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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.
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 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.
Indeed. The main reason is that pressure vessles don't just explode.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
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...
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
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. . .
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is nothing wrong with having a nuclear reactor in this region. It just needs to be built to fail-safe. This plant in particular was not appropriately built to that standard.
And honestly, if there was a 500 foot tsunami, Japan's going to have other things to worry about. I mean, yeah the homes all around will be irradiated, but since they will have been flattened already and anyone left inside dead, irradiation of their dead bodies is probably just going to slow down decomposition at that point.
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.
I know we love our car analogies, but 40 year old cars can be, and are, driven on the roads in the USA. Heck, Cuba's are even older. And if things like safety and emissions bother you, you can retrofit a modern computer-controlled engine, ABS disc brakes, and modern safety belts. It's not really possible to install crumple zones, though, so like a nuclear reactor, a 40 year old car will never be quite as safe. However, when a 40 year old car is in an accident, it affects several orders of magnitude fewer people than a reactor accident. So, yeah, let's hope we've learned that politics need to stay out of energy, so that we can move away from obsolete nuclear and coal power and into newer, safer nuclear reactors and renewable energy.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Well, just fucking build it above 500 ft and put base isolators under it, then!
The issue is not that we "cant" build nuclear power plants that are safe; the issue is that we stupidly chose not to.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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
I was more commenting on the point that you are talking about a 500 foot tall tsunami. The one that happened at Fukushima was only 49 ft tall. A tsunami ten times that size would inflict so much damage that I doubt you could do much to realistically mitigate that. But a 500 ft wave is unknown in human history. The tallest wave known was 100 ft tall at Lituya Bay in 1958.
It's not about whether it could happen, because its probably not impossible. However there is an assessment of risk that has to happen here.
Are you going to suggest that nuclear power is unsafe because it might fail in circumstances that have not been seen in all of history? You might as well suggest that it might have a reactor meltdown if it was hit by a meteor large enough to touch off an extinction event. At that point, who cares? We're all dead anyway. If anyone lives long enough to die of cancer from a busted nuclear plant 30 years after that, they probably lived a charmed life.
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
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.
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
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!"> Solar and Wind will slowly increase in overall percentage, but won't be a major part of the total world wide power consumption this century. Maybe in the 22nd Century they will, but hopefully by then Fusion is working and we won't need them.
Yeah, right. This is just wishful thinking on your part.
Wind power alone is already making 10% of the EU's average electricity supply, and wind energy is now cheaper than coal or gas in many parts of America.
Wind power in the world is growing enormously quickly, literally exponentially, at around 14%, year on year, and has been for about a decade, and shows no sign of slowing; and it's price competitive, fairly consistently cheaper than nuclear. It also has less restrictions than nuclear.
That's just wind; and it's already starting to overtake nuclear power for overall production.baseline.
Solar is smaller, but growing faster, the price is still relatively high, but dropping like a stone; and in sunny places it's already very competitive.
-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>
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