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Safety Measures Fail To Stop Fukushima Plant Leaks
AmiMoJo writes "The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi plant has been developing countermeasures to deal with repeated leaks from tanks of contaminated water. But despite the measures, 100 tons of radioactive water leaked on Wednesday and Thursday. 'The leaked water was among the most severely contaminated that Tepco has reported in the aftermath of the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, when damage caused by an earthquake and a tsunami led to meltdowns in three of the plant’s reactors. Each liter of the water contained, on average, 230 million becquerels of particles giving off beta radiation, the company said. About half of the particles were likely to be strontium 90, which is readily taken up by the human body in the same way that calcium is, and can cause bone cancer and leukemia.' The estimated volume of the leaked radioactive materials caused Japan's nuclear regulator to rank the leak a level-3 serious accident. The international scale of nuclear and radiological events ranges from zero to 7."
just in time for the new godzilla movie
I wasn't disappointed! On a serious note, I thought they were building the godzilla of ice walls to fix this?
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Indeed, the total spill is about the same size as a large-ish residential pool. The ocean will never know.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It's not like everyone hasn't been saying this for 3 years now. If you'd been paying attention, you would already know this was the case. But I remember when people were saying this in 2011, 2012, even into 2013, they were nay-sayed and called coal shills and alarmists. Now what?
I'm no nuclear engineer, but it seems to me that IF (big if) It were as simple as letting the fuel melt through the floor like a big ol' glowin' gopher, you'd have a hell of a time containing the vapor emitted.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Barring a meltdown so clean that it probably happened in physics experiment land, I suspect that that is a very good way to send all the stuff with low vapor pressure merrily on a world atmospheric tour, along with anything that burns, forms finely divided oxide dusts, or is otherwise ill-mannered.
If they, say, had it under some sort of control, and could just let it melt under a shield gas atmosphere of their choice, they could probably call the process 'in-situ vitrification' and declare victory; but their whole problem is that they are working from a point well below that.
Once the melted core hit the water table (considerably shallower than 1000' down considering the proximity to the ocean), you would get a huge radioactive steam geyser throwing the fission products into the atmosphere.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Really - So much drama. Who's never been guilty of a simple error resulting in a core dump?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
No sell it to facebook, they will buy anything.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It should obviously be reported as 90,000,000,000 milligrams of water with an average activity of greater than 6 billion picocuries. That'd be more frightening, I think.
How nice it would be to have some one-on-one time with the engineering team that covered up the flaws in the containment vessel during initial construction.
That isn't how reactors work, once the material has melted through the rod containment, the critical shape for fission is ruined. The only heat left is from beta decay, which is not sufficient to do anything like you are thinking.
I hope you've got a big mixer to make sure that blends evenly, because it turns out that dropping stuff in the ocean isn't like putting food coloring in a glass. The ocean is big and has currents and thermal zones that prevent even, global mixing. That's why Fukushima raised Strontium-90 levels 100-fold in some hot spots in the three months after the disaster.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Chernobyl was a completely different design. It had carbon graphite moderator rods that, once they caught fire, turned the whole mess into a radioactive barbecue pit. They were literally roasting uranium over charcoal briquettes.
Fukashima won't put up the huge smoke clouds that Chernobyl did. The main concern with it melting down has to do with steam release after it hits the water table. Which is bad enough.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Becquerels of particles? Really? That's like saying (obligatory car analogy incoming) joules of cars. A becquerel is a measure of activity - each litre gives off 2.3e8 electrons per second. While this is a problem, this is a nonsensical way to talk about it. What's that law again? The one that says that "every news article in your field of expertise is utter garbage". I'm pretty sure it holds here.
Cynical Idealist
Simple solution:
1) Install noscript
2) Don't whitelist fsdn.com or rpxnow.com
Result:
No beta. No popups.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Homer J. Simpson really needs to get his act together over there.
Everybody Wang-Chung tonight!
Ummm, Physics would happen? Unless you had a convenient hole to pool the melt in it will just spread out and solidify ( that what the "core catcher" dishes under the reactors are designed to do ) and stop "reacting" so you would not get the melt actually burning a hole in the ground, you just have a spread out highly radioactive glassy metallic mess sitting at hot temps because of the residual decay heat.
That and ground water, if the melt would burn down it's going to heat up water in the ground, resulting in radio-steam blasting from the hole, probable widening of the fractures the water is flowing through leading to ground instabilities, and irradiating of your groundwater supply.
As others have stated as well, anything the hot melt would burn would also be irradiated and sent to the atmosphere, as well as radio-decay gasses.
In other words, it would be a much more horrible headache than trying to control the decay heat until the fuel can be decanted and put into a longer term storage.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
But workers first determined that the alarm and information from the gauges were malfunctions, as they found no abnormalities around the tank, at least when the alarm went off.
Seriously, this isn't stuff that you shrug your shoulders on and ignore. Fire them, and possibly charge them (employees and employer) with whatever Japan's equivalent to "criminal negligence" is
The would give you a nice fire that would carry a significant fraction of the nuclear material in fine-dust form quite far. As in making Japan inhabitable with wind in the wrong direction. This type of fire was what spread the Cernobyl nuclear material all over Europe. Of course that was a bit less than what they try to contain at Fuckupshima.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"massive radio active steam and dust cloud and the resulting fires and highly molten core would create radio active dust high into the atmosphere that would spread for thousands of miles"
you mean like current coal plants do?
"Though the concentrations are low, the total amount of TENORM in fly ash is noteworthy (Beck
et al. 1980; Beck 1989). For example, in 2004, U.S. electric power plants burned approximately
921 million MTs of coal (U.S. DOE/EIA 2005d). If that amount of coal is burned with 1.5 ppm
uranium, 1,381 MTs of uranium would be concentrated, in addition to other TENORM quantities."
[http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/docs/tenorm/402-r-08-005-voli/402-r-08-005-v1.pdf] - EPA
Chernobyl did not melt down.
It simply burned up.
It was a graphite moderated reactor. Think of a huge coal fire with mixed in radioactive products.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"Google Cherynobyl? To this very day it is so radioactive you can't get within 50 to 100 miles of it?"
After the accident/explosion/fire etc. in 1986 the Ukrainian authorities continued to operate the three other undamaged reactors at Chernobyl (they needed the electricity supplies). After a few years folks started running tourist trips to visit the area including the evacuated towns surrounding the damaged reactor. Thousands of workers have been working on the reactor building for decades attempting to entomb it or at least cover it up so it doesn't leak quite as much residual radioactivity as it does even today.
Sure in a Hollywood disaster movie script the Chernobyl site is so radioactive you can't get within 50 to 100 miles of it. However this is real life which is kinda different.
Ah, I just realised you're trolling, aren't you? Silly me.
Well, the field mice in the city do have a significantly raised mutation and mortality rate, but outside of the city and the area surrounding the plant things in the exclusion zone aren't really that bad as far as we can tell. The wolves are doing pretty well since there's so much prey with no people or other large predators in the area.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
nonsense, the leaking isotopes will decay in decades not centuries.
Fukushimi diachi is a local problem, never mind hysteria over non-events like the detected level of one extra xenon atom per cubic meter in the USA, that's nothing. less than nothing.
Chernobyl was just bad engineering meets bad management, other plants in the world can't do what that one did. And Fukushima diachi hasn't caused widespread damage like Chernobyl did.
Love that comic. Bloom County was amazing and I miss it daily. Seen that particular one many times and had no interest in copying it from that website (I already own at least one book that includes it) until I tried to run my cursor over it. I just wanted to read it and kind of use my mouse cursor sometimes like a person would their fingertip to follow the text. The moment I did that the big red COPYNO.com image replaced what I was trying to read and it became my mission in life to copy the damned picture. Out comes my screenshot utility and moments later I'm sending that out to several people just because I can.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Except that much like mercury the radioactive material is biologically concentrated. I've heard the US has already drastically (20x?) raised its "safe threshold" levels for radioactive materials in foodstuffs to allow Pacific fisherman to continue to sell their catch.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
As I understand Indecent levels, level 3 tops out just before the actual release of radioactive materials outside the plant. Once you have materials leaving the plant in an uncontrolled manner, we are at Level 4.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Unless you take a guided tour.
However, this demonstrates nicely the factual level anti-nuclear lobby operates at.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
There's still significant levels of radioactivity at and around the Chernobyl site, well above international safety limits for permanent human habitation. Animals tend to have short lives anyway, dying of starvation, disease, predation or accident rather than old age so their chances of developing a lethal cancer (the only real ill effect of mild raised levels of radiation) are low since they die of something else beforehand.
I'd be suspicious of regularly eating food grown in the Chernobyl area unless it was thoroughly tested. If I was to work or live there I'd expect my exposure to radiation to be limited with monitoring and if I took enough exposure over a given period I'd move out.
In the case of Fukushima the evacuated areas around the plant are much smaller and less contaminated than at Chernobyl. There was an illustration I saw once layering the Fukushima release plumes map to scale over the Chernobyl exclusion zone -- the entire area in Japan designated off-limits (less than 1000 square km) was about the size of the marker pinpointing the reactor site on the Ukranian map. Even so large parts of the original Japanese exclusion zone have been reopened to permanent occupation and some of the rest can be visited on a restricted basis while decontamination takes place.
This depends on how much mass there is, whether it's concentrated in a small lump, or flows through the paths of least resistance, and separates, and spreads out, (like chernobyl did). If it spreads out, the reaction slows, and then, it's largely decay-heat that's left over (which is pretty significant, but still, not 3000 degrees C significant).
Youtube is full of videos of steam-clouds that have been around the plant since roughly June 2012. This *seems* to indicate that there's something hot contacting moisture in the ground, and forcing out steam over an area of soil, but it's not consistent with a 77-ton mass of molten material dropping into a lake (ie. worst-case steam-explosion situation which is often portrayed as the result of a meltdown). The plant is along the coast, so fog has never been an unusual occurrence, so that likely conceals the fact that the core is issuing radioactive steam through cracks in the soil. A simple sampling and test of the steam should reveal if this were the case. But we're not getting that kind of data from Tepco.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Well, dilution *is* a reasonable approach to disposing of this waste, but what we have here appears to be an ongoing leak from a point source into tidal waters, which is not at all the way you'd design a project to dilute the waste.
There are several big differences between letting the stuff leak and a proper attempt to diffuse the waste over a large area of the ocean. First of all the leak is a point source discharging into an intertidal zone. My wife is a physical oceanographer who helped site a major sewage outfall, so I remember some of the concerns. Stuff that is discharged right near the shore doesn't diffuse nicely out to deep water, it gets transported along the shore with the same currents that deposit sand from rivers along the coast.
This means that the S90 may well get deposited in sediments. The concentration of S90 probably won't be enough to be a direct concern to humans, but because strontium is an analog to calcium, it can bioaccumulate. This means the somewhat incomplete process of dilution gets undone when critters like benthic worms on the bottom of the food chain consume the S90, and are in turn consumed by ground fish and so on up the food chain. At each trophic level the S90 is concentrated a little more.
I agree that the amount here reported is probably not a serious threat to human and environmental health, but the problem is that this process is ongoing. It is possible that what is going on doesn't present any threat to human or environmental health, but we can't be sure. By the time we figure it out it will be too late to do anything (or anything affordable) about it if it is a problem.
In a nutshell: dilution could work, but there's a significant chance that just letting the stuff leak into the sea won't do the job. This stuff needs to be contained or otherwise dealt with *now*.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
why not just let the thing meltdown? It would essentially bury the fuel. After it drops down a 1000' or so, fill the hole in with cement. I wouldn't be too worried about volcanic eruptions, radiation is what keeps the earth core nice and soft.
The most important reason is that 'corium' isn't actually hot enough to burn through the earth like that, nor does it conduct heat all that well, even if any part of it became hot enough.
The integrity of the fuel rods is challenged at 2200F (zircaloy-water reaction, which released the hydrogen that caused the reactor building roofs to blow off on three of the Daichi units.)
Steel melts at about 2600F. Concrete breaks down at about 1800F.
In addition, the fuel is a uranium-oxide mix, a sort of ceramic. This class of material is generally known for poor thermal conductivity. That's why the pellets are the size of a pencil eraser, they need to be small and have a high surface area in order to conduct heat from the center of the pellet- which might be at 3000F in normal operations- to the fuel cladding and into the reactor coolant, which might be around 600F.
Anyway, from what I know about western reactors (it's my line of work, but i'm not a reactor engineer per se), I seriously doubt the fuel would 'burn' through steel or concrete. The fission products escape because of physical destruction to the facility caused by the Tsunami, or because of relief valves that limit reactor coolant system pressure, or primary containment structure pressure.
Chernobyl's release was due to a massive overpressure event that physically broke the reactor vessel. Nothing ever burned through concrete (check out the photos of the 'elephant's foot')
Three Mile Island's core was found in the bottom of the reactor vessel; a small amount of fission products was released by mis-operation of support systems. The integrity of the reactor vessel was never threatened, though the containment building (much larger than Daichi primary containment structures) withstood several hydrogen burns.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I'm not trying to be an apologist or anything. I was just adding some scale to the horrid-sounding headline. The list of "things I worry about" still does not include stuff like this. Perhaps it would if I at stuff that lives near the plant.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Agreed... I almost did the same! Pop it on a public webserver somewhere.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You've heard or this has been done?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Strontium 90 has a half-life of 29 years. Obviously the process of decay will go on indefinitely, so it's pretty much meaningless to say that the leaking isotopes will decay "in decades".
What we need to know is how long will it take the concentrations of harmful isotopes to drop to acceptable levels. Thata of course depends on how many times greater the concentration is than acceptable levels.
If the initial concentration of S90 is acceptable, the answer is "instantaneously". If the concentration is 4x acceptable, the answer is "116 years". So it's not inconceivable that an S90 contamination problem could persist for centuries, although we have yet to determine whether we have such a problem.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If you're not part of the solution you're part of the precipitate.
No brain, no pain.
Strontium 90 has a half-life of 30 years, genius. So if for example it's 100 times natural now, it will decay to 50x in 30 years, 25x in 60 years, 13x in 90 years, 6x in 120 years, 3x in 150 years, 1.6x in 180 years.
Cesium 137 has the same half-life: 30 years.
I suppose 180 years is "decades". Just as much as it is also "centuries".
Hell, a million years is 100,000 "decades".
Fukushima is a serious nuclear disaster. It's a very situation that we should all be concerned about. But this should not lead to any pause in our appetite for nuclear energy.
What people often fail to appreciate is that even coal fired powerstations release quite large amounts of radioactive material in to atmosphere. Coal fired powerstations burn about a million times as much material as a nuclear powerstation per joule of energy produced. Some of that material is radioactive. That stuff isn't been sealed in a container in burrried in a mountain, it's being blown up chimney stacks along with the rest of the rather unpleasant stuff.
Don't believe me? Reflect on this passage taken from this (PDF) document:
So far, there has not been a single confirmed death due to Fukushima accident. In comparison, there were 20 deaths in the US just mining for coal in 2013. This is not to mention all the deaths being caused by cancers and other health problems being caused by breathing polluted air.
If we're ever going to get on top of this climate change challenge, nuclear must be leading the charge. Nuclear is a safe, non-polluting technology. Modern designs are fail-safe in every sense of the word. The newer designs can even cope with a loss of external power (like Fukushima experienced) yet still stay safe.
This is the 21st century. The technology is mature, sensible and safe. Really, we should be looking to retire every coal fired plant as a matter of urgency, if only to reduce the amount of radioactive contamination of the atmosphere!!
I'm calling you on sensationalist bullshit. If I go to the west coast of the USA and take a piss in the sea, do you start calling the Pacific Ocean "a trillion tonnes of piss water"?
That's a dilution factor, not a measure of radioactivity. Quit fucktard sensationalist FUDing.
. First of all the leak is a point source discharging into an intertidal zone. My wife is a physical oceanographer who helped site a major sewage outfall, so I remember some of the concerns. Stuff that is discharged right near the shore doesn't diffuse nicely out to deep water, it gets transported along the shore with the same currents that deposit sand from rivers along the coast.
I'm not disagreeing with you or anything, just want to point out that the water didn't leak into the ocean, so this situation doesn't really apply (according to the article, so who knows).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I didn't think you were trying to be an apologist. I agree this situation is not an issue for global, regional, or even local panic.
There's a lot of ground between "not a serious problem at all" and "everybody run for the hills", and this situation falls into that territory.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
TEPCO still doesn't have adequate water-processing capacity Fukushima. They installed three units of the "advanced liquid processing system" (which is basically a big ion-exchange resin water purifier) in 2012, and they are still not working reliably. Failures are occuring for dumb reasons: "TEPCO officials believe the cause of that problem was due to a failure to remove a rubber pad from the tank, leading to a blockage in the system." On another occasion, they had to shut down because a crane failed.
Toshiba has overall charge of the project. Why a major Japanese company is having so much trouble with routine industrial tasks is not clear. As a result of all these processing problems, Fukushima has far too much contaminated water in temporary storage.
The process won't remove tritium, but that, at least, has a decay life of only 12 years, and it's not concentrated by biological processes like strontium and cesium, so dumping tritum-contaminated water isn't too bad.)
Correction make that 1.5" of solid lead to block 99% of gamma radiation(not listed in article) from Cs-137.. (The remaining 1% will still be extremely detrimental in short order. )
.
Nonsense, the concentration in the pacific is negligible and not a danger. you have no understanding of units of meaure of radioactive contamination. You read alarmist nonsense without sense of proportion or scale.
The area around Fukushima that is considered of any possible danger to humans is quite small, measured in low double digits of kilometers
there is no significant CS-137 contamination even ten miles from Fukushima. Not a danger to humans, and the levels now are less than 1/10,000 from when the disaster happened.
It does not improve my comfort with nuclear power that these people are still in charge of this plant.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Chernobyl reactor design and failure mode and fire of no relevance to Fukushima issues or this discussion
That's a good point. According to the New York Times this particular leak has not as of yet reached the ocean yet. TEPCO says it won't make it to the ocean, but I'm reserving judgment on that claim given TEPCOs poor track record.
Still, even if ocean disposal is the best long term approach, that doesn't mean that it would be a good thing if this leak is washed into the ocean. It needs to be contained.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Is the water in these storage tanks still being used for cooling? If not, just add a whole bunch of gelatin. That'd at least make it much more manageable. You can thank me later, environment.
Firefox/SeaMonkey: First, install NoScript (why aren't you already using it?) or otherwise disable JS. Second, right-click on the image and choose "View Image"; don't worry about "http:...NoCopy.php" in the status bar (if you have one). Third, you're done - there it is.
MSIE: Good luck with that...
- T
The Tohoku coastline on the south-eastern side of Honshu where the Fukushima nuclear plants are located is swept by the Kuroshio current, part of the North Pacific circulatory system dispersing material from the coast across the Pacific. Much of the fallout from the Fukushima disaster has already been thoroughly diluted into the ocean and marker isotopes such as Cs-134 (a fission product with a 2-year half-life therefore very little remaining from US nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific in the 1950s to confuse the results) are starting to be detected at very low levels off the US west coast.
100 tons of water is 24,000 gallons, or about 3600 cubic feet of water.
That's roughly about the same amount as two (2) of the large tanker trucks that fill up a gas station.
Or, in Olympic Pool metrics, about 1/24th of a Pool.
In radiation terms, 230m Bq per liter (for 24,000 Gal = 91,000 L) or 21 Trillion Bq.
A single (average) coal plant puts out about 4 Quadrillion Bq via emissions pollution. So this spill is roughly 0.5% of the yearly output of a coal plant (or, 46 hours of operation of one).
In terms Banana Equivalent Dosage, you're talking about 1.4 Trillion bananas per hour to start with, halving every hour.
And Now You Know.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Considering your smoke detectors have about 37,000 Bq of radioactive material in them, the amount of radioactive material released is equal to the same number becquerels as 10,270 smoke detectors.
Chernobyl's release of Strontium 90 was estimated at 200 PetaBecquerels. That is 200 * 10^15 power. Or 536 million times as much as that was recently leaked at Fukushima.
But hey, 380 million is a scary sounding number, so it works well for propaganda purposes.
He did say "decay" in decades not "disappear" in decades. Using a 30-year half-life, that means it's decayed by half in 3 decades. If you want to chart out decay to 1.001x, it's about 30 decades (or 3.0 centuries). If you want it to decay down to 1x, wait until sometime after the universe achieves heat death.
BTW, sarcastically calling somebody "genius" because he didn't completely clarify his statement just makes you sound petty, genius. I'm not saying that I agree with GP, just that squabbling over decades vs centuries with no indication of what level of "decay" implies "decayed" makes less sense than squabbling over milliliters vs square meters of contaminated water. If it's at 100x and you're waiting for it to decay to 99x, it takes a little over 5 months (or 0.0043 centuries.)
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Or... maybe that's the pro-nuclear lobby portraying such easily refutable claims as the anti-nuclear agenda in order to discredit them..? Such tin-foil-hat-esque theories have lately proven to be closer to reality than I would like them to be.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
Good catch. The claims are widely circulated, but doing my own googling shows conflicting reports from the sources I'd actually consider halfway reliable for such information. If I ate enough fish to actually care I'd investigate further. For now I think I'll just shut up.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
'Corium' is basically molten ceramic (The fuel is a uranium-oxide matrix.) It has such poor heat conducting properties that during normal operations, it could be 3000F in the center of a pellet, and 650F on the surface of the cladding- 3/16" away from the center.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
It seems so but it is a large pool of highly radioactive water. I wasn't sure so I did the math:
Seawater contains about 12Bq/L of radioactivity naturally and this spill contains 230MBq/L, that's a factor of nearly 20 million. Bringing this back to the total volume of the oceans (around 1.3x10^21L), this spill has a radioactivity equivalent to around 1/650 millionth of the ocean's contents.
At first glance one in 650 million might not seem like a lot, but several other spills have already happened, and a very large amount of water is not even contained at all and directly spilled in the ocean or underground. It won't remain unnoticed if we keep this up for too long.
Because a full meltdown would resemble Chernobyl?
Yup. We sure do. No reason not to.
Nope, none at all...
I'm surprised the free-marketeers haven't trolled this article yet, so I guess I'll do it for them. Here goes...
SEE?? This just proves that government bureaucrats can't do anything!!!1 If they'd just gotten those stupid regulators to get their boots of the throats of the job-creators, the guiding hand of free-market capitalism would have fixed this by now! This is why we need to cut capital-gains taxes and destroy the EPA!!!1
THANKS OBAMA WHERZ TEH BIRF CERTIFICATE BENGHRZGGG etc
Why is this still news?
Assume we actually cared about the minuscule amount of radioactives coming from this site...
The U.S. Navy offered to bury the material under millions of tons of cement only days after the incident was first observed by equipment on a U.S. Navy carrier off the coast of Japan. Just bury the crap in cement, as was already suggested, and let it half-life it's way down to edible levels in the next 90-180 years. Problem solved.
Why is new water being pumped into a holding tank containing the material, and then being allowed to leak over the edge and onto the ground near the tank? Because they haven't brought in water reprocessing equipment, and continue adding water to the system as a whole. It's not like Japan lacks the industrial capacity or the transportation infrastructure to get more reprocessing equipment built and delivered to the site. Problem solved.
Again: Why is this still news?
Animals might not have much to worry about from the radiation, until they try to reproduce that is. Cells are most susceptible to radiation damage during cell division and that is a lot of that happening in a embryo.
At the time of the original incident, a lot of people were saying that NHK was TEPCO's mouthpiece or something. But they happily report stuff like this.
4x acceptable concentration would be only 2 half lifes... so it would be 58 years, not 116.
Just saying.
A single (average) coal plant puts out about 4 Quadrillion Bq via emissions pollution. So this spill is roughly 0.5% of the yearly output of a coal plant (or, 46 hours of operation of one).
In terms Banana Equivalent Dosage, you're talking about 1.4 Trillion bananas per hour to start with, halving every hour.
You are not comparing like with like. The potassium in a banana is mostly passed through the body harmlessly, as only enough to maintain the normal level is absorbed. The strontium in this water is absorbed by the body like calcium, accumulating in the bones where it will sit for years or decades slowly irradiating you, which is why is causes cancer and leukaemia.
Similarly the output from coal plants is not nearly as dangerous as the content of this water.
I'm disappointed. I expect more than this level of scientific illiteracy from +4 Slashdot comments. The Banana Equivalent Dosage is about as credible as the claim that bananas prove intelligent design, and yet it keeps getting repeated here as if it were a convincing argument.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Tell that to the farmers who have had to destroy crops or the fishermen who have had to write off catches due to contamination.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Sr-90 has a half life of 28 some years.
While a few year delay won't do that much, there is significantly less of the stuff than there was.
That also means, that even given exposure and biological uptake, beta radiation exposure levels don't happen very fast. There's a burst at the end when it turns to Y-90 and then Zr-90 a stable element.
A lot of what we know about Sr-90 effect on mammals on this came from studying milk-tooth levels in children in the US and Russia during the 50's and 60's.
Given that wasn't a disaster, but something to be "concerned about"... then the Fukushima plant spills are in the "concerned about" category as well. Don't swim in the stuff, and avoid foods that would be exposed. Somehow people can't tell the difference between a nuclear weapon going off under their ass and a bit of radiation here and there.
However, this demonstrates nicely the factual level anti-nuclear lobby operates at.
Both sides have idiots. The nuke-u-like lobby always trots out the Banana Equivalent Dose, for example.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
They could probably solve this by giving people free pizza
http://rt.com/usa/chevron-frac...
(On a serious note, why does it take a PR scandal to make a fatal explosion at an gas well newsworthy?)
there is no significant CS-137 contamination even ten miles from Fukushima. Not a danger to humans, and the levels now are less than 1/10,000 from when the disaster happened.
Thanks to the magic of bio-accumulation, trace concentrations can be increased by many orders of magnitude:
Tourism industry officials and restaurant operators have been aghast to learn that wild mushrooms picked far from the site of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima Prefecture last year are showing high levels of radioactive cesium.
Last year, only wild mushrooms picked in Fukushima Prefecture were found to have cesium levels that exceeded legal standards.
This year, however, wild mushrooms from as far away as Aomori, Nagano and Shizuoka prefectures, all more than 200 kilometers from Fukushima, have been found to be contaminated with cesium.
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0...
You are not comparing like with like. The potassium in a banana is mostly passed through the body harmlessly, as only enough to maintain the normal level is absorbed.
Mostly correct. Instead of only absorbing "only enough to maintain the normal level", what you will actually get is absorption of a bit more than enough to maintain the normal level, coupled with increased elimination (mostly via urine) to maintain that normal level. Either way there is no difference -- there is no long-term storage of Potassium in the body, it is all present as the soluble, highly-mobile aqueous ion. So any increased level of from a radioactive source will relatively rapidly come back down to equilibrium levels of radioactivity, once you return to your intake from your regular Potassium sources.
Anyway, the ratio of radioactive Potassium (to non-radioactive Potassium) in your body will be equal to the average level of radioactive Potassium in Bananas (and other dietary sources, mostly plant-derived materials); the Potassium-40 isotope to non-radioactive isotopes is mostly at equilibrium concentration in the environment. For a 70kg human this means approximately 160g of total Potassium in the body, with 0.0187 grams of 40K, producing 4,900 disintegrations per second (becquerels).
The strontium in this water is absorbed by the body like calcium, accumulating in the bones where it will sit for years or decades slowly irradiating you, which is why is causes cancer and leukaemia.
Partially correct. Like Potassium, Calcium is regulated at a "normal" level, and the body will reduce absorption (from the gut), and increase elimination (mostly through urine) to eliminate excess. Accumulation happens if there is a deficit, or with active deposition of osseous material. However, due to constant turn-over of bone Calcium, at any given time a small amount of material is simultaneously being both absorbed and released from long-term storage. So this means a small amount of the ingested material will go into long-term storage, even when your body is not actively increasing Calcium stores.
However, note that while Potassium-40 and non-radioactive Potassium are chemically identical (well, almost identical -- some tiny kinetic effects may be present, negligible), Calcium and Strontium are not. They are grossly handled the same by the body, but there may be some differences in absorption / retention / excretion rates between the two substances -- so the radioactive Strontium will not be a straightforward constant fraction of the Calcium pool as it moves around in the body.
I'm disappointed. I expect more than this level of scientific illiteracy from +4 Slashdot comments.
I'm not disappointed; I never had any expectations to begin with :)
The proper response would be to stop giving it attention.
Instead of sending a message, all you did was made it MORE popular. Good job, I'm fairly certain thats the opposite of what you should have done.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
...
They know where the cores are, they haven't left the reactor containment vessels ...
What the fuck kind of bullshit are you spewing? Common ground fog is now steam from a core meltdown thats deep underground somewhere?
Ignorant bullshit from people like you are why we have so many fucking morons who are so afraid of nuclear power. Please shut the fuck up and stop making up random bullshit to get peoples attention.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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Conclusion: We're soon going to run out of monkeys.
Given that all the alkaline earth elements except beryllium and magnesium have moderately to extremely insoluble sulphates, and excess of sulphate is not hard to supply without turning the place into a blasted wasteland (whether delivered by ploughing the soil with potash alum (potassium aluminium sulphate, used sometimes as a fertilizer and other times as a treatment for indigestion), or just spraying the ground with "don't use this as eye-wash" strength of sulphuric acid, this isn't exactly an unrecoverable situation.
Not good either, but not a run for the hills situation either.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Just curious,
Instead of pumping in (then polluting) seawater, why not just let the thing meltdown? It would essentially bury the fuel. After it drops down a 1000' or so, fill the hole in with cement. I wouldn't be too worried about volcanic eruptions, radiation is what keeps the earth core nice and soft.
Well first of all you would have a plutonium fire which would more than likely render the entire northern hemisphere un-inhabitable as it melted into the earth at, IIRC, 1500-3000C. Once it hit the water table it would produce a mighty explosion which would draw in the other 6000 fuel rods stored on the site. If you a)had enough concrete and b) could get lose enough to dump the concrete the melting core would turn the concrete into powder.
So it's probably not a worthwhile option ;)
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
nonsense, the leaking isotopes will decay in decades not centuries.
pu-239, a component of reactor four's fuel mix has a 25,000 year half life and is a fatal dose to a human in the microgram range - at least according to Oppenheimer.
Fukushimi diachi is a local problem, never mind hysteria over non-events like the detected level of one extra xenon atom per cubic meter in the USA, that's nothing. less than nothing.
No, it's a Pacific wide problem and atmospheric effluents are a serious problem for the US food producers. Bioaccumulation has no regard for your ignorance of the facts.
Chernobyl was just bad engineering meets bad management, other plants in the world can't do what that one did.
The only difference is Fukushima adds criminal negligence.
And Fukushima diachi is causing widespread damage, slowly, like Chernobyl did.
FTFY
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Nonsense, the concentration in the pacific is negligible and not a danger. you have no understanding of units of meaure of radioactive contamination. You read alarmist nonsense without sense of proportion or scale.
Except that you are talking about radioactive contamination, instead of radioisotope contamination, so it does call into question your capacity to asses the comment at all.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
There is so much bad info here its ironic. I will comment on a couple of points for those that are seriously interested, please ignore the trolls
Some facts worth noting first:
Fires can of course spread it. Significantly high radiation measurements were made in Tokyo (well over 150 miles away from Fukushima). Imagine what happens in the spring when the pollens get released from the grasses, shrubs and trees. All the pine cones are Cesium-137 laden, probably from the excessively high (more than Chernobyl) levels in the ground water.
Wind, evaporation, percipitation make this a world event.
No Technology to stop the leaks now or for the next 10 years means that every spring will bring more of the radiation out of the ground.
those mushrooms have two and a half times the government limit, but nevertheless in absolute terms will not harm anyone.
it's a local problem