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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.'"
As I said here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4110983&cid=44626741
Yet nobody cares about your pride except you
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.
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Factsheets/English/ines.pdf
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...
I, for one, can't wait for my new superpowers!
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.
The USA did that twice. it didn't stop the Tsunami.
It means at least one of the 'level 3' conditions has been met.
Most likely:
Severe contamination in an area not expected by design, with a low probability of significant public exposure.
.... now! "Fukushima is just the same as eating ten bananas, see? I saw it on xkcd!"
Radiation exists in the environment. Fukushima being worse than they're disclosing is, generally speaking, a very localized problem. There's lots of radioactive stuff in the "food chain", and only nebulous comments about potential "health concerns" in the article.
The oceans are big, and the radioactive tanks there are small. Its the radioactive equivalent of homeopathy, when you look at things on the global scale.
So, XKCD (although I don't recall the comic you're talking about ) would be absolutely correct if they're mocking the overhyped concern about the food chain.
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
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
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.
Actually, the Fukushima disaster has already released over 168 times the amount of radiation as the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
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.
Nice rant. Have any actual evidence, Mr. AC?
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
Those hydrogen explosions outside of the containment structures vaporised plutonium? How the heck did that plutonium get there, and why would it be vaporized, while, say, the structure itself wasn't vaporized? How do you know that significant (say >10% by weight) of released plutonium got vaporised? Doesn't vaporised plutonium, like, condense at room temperature as you'd expect any other room temperature solid to behave? Does it subsequently sublimate if it has small particle size? I mean, man, what the fuck, do you have nothing specific to say? Get real.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
With the exception of ones specifically designed for the purpose (which remain mostly theoretical and definitely unused), Nuclear bombs aren't really designed for radiation release, and definitely not the loads of messy decay products that you see with nuclear fuel rods that have been stewing in their own neutrons for months to years.
The initial blast is pretty dramatic, and certainly spreads whatever nuclear fuel isn't converted into energy all over the place; but for them to release as much radiation, and cause as much contamination, as a defective nuclear generator they'd have to be so large that they wouldn't fit on anything short of heroically large transport aircraft.
You use toothpaste which makes your teeth glow in the dark?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
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.
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?
This is a very good question and as a nuclear layman, it's difficult for me to get a handle on an exact answer. IANA health physicist, just a guy with Wikipedia and Google. But given that, I'll try to give some baselines from what I can see on the net.
First, in terms of "radiation", it seems like we're mostly talking about release of radioactive isotopes, rather than the initial prompt radiation of a nuclear explosion itself. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs ( as, eg, this blog describes) were airbursts, so relatively radiologically "clean" - they did a lot of initial damage from blast, heat and gamma radiation, but didn't leave nearly as many "dirty" isotopes in the way of fallout. This is compared with, eg, a surface shot like Castle Bravo which was a huge dirty contamination event.
So when we're talking about "comparing" Fukushima with Hiroshima, we're talking purely about the isotopes, not the explosive power. Which is not really a straight comparison. But given that, Fukushima (or any other nuclear power station) is and/or has the potential to be much dirtier than a bomb (at least an airburst), because there's more nuclear material stored onsite. You'd want a nuclear engineer to give the precise bequerel ratings of all the isotope mixes in the fuel composition, but for a back-of-the-envelope estimate: Little Boy had 64kg of uranium fuel - Fukushima had 1,760,000 kg of fuel on the entire site.
So all else being equal, which of course it's not because we're not talking weapons-grade uranium and I'm sure power rods have lots of other alloys in them, Daichi has 27,500 times as much raw radioactive fuel as the Hiroshima bomb. Impressive, no?
Now most of that fuel probably won't be released, as not all the reactors were damaged, and the health impact of the various isotopes varies wildly based on the half-life of the isotope, its heaviness (ability to be transported far from the site), whether it can be ingested in air or water, how long it stays in the body, what the affinity is for various body parts, and what kind of radiation it releases - alpha, beta or gamma. Alpha particles are the biggest, so do the most damage, but also the easiest to block - I believe outside the body they're fairly harmless, blocked by cloth or skin. But inside the body, they can do more harm. So you really do need a health physicist to work out all the equations here.
However, the buzz on the net has always centered around three main radioactive isotope families: iodine-131, caesium-134 and -137, and strontium-90.
Iodine has a half-life measured in days to weeks so it was always going to be the initial problem. Theoretically, if all the fission occurred at the first meltdown, there shouldn't be any left. In practice it seems like some short-halflife isotopes are still being detected, which suggests spontaneous fission may still be occurring in the melted cores. Iodine goes for the thyroid and its effect is thyroid cancers, particularly in children. This is starting to show up but there's arguments over what the baseline rate is and how much is due to testing rather than fallout.
In terms of initial (not ongoing) iodine release, Fukushima was 2.5 times bigger than Hiroshima.
Most of the Fukushima-Hiroshima comparisions focus around the caesium isotopes, as these are long-lived (several years) and the body trea
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
More people die every single year simply falling off roofs installing solar panels than from nuclear power plants.
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.
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?
Actually a very good question. And the answer is: yes, removing the fuel rods and making them safe in permanent storage is a very sensible thing to want, and TEPCO is planning to start doing this this November.
The bad news, as I understand it, and the reason why they haven't done this obvious thing until now, is that moving fuel rods is very dangerous since you don't want to get two rods too close to each other otherwise you get a criticality event (a small fission reaction). While radioisotopes can give you cancer or make you very sick, a criticality could kill you in days. And while the rods in the fuel pools aren't melted like the cores are, they have been badly shaken by the earthquake, tsunami and explosions, and they've been drenched in corrosive seawater for two years. I'm guessing that could mean that they're likely to be jammed in their framework, maybe shaken loose, possibly with their cladding decayed, some of them in pool 4 may already have burned, and all this will make handling them a very difficult and dangerous manual process.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC