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Fukushima Cleanup, 5 Years On (bbc.co.uk)
AmiMoJo writes: Today is five years since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was damaged by an earthquake and tsunami, leading to a series of meltdowns. Nearly half a million people were evacuated at the time, with 100,000 still unable to return to their homes. The government has set a goal of 20mSv/year before people are allowed to live in affected areas again, and while progress is being made hotspots are still a problem in many areas. Reconstruction has been largely waiting for decontamination to be completed, allowing homes and businesses to fall into ruin. Those who do wish to return find their communities gutted, with essential services and jobs gone. Meanwhile, engineers are still unable to determine exactly what happened at Daiichi, particularly what saved reactor 2's pressure vessel from exploding. The initial reports were scary even before the nuclear plant problems were evident. Engadget notes that even now, the worst part of the cleanup remains a grueling work in progress, tough even for robots. Reader the_newsbeagle writes, too, with a link to the New York Times' take on the 5-year mark, and notes that The state and location of the melted fuel inside the reactors is still a mystery. The meltdown zone is too dangerous for human workers to enter, and robots have had limited success navigating in the wreckage. So Japan is recruiting subatomic particles called muons to map the reactors' insides. These particles, born of cosmic rays, constantly stream down from the atmosphere, passing through most matter unimpeded. But their occasional interactions with the subatomic components of uranium allow physicists to locate the blobs of the deadly stuff.
what saved reactor 2's pressure vessel from exploding?
I'd suspect it was the same that saved reactor 1, 3 and 4's pressure vessels from exploding.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Except that the accident is poisoning the ocean still and the Japanese diet has lots of fish in it. Bummer.
I watched this on NHK this weekend and was very impressed. A bit dramatic but very informative technically
88 Hours - The Fukushima Nuclear Meltdown
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld...
A small amount of nuclear contamination in exchange for saving millions of tons of carbon from entering the atmosphere and a lesson in how to prevent this ever from happening again is a good trade, imo.
I agree. Especially when you consider that far more people have had, and will have, serious health problems (including cancers) from all the coal-fired power plants used in Japan than from this incident.
And while the trigger was the earthquake and tsunami, the failure was purely human in nature- poor planning, stupidity, etc. When it comes to coal power, the solutions are not nearly so well known or easily implemented.
I was assured by the Slashdot elite, even weeks on from the earthquake/tsunami, that there had been no meltdown nor even any kind of breach of the nuclear fuel at all and to say otherwise was a tinfoil-hat-tier conspiracy.
This is shocking to hear of a meltdown today!
Your brainpower must be exceedingly limited if you don't understand the length of time and scope of problem that a nuclear meltdown poses to the environment versus some "carbon", that arguably does or does not have a limited effect solely on the climate of the planet.
I doubt that the plants being asphyxiated due to lack of CO2 agree. The periods of the greatest diversity of life one earth (like the Carboniferous Era) correspond to periods of high CO2. What condition was present during the Archaen Eon and snowball earth? Low CO2.
I doubt that the thousands of people evacuated from their homes and businesses for the last 5 years and continuing in the future for a while yet would agree.
It was an unnecessary lesson, given that other nuclear power plants in the same area survived the tsunami just fine because they were properly prepared: they built tsunami walls high enough to handle historical tsunami, plus a bit more as a safety factor. Even as there were warnings in the 2000s that the protection was inadequate at Fukushima the management there didn't improve the situation. This is a trade-off that never should have been necessary. Tepco was simply too cheap to head the lessons already learned by others, and now the government and the people are on the hook to the tune of billions of dollars.
The only lesson learned here is not to trust a for-profit business to do the right thing when safety costs them money. It needs substantial oversight to make sure they don't cut corners.
Does it not make more sense to cultivate the trees in a sweltering CO2 atmosphere and make them our servants? We have need of wood.
Indeed. The main reason is that pressure vessles don't just explode.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Pretty much all coal plants release large amounts of alpha radiation in the direct vicinity of the plants, among other pollutants.
The problem here was continuing to use old designs of nuclear power station well beyond their sell-by date.
Nobody would advocate using a 40 year old car on the roads. Yet we persist with extending the life of nuclear reactors - clearly into danger territory.
If this reactor had been shutdown and encased on schedule and a new one built using more up to date techniques, then perhaps the issues with it would have been much less.
what saved reactor 2's pressure vessel from exploding?
I'd suspect it was the same that saved reactor 1, 3 and 4's pressure vessels from exploding.
Nuclear engineers are so stupid. If only that had called you.
Reactor 1, 3, and 4 never had a sudden massive pressure excursion which appeared to drop off for reasons either unknown or not revealed.
You do realize this is actually killing off an entire ocean right?
No, I don't realise that. Whatever makes you think that's the case?
You do realize eating ANYTHING from the Pacific Ocean is very very risky... right?
No, I don't realise that because it's not true.
Half of Japan should have been, and still be, evacuated
If that's the case, I'm sure you can tell me what the average excess dose in mSv/yr in the half of Japan that ought to be evacuated? I mean you'd never make such a wild claim without knowing the numbers, right?
Carbon doesn't continue to react outside of the reactor leaking gamma and beta rays
By reaction, you mean decay right? Coal ash has decaying radioactive elements in it too, by the way.
yes, the same ones that made the Hulk
I hate to break it to you, but the Hulk isn't real.
Carbon doesn't cause mutations and cancers,
Certain allotropes of carbon are in fact strongly suspected to be carcinogenic.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I always love how the chief argument on /. for continuing the use pf nuclear power use into eternity entails holding people hostage with the mediocrity of coal-burning and its waste. Is the argument that we're stuck with nuclear due to how crappy the alternatives are, supposed to reassure me?
Oddly, the meltdown may be good for the environment. The meltdown has created regions that a bad for humans and may be good for nature. Overfishing in the hot zones is no longer an issue...
And that my friend would essentially make Japan completely inhabitable for hundreds or more years.
I'm not sure what your friend has to do with any of that other stuff, but he sounds absolutely terrifying. If he can do that to an entire country, just imagine what he could do to your living room couch. I'd suggest getting some new friends, immediately! Perhaps a couple of commas?
Let's be honest here.
We, as a society, have mental blinders to real and known risks.
We know that the entire Pacific region, aka "the Ring of Fire" is vulcanically and geologically active. And is subject to 500 foot tsunamis periodically within recent history, and quakes up to factor 9 or above.
Is it wise to have any nuclear fission reactors in this region?
No.
Will we do anything about this.
Probably not.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Sounds as if they had hired slashdot's own mdsolar to write the article.
When I was I high school in Ontario in the mid-90s, we got a presentation by a gentleman from the AECB (now renamed CNSC), the Canadian nuclear regulator. He passed a hefty chunk of uranium ore around the school auditorium. Every student got to hold it. Yet, I'm still here to tell about it, and just fine (other than having become a slashdot poster), and I have no concerns about my former classmates, either. Why? Becase playing with that chunk of uranium increased our overall environmental exposure to radiation imperceptibly.
Uranium can be deadly in the long run if you eat it, breathe in uranium dust, or put on a night face lotion laced with a good amount. Aside from that, it's only critical amounts of it, and the byproducts of uranium, that are deadly. The sly wording of the author, though, is intended to associate uranium with death in a general sense, and is FUD that reveals his bias.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
It's also with noting now close it came to being far, far worse.
Number 2 rector was building up pressure and the operators were unable to relieve it. The valves seemed to be stuck, even after they got emergency battery power to them. The containment vessel was over its design limit for pressure. Then suddenly the pressure fell, and no-one knows why.
Had the reactor containment vessel failed, the worst case was the loss of Eastern Japan. Hopefully one day we can find out what saved the country.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
More people died worrying about Fukushima than they did from actual radiation poisoning from Fukushima.
The other reactors were vented. They had a venting system that passed the contaminated air through water before releasing it. The water cleaned it much of the contamination, but not all, and now they have massive amounts of highly contaminated water to deal with.
They had to send people in to connect up emergency battery power to activate the vents. Those are the people who got the biggest dose of radiation, and who saved Eastern Japan.
For some reason the venting system in reactor two didn't work. The water level was low, but due to the severity of losing the containment vessel they decided to vent anyway. That didn't work either. Then at the last moment, with the vessel way beyond design limits, something happened and the pressure dropped.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Indeed. Coal Ash is more radioactive than actual nuclear waste.. In fact, significant amounts of both uranium and thorium are found in coal fly ash, to the point, in some cases, Thorium Reactor advocates have suggested there's more generate-able power if the Thorium was used in a reactor, than was generated by burning the coal. I've seen no numbers to back that up, but it seems plausible, based on back-of-the envelope numbers. . .
http://www.sfgate.com/health/a...
Then suddenly the pressure fell, and no-one knows why.
Has no one yet noticed that nuclearly-melted farthole around the backside of the containment vessel ("con-tane-ment wessel" P.Chekov).
Most professionals are pretty stupid. That's why the internet needs to design more things.
Had the reactor containment vessel failed, the worst case was the loss of Eastern Japan. Hopefully one day we can find out what saved the country.
It's not that mysterious. For example, according to this report, the pressure release of Reactor 2 is unexplained, but they weren't close to blowing out the pressure vessel:
The containment pressure rise at first was much slower than should be expected if all the decay heat is delivered to the suppression pool, which is an indication of a leak in the containment boundary. The wetwell venting line configuration had been completed by 11:00 a.m. on March 13, but the containment pressure had not reached the rupture disk setpoint, so no venting occurred. After core damage, the containment pressure increased more rapidly, probably because of hydrogen production. At 6:00 a.m. on March 15, an impulsive sound that was initially attributed to a hydrogen explosion was confirmed near the suppression chamber of the containment. Later reviews suggested that sound was not due to hydrogen burn. In any case the containment pressure did sharply decrease. It is not clear whether the designed vent path was ever in service; however, longer term, the containment pressure has remained low, around the level of atmospheric pressure.
In particular, it's worth noting that there is a rupture disk here precisely to prevent the reactor pressure vessel from experiencing a catastrophic rupture and that the vessel was leaking enough that it might not have even reached a high enough pressure to break the rupture disk.
Neither continue AGW business as usual, nor use more nuke. Those aren't our two only and sole choices.
Number 2 rector was building up pressure and the operators were unable to relieve it. The valves seemed to be stuck, even after they got emergency battery power to them. The containment vessel was over its design limit for pressure. Then suddenly the pressure fell, and no-one knows why.
Oh they know why. But they don't think the world is ready to hear about that big ass lizard that took a bite out of the containment vessel and absorbed the radiation.
So you have some links I can read? I'm finding it somewhat difficult to get any details about this event.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
This quake was the fourth largest in measurement history, one of the rare magnitude 9 earthquakes. It was thought this area would max out at a mid 8 from historical earthquakes and estimation of the maximum potential fault break size. But what happened is three fault segments broke in quick succession, creating a super quake.
A similar thing happened in Sichuan China a few years earlier. Three faults broke making a quake larger than anticipated.
So seismologists are revising their ideas about California faults. Perhaps multiple faults could break together, creating a quake larger than any measured int he past 2000 years.
It's a problem of culture, not physics. Most of us feel safe flying despite knowing that about once a year, somewhere in the world, a planeload of about 200-300 people will be lost. Furthermore, those who do fear flying just keep quiet and take the train. You never see them protesting around airports or filing suits to prevent Boeing from building the next model. I used to explain this as aviation being grandfathered in before the liberal fear factory decided to start hating science, but recently we have seen them start a campaign against vaccination, which has been settled medicine for two hundred years.
Perhaps, but it's not like a government automatically does any better.
Note that the #1 nuclear accident in the world was a government reactor for the now defunct Soviet Union. If we're simply going by how bad reactor events have been, we should probably still be more afraid of government control.
Chernobyl was an explosive event, yes, but considerably less than fukishima on all honest accounts
That is a demonstrably false statement.
Do you even know what happened at Chernobyl?
Once on a tour of the Nevada Test Site I got to handle a chunk of pure U-238. Dark gray, the size of a common brick and insanely heavy. They use it for shielding.
Yea.. oversight. Like how the oversight of the Mines and Mineral Service here in the states prevented the British Petroleum disaster that spewed oil into the gulf for weeks. I'll take profit motive over a government agency's oversight any day, the odds are better. At least the company has a motivator, the government bureaucrats are just biding their time until they can pension out.
I keep hearing about the contaminated water in Japan but I'd like to know what's in it to get an idea of the problem this poses.
If the problem is heavy hydrogen then I suspect the problem will resolve itself before anyone gets around to processing the water. Some stuff like cesium and strontium are quite deadly but that is also what makes them valuable. There might be money to be made in "mining" this water for valuable radiation sources like that, for things like cancer treatments and disinfecting food.
Just how radioactive is this stuff? Couldn't we just fill an old oil tanker with this water, seal it up tight, then flood the outer hull and watch it sink into a deep sea subduction zone?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
How many died from AIDS? If the death vector is something else but it's caused by a prior requirement, the prior requirement is still deadly, even though you can turn round and claim "Nobody died from that!".
Fucking stupid nuclear fluffers.
Sorry to break it to you, but you're the one who doesn't seem to grasp the problem.
If you're talking about coal powerplants vs nukes, the correct metrics isn't brainpower, but "deaths per PWh".
And coal is many orders of magnitude deadlier than nuclear power, even with Tchernobyl and Fukushima.
Global warming isn't the only negative impact of coal powerplants : miners are dying in the thousands per year, in China alone (another example : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...), and air pollution is alarmingly high close to the powerplant, even with good filters.
A coal powerplant in Japan or Germany also has an high impact on people in Sudan, Syria or Tuvalu due to climate change.
The impact of Fukushima is pretty much limited to the Fukushima region.
Sorry for the forbes link, but this article really is relevant to the discussion : http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...
You have got to be kidding.
From my home I can see the smoke stack of the Kingston coal power plant in Kingston, TN, located at the confluence of the Emory and Clinch rivers. A few years ago the largest coal ash spill in history happened at the plant when the wall of a large coal ash retention pond collapsed. Nobody died or was injured. The area has recovered and is beautiful. This is quite significant, let me repeat, this was the largest coal ash spill in history, no one was hurt, the area is beautiful.
From my home I can also see wind power turbines up on Windrock mountain, in the Cumberland mountains. There is a fairly good wind resource there.
I can't see it from my home but a few miles down river is the Watts Bar nuclear power plant.
I cannot see it from my home but a few mile up the TN river is the Fort Loudon dam and hydro electric power plant.
I worry the least about the hydro power plants. Very safe, very clean, we have nice lakes for boating, fishing, recreation, they use the dams to help with flood control etc.
I worry a little more about the wind mills, I admit I don't like to see them, I think they ruin the natural beauty. We have eagles etc. around here and windmills kill a lot of birds and bats. I cannot hear the windmills but would not want to have them close enough that I could hear them.
Next, I worry slightly more about the coal plant. The coal plant has the scrubber stacks for pollution and emits mostly water vapor clouds, it is considerably cleaner than in the past. But it still does emit some pollutants into the air that I don't like.
I worry the most about the nuclear power plant. It poses the greatest threat to myself and my family. If there is a problem at the Watts Bar nuclear plant the entire region would be devastated for a very long time. It could be like Fukushima or like Chernobyl. When you have people involved you have human error and there will be problems that were not anticipated. There is much more down side to a problem at a nuclear power plant.
prsdntl
Here are photos and an article in National Geographic from the massive quake and tsunami in the same area in 1896. Almost 27,000 people were killed and a tsunami was reported as high as 50 feet.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic....
The excuse that the tsunami was unprecedented and a "once in a 1,000- year event" is false.
The take away for me after five years is that it was criminally incompetent to not have planned for the possibility of a similar event so recent that there are photographs of it.
The engineers involved in the construction and operation should be in prison.
Disclaimer: I have a BSME with a Nuclear option, and I should be in prison if I had anything to do with the plant. I also live within 90 miles of the plant and remember thinking that I was in serious jeopardy when I saw a helicopter dropping water onto the stored fuel rods on TV. When the helicopters come out, it's the last straw.
Stop lying, there was no such thing.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Huh?
Of course, the "highly contaminated" is bullshit. It's minimally contaminated, but idiots like you would ban bananas if they weren't cute and yellow.
...says the governer of Flint Michigan.
You miss the point. Ignore the CO2 and all the "traditional" pollutants (particulates, VOCs, SOx, NOx, etc.) completely. Forget about it; it's irrelevant for the purpose of this post. We're not talking about carbon, or any of the rest of those, at all. Got it?
Okay. Now, understand this: even then, coal-fired plants are still worse because they collectively release more radiation per MWh in normal operation than nuclear plants have done, even including meltdowns!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
In particular, it's worth noting that there is a rupture disk here precisely to prevent the reactor pressure vessel from experiencing a catastrophic rupture
This seemed wrong to me, since the RPV in Unit 2 was already breached. I believe AmiMoJo was talking about is pressure in the the primary containment vessel (PCV), not the RPV. Just to be clear the reactor core is inside the metal RPV and the RPV is inside the reinforced concrete PCV. The in the Mark 1 reactor design the PCV is the outer wall of the "dry well".
I also looked up some design diagrams for the venting system. While venting system rupture disk is indeed designed to protect the PCV it is not built into the PCV itself. Operators have to open two sets of valves in order to transfer pressure from inside the PCV to the disk. So while it's true the purpose of the rupture disk is to prevent catastrophic failure, that can only happen if the venting system is activated and works as expected.
Now the report you linked to is four years old and assumes that the venting system worked correctly, delivering overpressure to the the rupture disk. AmiMoJo is referring to evidence which came out later which indicates that the venting system almost certainly failed.
In a way I do agree with you. It's not mysterious why the PCV didn't explode; it didn't explode because it failed in some other, unknown way. Under the circumstances that was a very good thing in comparison to the alternative, but it takes a rather determined optimism to construe it as an endorsement of the reactor's design. It was more like a stroke of good luck.
This article has both a detailed diagram of the Oyster Creek reactor, which is the same design, and a schematic of the venting system.
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I think I prefer the deaths from other forms of power than this complete evacuation for years at a time.
To the extent that's true, it's true mostly because of mercury contamination produced form coal-fired power plants, not radioactive particles from Fukushima.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The blowout panel on the reactor floor level of Unit 2 opened when Unit 3 exploded. This allowed accumulated hydrogen to escape, preventing an explosion. It can be seen as a rectangular opening facing seawards on the main structure of Unit 2.
It's oversight or nothing. Which do you think would result in fewer accidents? Or is there a third option I have failed to consider to try to encourage companies to do the right thing rather than scrimp on safety?
Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting the entire operation should be run by the government. I'm saying that leaving a company alone to set its own safety standards and make its own tradeoffs between expenses and safety is a recipe for disaster.
The 170,000 killed during the collapse of the Banqiao dam and related dams may disagree with you.
That one disaster killed far more people than every nuclear power accident combined.
The cause was simple - a hurricane stalled over the area dam, dumping a year's worth of rain in a day. Banqiao, a hydroelectric dam, was the most notable dam to fail, but not the only one. The death toll was in the six figures, and millions were made homeless.
I'm not suggesting government should run it by itself. That would also be risky. I'm suggesting that leaving a company to its own devices is risky without thorough oversight. In the case of Fukushima neither the company's efforts nor the government's efforts were adequate, but I'm pretty sure they would have been even worse without oversight. The lesson here is kind of like the one for the 2008 financial crisis: of course a company would never, ever undermine the safety of the entire economy for the sake of making a buck. That was the argument for limited government regulation and interference. Likewise, of course the company that runs a nuclear power plant on the coast of Japan would never undermine safety once they became aware that they had underestimated the tsunami risk, as was discovered in ~2000 or so.
Unfortunately, by empirical example, they would. In both cases they went right ahead and rolled the dice. That's why you need some kind of adversarial system where you have two components, commercial and government, keeping an eye on each other. Doing either alone would be foolish.
In reality, the nuclear power industry is already fairly strongly regulated, but as Fukushima demonstrated, it still needs to be better.
Actually, depending on what variety of coal is used, and the specific origin of that coal, the mass of coal required for a power plant of a given size puts out between 5 and 10 times the mass of radioactive particles that a nuclear plant of the same output would, if it melted down entirely and completely vented. Similarly, on energetics of the particles, we're again talking roughly an order of magnitude of energy released by those particles, over a year. It's merely diffused over space and time from a point even like a reactor accident, and much is stored as fly ash. Which would have gone to the Yucca Mountain storage facility, but instead, sits in drums outside of coal power plants.
There is an NHK documentary called 88 Hours, that's pretty good. See if it is available where you live.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
In a way I do agree with you. It's not mysterious why the PCV didn't explode; it didn't explode because it failed in some other, unknown way. Under the circumstances that was a very good thing in comparison to the alternative, but it takes a rather determined optimism to construe it as an endorsement of the reactor's design. It was more like a stroke of good luck.
Or that one or more components were designed to fail first. Or that the part of the PCV which was overpressurized (the "dry well") eventually vented to the part that wasn't (the "wet well"). I'm still hearing way too much assumption about what normal operation during a core melt is supposed to be. I know that if I were designing this thing, I'd have most plumbing passing through the shell of the PCV fail first (especially anything for venting the interior of the PCV).
I'll go one better. I have a small chip of uranium ore in my desk drawer right this very moment. I got it to test a geiger counter gizmo I got for testing whether old watches I was working on had radium pigment. Naturally I had to make sure the thing works before I trusted a "normal" reading.
I'm not afraid of handling this bit of ore, not in the least. But I wouldn't feel the same about handling the same amount of refined fuel, or the random by-products of a reactor disaster. Clearly I'm not radiation phobic, but extrapolating from the safety of handling ore to the products of a reactor accident is just plain stupid.
I'd have no fear of wearing a watch with radium pigment by the way; I've measured the radiation from them and what you get, even on the face of the watch, isn't a big concern especially if you don't wear it every day; maybe 3x background radiation in my neck of the woods. But I don't work on old radium watches because the binder in the pigment breaks down. If you open the case it'll release radium dust into the room. Would I freak out if I opened a radium watch by accident? No, I just wouldn't voluntarily put myself in that situation. There's a world of difference between carrying around intact radium pigment in a sealed case and breathing loose radium dust, just like there's no comparison between handling a piece of low grade uranium ore and exposing yourself to a radiological disaster.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Do you think nuclear power stations in Japan were unregulated?
We have oversight already, which is the point I was getting at mentioning the MMS. I'm sure Japan had oversight as well. Oversight in the states is one reason why we're still running seriously outdated reactors, so it could be suggested that oversight can work against safety. I'm not suggesting all or nothing, but it's foolish to say "we need oversight". We have it.
If anything, there needs to be more accountability when things get this messed up. Companies won't sacrifice safety as much if they believe it's financially unsound or if it's going to land the decision makes in prison. Perhaps the same is needed for the government overseers.
The report doesn't contradict what I said, it agrees with it. The pressure was very high, beyond the limit at which the reactor was designed to operate or sustain for long. Not quite high enough to force open the final emergency rupture points that were designed to fail first to avoid an even more catastrophic explosion.
What you have to remember is that the containment building was already damaged at this point. The explosion of building 1 had put holes in it, which happened to vent hydrogen and prevent yet another explosion. But if the containment vessel failed, there was no building to prevent the contents getting out. Thus half of Japan was at risk, due to the amount of material in the reactor that would enter the atmosphere.
There is an NHK documentary called 88 Hours that explains all this pretty well, see if you can track it down.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
To clarify, the reactor vessel is designed to fail in a somewhat less severe way than simply exploding. There are points that are designed to fail first and vent the high pressure gas inside, into the containment building. However, in this case the containment building already had holes in it from explosions of other nearby containment buildings, so it would have been venting into the atmosphere.
So yeah, no explosion as such, but a massive disaster anyway.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Well, that's how I would do it too, but it's evidently not how this particular reactor was designed back in the 50s. If the reactor failed in any kind of planned way, we'd have some idea what that was. What we're learning is that we don't have any idea how this particular design behaves when it's operating outside its normal operating envelope.
I think it's important to stipulate I'm talking about this design. You can't really talk about the "safety of nuclear power plants" as if all designs are the same. Clearly the old Soviet RBMKs are dangerous pieces of shite; and concerns about the GE Mark 1s were raised all the way back in the early 70s. Fukushima, in my opinion, probably means it's a high priority not to extend the operational licensing of any Mark 1s. That doesn't necessarily mean the Germans should shut down reactors whose design is 20 years newer. And it certainly doesn't mean Japan should shut down it's brand new Gen 3 reactors it just put into service, although maybe they should look at how those plants are managed and sited.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This quake was the fourth largest in measurement history, one of the rare magnitude 9 earthquakes.
The mag 9 quake was 450 miles away, I believe 'natucal miles' even.
At the plant side the quake was roughly mag 6.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes, it's not good for the environment, except relatively, in that humans are so incredibly bad anyway.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Leslie Corrice's Hiroshima Syndrome is the best all-round source. Corrice's site is an amazing work, he has collected into one place facts as they became known, and news coverage of the events. He is particularly attuned to distortions, exaggerations and certain scenarios that have been delivered to the press chosen for their dramatic description despite a laughably low probably. And unlike just about everyone else, he strives to segregate his news reporting from his own commentary.
Some no-hype and anti-hype information sources compiled by The Actinide Age,
What actually happened, written clearly by a radiation professional and teacher, Les Corrice ... Putting Health Risks from Radiation Exposure into Context: Lessons from Past Accidents Professor Geraldine Thomas, Imperial College London, April 2011 ... Also quoted in New Scientist ... The D-shuttle project comparing negligible radiation doses internationally in 2014, and its published open access paper ... Real-time radiation monitoring network for Japan. See if you can find a reading higher than this ... Internal radiocesium contamination of adults and children in Fukushima 7 to 20 months after the Fukushima NPP accident (all below detection limit in 2012) ... in Proceedings of the Japan Academy ... Radiation dose rates now and in the future for residents neighboring restricted areas (after 2012, will not cause detectable health impacts) ... in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ... Will Boisvert confirms that wild claims of Japanese thyroid cancers in 2015 are based on bad science. Dr Jonathan Kellogg summarises the academic criticism ... Tim Worstall confirms that wild claims of a single Tepco worker developing radiation cancer is mere anti-nuclear opportunism ... Articles on the mental health impacts of long term evacuation in Medical News Today and Tech Times, and the cited 2015 Lancet study ... Ocean contamination in 2012(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) and in 2015(Scientific Reports) --- already comparable to natural radioactivity ...
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
"Many discussions of nuclear power on slashdot are polluted by references to completely bogus calculations at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory web site that claim that coal power plants emit more radiation into the environment than nuclear power plants. This is completely bogus because when coal is burned, the uranium within it remains in the ash and its concentration is no greater than in typical low carbon soils. You might as well say that a bulldozer pushing clay soil around is releasing radiation into the environment. Why? Because the uranium in coal comes from the soil out of which the primaeval forest grew. When the coal is burned, you just get the soil components back."
Fossil fuel use cuts our internal radiation burden. http://slashdot.org/journal/27...
It took some work but I read (and properly parsed - I think) their post, not once but twice. I've decided that it has to be trolling. Seriously... It has to be.
I don't know a whole lot about nuclear energy but I've taken the time to learn the basics. I know what to do with the three cookies, I know how safe they are (or can be), I understand the mechanics and process well enough, and I know what half-life means. I'm pretty sure they're intentionally trolling. What's curious is that I'm using an alternative browser at the moment so that I see they're a Facebook user. Who'd tie intentional trolling to their account?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
It was not *technically* mine but was my older brother's - though I later purloined it, sometime in the mid-1960s. I don't know what ever happened to it. He had (and then I had) a chemistry set or something along those lines. In that set was uranium - I have no idea what for as the manual had long-since been lost. It had a small Geiger counter but I don't think that came with the set.
I'm remarkably healthy for my age but I never developed super-powers. I don't know for certain but, given that we were kids, presumably it was put in a mouth at one point or another. "Here, lick this. I double-dare you!"
Come to think of it, I'm kind of surprised we lived to be adults. I'm pretty sure my parents would be in prison and us kids wards of the State if they let us do some of that stuff today. We distinctly, with concerted effort, tried to make things blow up, be eaten away, smoke, emit fumes, spark, or otherwise frighten our mother.
Yeah, we'd be wards of the State. We used to have molds and melt our own tin soldiers. We had firearms and knives. We climbed to ungodly heights - often jumping off those lofty perches. We broke bones. We actually had a fight with frozen crab apples that had partially thawed out, it was awesome. I got pneumonia and puked in his boot, that was awesome too. Oh, I once beat the ever living hell out of him using nothing but a Queen Anne's Lace (a flower with a vine-like stalk that makes a fine impromptu whip) but that's because he did something to one of my Tonka trucks but I'll be damned if I remember what. Oh, they were made out of metal.
Yeah, we'd be in foster care today.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
It's a problem of culture, not physics. Most of us feel safe flying despite knowing that about once a year, somewhere in the world, a planeload of about 200-300 people will be lost.
I'd argue that it's actually the opposite. Many of us fear flying despite it being generally the safest mode of travel, to the point that you're far more likely to die on the drive TO the airport than on the flight.
The damage from coal is steady and persistent, and therefore we come to ignore it. The damage from nuclear power is approximately once every couple decades, so we fear it. Much like how car accidents trickle in the deaths in 1-2s, normally speaking, so we never hear about them - but we certainly hear about that plane - day in and day out, for weeks, and they bring it up again at the anniversary of the accident, just to pound it in more.
Having run the numbers, we'd have to have such a disaster every year, using the mid-high estimates for the deaths from Chernobyl(which are mostly theoretical even today), in order to even start challenging the death toll from coal with nuclear energy.
I don't read AC A human right
I'm not afraid of handling this bit of ore, not in the least. But I wouldn't feel the same about handling the same amount of refined fuel, or the random by-products of a reactor disaster.
Refined fuel is fine. They handle it with cotton gloves - mostly to keep the oils in their hands off the expensive metal stuff.
Random stuff from a reactor disaster? I'm with you.
I don't read AC A human right
Seriously, we need NEW reactors to replace the old ones. With gen IV, we can even burn up the old waste and even use it to clean coal waste.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
assuming that you are American, we now have ACA and you can get back on your lithium.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Coal plants in first world nations don't release radiation. ... and the ash js not more 'radioactive' than pure uranium or pure thorium, how could it?
In other words, the general public never gets into contact with it.
The fly ash js deposited
The idea that coal plants are irradiation the population js debunked since thirty years.
Or to say it with words you understand: a coal plant with all its radioactive ash (most plants don't even produce radioactive ash as there is no uranium or thorium in the coal) release less radiation than an open pit mine for Uranium. OOPS!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers tested this type of reactor (without fuel in it) and found that it leaks at 70psi. This was the first critical design basis issue. The second was the gate pair seals for the spent fuel pools would leak if they were not powered (IIUC they're inflated with compressed air). What this meant was that GE had to issue instructions to operators. S class facilities have to be constantly powered, this means the reactor and the spent fuel cooling pools. Means *had* to be provided for the reactor to always have power. They didn't and this is why this is criminal negligence at a board room level.
Exposure of these basis design issues meant that as the fuel became more critical in the reactor and the cooling pools they would produce the hydrogen that lead to the explosion. We knowthe spent fuel cool pools were leaking because there was about 450 tons of water above the fuel rods would keep them cool for about 7 days without additional cooling.
I have a theory about that. I think that the failing cooling pool is what stopped the reactor from rupturing. The water either broke the seal all at once or over came some threshold to arrive at the head of the reactor where most of it was converted to steam and hydrogen when exploding. It wouldn't have been the first time something some comedy of circumstance prevented a nuclear accident from being worse than it could have been.
I don't think these nutty nukkers place any value on the communities that Nuclear power destroys.
Thank you, I'll look it up. Great scoop btw - a pity I was too busy to get into this one.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
This is absolute total fucking bullshit!
I can only assume that you're referring to a Scientific American article that says that a coal powered plant emits a hundred times than the amount of radiation of a RUNNING nuclear plant; that's a RUNNING plant, not one that has lost its containment when it melted down. When a nuclear reactor melts down, the amount of radiation emitted jumps about a MILLION fold; and then takes decades, or longer, to decay away.
But don't take my word for it, here's the article:
http://www.scientificamerican....
The articles just says that the absorbed dose of someone living within a mile or so downwind of a coal plant is about 1.8 mrem/year, compared to 300 mrem/year of natural background radiation. After a meltdown the levels at that distance can be more than 300mrem/year just from the reactor. It will decay away over time, but it can still be well above acceptable limits hundreds of years later.
There's just absolutely no way at all that the total output of the coal plant could ever reach that of melted down nuclear reactor, let alone being a hundred times more. You're just totally full of it.
There's plenty of reasons to shut down coal plants, mercury, small particle air pollution, acid rain, CO2 etc. etc. Radiation just isn't one of them. The radiation is very dilute and far, far below background radiation. Dilute radiation is largely (but non completely) non problematic; we're surrounded by dilute background radiation anyway. it's the fallout from meltdowns that causes mass evacuations and all farming to cease. That's the real problem, and it's specific to nuclear accidents.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Interestingly enough, apparently TEPCO was planning on beefing up the safety measures later that month. The earthquake just happened first.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
What a load of biased bullshit.
In particular, it's worth noting that there is a rupture disk here precisely to prevent the reactor pressure vessel from experiencing a catastrophic rupture and that the vessel was leaking enough that it might not have even reached a high enough pressure to break the rupture disk.
Interesting, perhaps you found the ASME report. As I said to you before that was the first design basis issue in implementations of that GE reactor, it started leaking at 70psi.
I know that if I were designing this thing, I'd have most plumbing passing through the shell of the PCV fail first (especially anything for venting the interior of the PCV).
If you were designing this, you would be sperm ;)
Or that one or more components were designed to fail first. Or that the part of the PCV which was overpressurized (the "dry well") eventually vented to the part that wasn't (the "wet well").
Or perhaps the gate pair seals for the spent fuel cooling pools in this reactor were situated in such a way that they leaked water over the top of the PCV. This was the second known design basis issue with this reactor type and that they would leak water when power was lost. It was also known that they would produce hydrogen in this state, and it did explode. The hydrogen density must have been high to puch holes in concrete like that.
However it is all irrelevant, the operators were criminally negligent because they did not take adequate steps to ensure power was maintained to this reactor installation so as to avoid exposing those issues. There is no mystery here. The collusion you yourself complained of, that was exposed in the official report into the accident, that led to the accident. Sea wall was not raised to account for new knowledge, additional generators could have been installed, they could have run those reactor at a lower output. So many opportunities to avoid this accident.
As for your unsubstantiated claims that the facility was to be decommissioned, evidence is emerging that Reactor 4 was actually being upgraded along with disturbing allegations of illegal fuel rod storage. That really undermines your argument that seawall upgrades wern't neccessary. On the good news front though I see that the amount of mox fuel rods in the No.4 reactors are down from 1300 to 400 and we are finally seeing the board of Tepco being brought to justice after avoiding charges of negligence for so long.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Correction: The amount of mox fuel rods in the No.4 reactor's cooling pools are down from 1300 to 400
My ism, it's full of beliefs.