More Bad News From Fukushima

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Posted by samzenpus on Sunday September 1, 2013 @01:31AM from the from-bad-to-worse dept.

PuceBaboon writes "Both Reuters and the BBC are carrying the story of an increase in radiation levels reported by Tepco for contaminated water leaking from storage tanks on site. When this leak was discovered almost two weeks ago, Tepco reported that the radiation level was 100-millisieverts. It now transpires that 100-millisieverts was the highest reading that the measuring equipment in use was capable of displaying. The latest readings (with upgraded equipment) are registering 1800-millisieverts which, according to both news sources, could prove fatal to anyone exposed to it for four hours. Coincidentally (and somewhat ironically), today is earthquake disaster prevention day in Japan, with safety drills taking place nationwide."

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Where were the professionals. by PlusFiveTroll · 2013-09-01 01:34 · Score: 5, Insightful

-Tepco reported that the radiation level was 100-millisieverts. It now transpires that 100-millisieverts was the highest reading that the measuring equipment in use was capable of displaying.
What the actual fuck. How could such a stupid mistake be made?
1. Re:Where were the professionals. by tuo42 · 2013-09-01 01:38 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  That's what I was thinkng also!
  
  Then again, it is a very interesting way of damage control. Simply bring equipment which can only measure up to the damage level we want.
  
  I cannot understand how a company can make such a mistake. This is the most severe radioactive problem at the moment, threatening to change a country for the next decades.
  
  They know how important this is, and fail to bring along the right equipment?
  
  Unbelievable...
2. Re:Where were the professionals. by jamesh · 2013-09-01 01:46 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  -Tepco reported that the radiation level was 100-millisieverts. It now transpires that 100-millisieverts was the highest reading that the measuring equipment in use was capable of displaying.
  What the actual fuck. How could such a stupid mistake be made?
  Wouldn't be the first time testing was stopped as soon as a nice answer was found...
3. Re:Where were the professionals. by Joce640k · 2013-09-01 02:09 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Tepco needs to be taken out of the equation. Now.
  (Though they can still pay the cleanup bill...)
  
  --
  No sig today...
4. Re:Where were the professionals. by AHuxley · 2013-09-01 02:11 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  It allows "smart" people note that the rates are like a medical xray or passenger flight and get modded up as the math is sort of correct.
  
  --
  Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
5. Re:Where were the professionals. by polar+red · 2013-09-01 02:12 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Humanity has a long history of cover-ups when big organisations are involved.
  FTFY
  
  --
  Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
6. Re:Where were the professionals. by gweihir · 2013-09-01 02:16 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  You cannot measure radiation underwater. Usual measurement is 1m free-air-distance, but at the level they observe, they cannot sent anyone in there to make these measurements.
  
  --
  Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
7. Re:Where were the professionals. by Joining+Yet+Again · 2013-09-01 02:46 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  It isn't damage control. It is technician stupidity.
  Apologists need to stop trotting out equivalents to, "Don't attribute to malice.. bla bla stupidity," at every corner.
  It's not the middle of the 20th century. We're awash with excellent physicists who can't find a job, and I can assure you that everyone in the highly competitive Japan who has a job in the nuclear industry has the technical ability.
  What they don't have is a moral compass: it's a very obeisant culture.
8. Re: Where were the professionals. by O('_')O_Bush · 2013-09-01 03:04 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  But it should be obvious to anyone that if your equipment pegs to 100mSv and no higher that something is wrong, and you shouldn't go to the media claiming 100mSv was the likely extent of the radiation levels in the leak.
  
  --
  while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
9. Re:Where were the professionals. by GNious · 2013-09-01 03:12 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  It isn't damage control. It is technician stupidity.
  Apologists need to stop trotting out equivalents to, "Don't attribute to malice.. bla bla stupidity," at every corner.
  People just need to understand that there is a point where Stupidity stops being a valid and reasonable excuse. Still having Tepco handling all of this is one such case, where it is not longer correct to attribute it to Stupidity.
10. Re:Where were the professionals. by fnj · 2013-09-01 03:40 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  If your equipment only registers to 100 and you read 100 on it, then it is WHOLLY imcompetent not to RUN and get better equipment to re-measure.
11. Re:Where were the professionals. by timeOday · 2013-09-01 06:58 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  It must be a digital display, because you can clearly see when a needle (like a speedometer) is pinned.
  I think there is a real takehome lesson for designing instrumentation here. A device should not show the value "100" for "everything greater than 100." Under overload it should just show a row of hyphens or something. Even my cheap little digital kitchen scale does this.
Wrong issue by gweihir · 2013-09-01 02:01 · Score: 2, Insightful

While everybody is writing about the water, the real issue is the spent-fuel-rod pool. If that thing is not secured very soon, Tokyo becoming uninhabitable within a very short time is a real possibility. There is so much radiation in there, it is staggering. The pool is inadequately cooled. The pool is damaged enough that even a minor earthquake could prevent cooling it more and a fire starting in there would both be impossible to put out and starting by itself very fast. If that happens, only the wind not blowing in the wrong direction could save most of Japans industrial base and a significant part of its population. With the probability of minor earthquakes in that area, they are already on borrowed time.
Personal prediction: TEPCO will go on blundering about, and eventually they will get a nuclear catastrophe that makes all others so far look like a summer breeze. After that, Japan will not play a role in the world for a few thousand years or longer, because for all intents and purposes it will not really be there anymore.

--
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
1. Re:Wrong issue by gweihir · 2013-09-01 02:22 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  That is probably what the Japanese are thinking also. It is called denial, and it can kill on a large scale if practiced in the face of a severe risk.
  
  --
  Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
2. Re:Wrong issue by MobyDisk · 2013-09-01 05:06 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  This thread exemplifies the entire radiation insanity fear very well. I hope every intelligent Slashdot reader is watching this. Because this is what it is like to discuss Fukushima or Global Warming amongst the public.
  Just this week I sat across from a veteran software engineer who, in all seriousness, said "Fukushima will be uninhabitable for 6,000 years. Probably 60,000 years." He had no basis for such a claim. I assumed engineers would not make such statements without any knowledge, but apparently not. Radiation fear goes deeper than that. People don't even understand the basics of how radiation works. But this kind of insanity is so ingrained into peoples minds that it doesn't need a source. The two ingrained assumptions seem to be that "Any amount of radiation = deadly" and "All radiation lasts for thousands of years." It is just treated as common sense, and doesn't need any backing. Oh, the other one is that "if radiation contacts something, that thing because radioactive, and so on into perpituity." Beware of these assumptions when discussing anything involving radiation.
  As this thread continues, notice that gweihir claims that there is no need to backup his claims "unless you are illiterate." Wow. Just. Wow. If I wasn't having to debunk this kind of thing every week, I would shake my head and move on thinking "Troll." But folks: this is your peers. Your fellow voters.
  So many of these claims are like saying a firecracker exploded a mile away, and you got hit by the debris. People seem to have a common-sense understanding of everyday physics: fire, explosions, guns, maybe even chemicals. But nuclear radiation is just magical. It can do anything, over any distance, any time..
  I really have to thank durrr for his comment about HystericGreenAlarmism.com. That is not that far from the truth. Let me show how this situation is worse than one might think.
  Last week I had a relative link to an article at some site like nature news blog or something named like that, which made similar insane claims to what gweihir is claiming -- BUT WITH CITATIONS. That is where things become a real problem. There is so much false science out there, and it isn't easy to determine what is real and what isn't. The claims in the article were so egregious that anyone with familiarity with the subject would instantly know it was false. It was like my firecracker example. But not everyone has that background. A 5 minute search turned-up a Scientific American article that basically showed the study was intentionally faked. But the nature blog had several such ridiculous claims and I don't have time to debunk each and every one. Real information is harder to find than fake information.
  So what do we do about this?
3. Re:Wrong issue by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-01 06:07 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  Well, you could start by making a nominal effort to show gweihir doesn't know what he/she is talking about. While you wrote some right pretty words (fires up the blood real good), you're post is as substantive as gweihir's.
  Then again, perhaps I'm being too harsh. If you really do have to debunk nuclear myths everyday, I suppose one would want to go on a frustrated rant every once in awhile.
Re:Wrong PLACE not "Wrong Issue" by Maxo-Texas · 2013-09-01 03:17 · Score: 1, Insightful

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chernobyl_radiation_map_1996.svg
The Chernobyl exclusion area is about 700km from tip to tip. Varying from about 300km wide to 100km wide.
Total "lost" area is 2,600 km.
If a similar area were lost in Japan it would be .6% of their total land mass, concentrated in important areas (potentially including tokyo as noted above).
I agree, it's unlikely. But it's not impossible.

--
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.