claiming an ocean whirlpool effect protects their seafood. pressure the FDA to require radiation measurement of foods or drugs of Pacific Region origin, including Western US.
For once in my damn life id just like them to say you know what SHTF time to wave your arms and run circles in panic.
i,d have a hell of alot more respect for the powers that be.
Nuclear power is unsafe!
Absolutely it is. It just happens to be safer than the current alternatives, and a lot safer than going back to the stone age and doing without power.
Anyone who really cares about safety (or indeed the environment) should be focussed on one thing only: eliminating coal as a source of energy. Until that happens, all of this scaremongering is just a distraction.
FUD always is.
I always chuckle when the technology crowd here at slashdot and the people leaning right on the political spectrum always seem to pump up nuclear power as the solution to our energy needs.
Sure, in theory with the proper safeguards it could be ok.. but as Yogi Berra said:
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice there is.."
And the cost for mistakes is so high and long lasting.
You are probably right about coal and fossil fuel in general. That's a slow death.
Nuclear on the other hand is a random killer, striking without warning. Kind of like a mad terrorist with access to radioactive material.
Then again, what about the wast problem. Can we administrate waste over a 10.000 year period ?
I don't think so.
Sun power is good, especially near equator.
Wind power is good wherever there is wind.
Same with water power (wind=>waves).
But i would much rather like to see the next moon project being about helium 3 harvesting.
Imagine one ton of H3 arriving at earth every month.
That would be the biggest change in energy production ever.
E=Mc^2 gives you the answer.
The more mass you convert to energy, the bigger the explosion. The unconsumed fuel is the radioactive waste that is spread about, so if you are producing waste, you aren't creating the theoretically most efficient detonation. Since the goal with most nuclear devices is to create a big explosion, most military weapons are going to be designed the be as efficient as possible. (Especially because of the c^2 portion of the equation, which says that even a little mass will release a lot of energy. Even being a little more efficient with your fuel will yield a lot more energy.)
Now you could build bombs that poison the detonation zone, but that makes them substantially less useful. For example, you can't really use them against an invader or against a enemy in close proximity. You can't use them when invading, because you are poisoning the land you are trying to take and hold.You are also getting a smaller bang for your buck, where your opponent might be employing higher yield clean bombs. (Or worse, twice as many bombs of the same yield.)
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
You are probably right about coal and fossil fuel in general. That's a slow death.
As soon as you say that, you've entirely missed the point. Coal - specifically coal and just coal - is a horrible nasty source of power. The pollution is bad for all involved, the mining is bad for all involved, and mine fires are as close to Hell on Earth as anyone should ever see.
Natural gas doesn't have these problems. Burns clean, and while we're still figuring out what problems fracking can cause, it doesn't hold a candle to the problems coal causes.
The total worldwide deaths ever attributable to nuclear power are just tiny (and almost all from Chernobyl) on the scale of deaths from mining coal.
Ultimately solar is the way to go. But that will take decades, and in the meantime everything-but-coal would be a vast improvement with no miracle technologies needed.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Look, here's now it goes.
Solar PV gets some birdshit on it and that's the most danger you'd get from an accident involving a solar power plant.
But, no, since nuclear is shit, you go all freak-out and claim "WELL, SINCE NOTHING'S PERFECT!" Who the fuck said it had to be perfect?
Risk x probability should be as low as possible.
That works for renewables. So we can go with them.
I'm sure you saw Bennett Ramberg's paper in Annual Reviews of Energy many years ago. He was concerned about dangers from high explosives ( not necessarily sustained). When I spoke to Velikhov he said that had they had it earlier, it might have prevented Chernobyl.
Half truth.
1. It is true that "normal rate" is 1-ish per 100,000
2. It is not true that there is not MORE than 1-ish per 100,000
There are plenty of people with thyroid cancers that never manifest themselves and never cause problems. Some populations have 30% rate of thyroid nodules simply because of their genes, and nothing to do with any radiations.
A doctor told me once, if you screen carefully enough, you will find *something* wrong with almost everyone. Be that some thyroid nodule, some cysts on your liver or kidneys, some partial artery occlusion in your brain, or heart with screwed up electrical connections (at least 8% of males in the last group!)
Furthermore, it is well known that radioactive iodine exposure results in tumors being produced in the thyroid about 7 years after said exposure. That is from years and years of using I-131 to cure hyperthyroidism. (yes, it is continued to be used because there are no safer alternatives).
So, your entire poast is a half-truth. We will ONLY know that real rate of thyroid tumors because of Fukushima in about 10 years, after the 7-year peak that happens in about 5. Only then will there be sufficient information to weed out the sporadic cancers from the radioactive iodine cancers.
The event was raised from a level 1 atomic event to a level 3 (per the article, read it a couple of times I did).
Each level is 10 times more "severe" than the level below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale
Level 4 is Accident with Local Consequences; in my opinion they are at least one level too low. Given the food chain potential implications, level 5 may actually be honest, Accident with Wider Consequences.
The best people in the world need to be working on this problem until it is resolved. No other response is rational.
BlameBillCosby.com
that the same folks who are pro-nuclear also tend to be anti-regulation. That's a hell of a recipe for disaster.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
If Fukushima killed half the population of Japan, then on average nuclear power would be *almost* as deadly as coal.
Of one thing we can be sure. Any official report will paint as rosy a picture as possible. And by possible, I mean without immediate, predictable, credible contradiction. And by credible, I mean contradiction by those whom the officials lack the power to silence. That doesn't, in fact, lead to very many contradictions, except those between official reports and reality.
could be wrong, but I'm thinking that the core technology here was built, licencesed and or, contracted from General Electric or Westinghouse.
I am betting on solar and batteries!
Is there any way to super-freeze this radiactive water or contain it to some kind of high carbon impregnated colbalt diamond concrete shielding and send it to the sun? Why does this have to end up in our ocean? If there is any help the rest of the world can offer to the Japanese, whether they ask for it or not, get right on it, now.
CALLING ALL STATIONS..
HELLO! Is there anybody out there?