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Excessive Radiation Inside Fukushima Fries Clean-Up Robot (gizmodo.com)
"A remotely-controlled robot sent to inspect and clean a damaged reactor at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant had to be pulled early when its onboard camera went dark, the result of excess radiation," reports Gizmodo. "The abbreviated mission suggests that radiation levels inside the reactor are even higher than was reported last week -- and that robots are going to have a hell of a time cleaning this mess up." From the report: Last week, Gizmodo reported that radiation levels inside the containment vessel of reactor No. 2 at Fukushima reached a jaw-dropping 530 sieverts per hour, a level high enough to kill a human within seconds. Some Japanese government officials questioned the reading because Tokyo Electric Power Company Holding (TEPCO) calculated it by looking at camera interference on the robot sent in to investigate, rather than measuring it directly with a geiger counter or dosimeter. It now appears that this initial estimate may have been too low. Either that, or TEPCO's robot is getting closer to the melted fuel -- which is very likely. High radiation readings near any of the used fuel are to be expected. Yesterday, that same remotely operated robot had to be pulled when its camera began to fail after just two hours of exposure to the radiation inside the damaged reactor. Accordingly, TEPCO has revised its estimate to about 650 sieverts per hour, which is 120 more sieverts than what was calculated late last month (although the new estimate comes with a 30 percent margin of error). The robot is designed to withstand about 1,000 accumulated sieverts, which given the failure after two hours, jibes well with the camera interference. This likely means that the melted fuel burned through its pressure vessel during the meltdown in March of 2011, and is sitting somewhere nearby.
Send a droid.
If someone could figure out how to make tech that could survive in such environments. Aircraft have to deal with more radiation than normal, as do spacecraft. Something that survived for say a day in such an environment might survive for a very long time in an aircraft and work without errors, which is equally important..
How does that work? I would think a robot would not be affected by radiation.
I just ate some glow-in-the-dark unagi and I don't feel so well right now.
Whats the moral of the story?
Reports indicate that a person submerged in the plant's inner workings would be nearly instantly killed by drowning, be afraid!
:(
Too bad the fictional "Japanese Miracle" is just that, fiction. https://www.bing.com/search?q=...
It's cost effective and safe, despite what you've heard in the news every time there's a disaster.
The Fukushima plant will only take 1/5 of a trillion dollars and 1/3 of a century to decommission and cordon off a zone where people should never again go. If that's not a good investment of time and money, what is?
And just like I said after Chernobyl, this little Fukushima incident is a fluke that will never happen again.
That is why we need replicants. They can withstand anything, even the C-beams that glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
It's clean, safe, and too cheap to meter.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm not sure I want anyone handing you a hammer so you can speak from more experience on what a hammer can smash, but personally, I like smashing walnuts and pecans with hammers.
Why, I read on Slashdot just the other day that a few remote controlled bulldozers could have Fukushima cleaned up in a month and that tree-hugging anti-growth enviros should shut their pieholes about that accident.
sPh
Just saying. On that matter, however, what else did you eat/consume. Cherrypicking data points gets us nowhere on diagnosing the problem.
What would I be doing without sites like Slashdot pointing out basic arithmetic for me in the summaries of their home page? Thinking, that's what!
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
You don't even want to know what happens when I use power tools!
You'd get a fatal dose in 30 seconds or so and you'd be incapacitated in an hour or two but you might even live for a day (see http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/675780.pdf)
600 sievert / second sounds an awful lot!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Just saying.
Hope they come out with some cool new radiation proof robot technologies. Perfect robot for starting space colonies :()
Was that Jedi guy who said "Only Siths deal in absolutes" a Sith. Maybe we're all Siths. Just saying. You put a comment in the title. I guess that makes you a bundle of sticks. Just saying.
Genom Corporation is proud to anounce that they are working on their new generation of Robots, the Voomers, to handle this and other situations like it.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Yes, I'm gay. You gonna cry about, faggot?
Couldn't they just slap an actual Geiger counter on the thing and know for sure, instead of just guessing?
How charming.
But we have been assured that things are under control and it is only the conspiracy theory nut jobs that keep claiming that thing there are far worse than Japan is willing yo admit.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
We need a radiation cleanup robot cleanup robot.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
certainly know all about that.
8=====D
while I attempt to choke on him.
http://www.imdb.com/find?ref_=...
I actually don't know a Richard to ask to borrow a bucket to choke on... for that matter, I'm not too set on this whole getting choked plan.
That's pretty stupid.
The third most obvious thing to do would be to send in a robot with a tether, and include a fiber optic cable, and have the camera outside with the pneumatic drivers for the pneumatic servos and other equipment actually on the robot, making the robot entirely free of all electronics, other than lights.
The second most obvious thing to do would be to load all the spent fuel that's contributing to the ongoing radiation leakage onto the end of a long train, and distribute them around to all the other nuclear power plants in Japan that still have functioning cooling ponds, and stop the leakage -- 10 days, tops, to solve the leakage problem.
The first most obvious thing to do would be to bury the site in cement and call it a day.
The U.S. Navy has offered to do that for them a half dozen times already, but given that the top two executives at TEPCO at the time now work for a Japanese oil company, there's something of a vested economic interest in keeping it an ongoing danger. "No, no: we don't need your help".
Where's Red Foreman, when you need someone to yell "Dumbasses!"?
Or rather, excessively more expensive once reality demonstrates the inadequacy of ElCheapo risk management and risk avoidance. Interestingly, cost comparisons never include these factors. If humanity were not so stupid as a group, the refusal of all insurers to ever cover nuclear reactors should have been a really large hint. And we have not even started to tackle the problem of dismantling non-melted down reactors and storing spend fuel. Fun for the next few 1'000 or so generations to come!
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I wonder how much it would cost to replace the parts damaged by radiation, instead of getting a whole new robot?
... or more:
- Why the fuck didn't they hang a Geiger counter on the robot?
-- Maybe they don't have one that's any tougher than their robot eye
-- Maybe they don't wanna know
-- Maybe they think they know and don't want to alarm anyone.
- Where are the +5 comments?
-- I'm serious
-- I want to learn something
-- The current crop of comments (including mine) are not helpful
Thanks.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Would a lead jacketed fibre optic camera make a difference?
Hey BeauHD, seeing that you're a millenial, I noticed that you obviously knew about "getting fried" at a young age. You are too young to recall the console era of the Playstation original, the Playstation 2, 3, 4, and so forth, but back in the day, we didn't toke so much and played video games instead. It was a form of social interaction. Today, all that you can talk about is fried robot, and I glean that from the summary you can't get over how yummy KFR (Kungfu Fried Robot) would be if only you could get a sample of some. Because if you deep fry something, it's automatically tasty. Including your brains. You should try that some time too. Mmmmmmm, bbbbrrrraaaaiiiinnnnsssss.
By the way, robots have been "fried" in there since 2010. You may be too young to remember 2010. Ionizing radiation spews ions into the semiconductors which might be enough to knock a 0 to a 1, for instance. Similar things were happening at Chernobyl with the olden CCD cameras around the time your grandparents were born.
pfft, the big radiation problems are cesium 137, and strontium 90. Each has a half life of around 30 years. After about 600 years, the radiation will be a millionth as strong. But hey, Harry Reid's got to fearmonger about Yucca Mountain.
How will space colonization ever takeoff if the Earth is not made uninhabitable?
**Life is too short to be serious**
https://www.stripes.com/news/16-us-ships-that-aided-in-operation-tomodachi-still-contaminated-with-radiation-1.399094
You don't know what you're talking about again, Kendall.
The thresholds that are considered contamination are so low it's absurd. Meanwhile, many poor people are exposed to more dangerous forms of radioactive pollution via coal pollution because of anti-nuclear power hysteria.
Why not construct a drill derreck over the reactor and drill into the facility to extract (at least some of) the corium?
Drill bits are expendable, it's entirely flooded so nothing will get into the air, there's already a rough idea where the material is, and it'll allow for the material to be collected either by grinding up the corium and filtering the water for it, or by collecting sample after sample in a standardized container by using a hollow drill bit when they get to the corium.
Is there a reason why this idea won't work?
You laugh, but tubes aren't affected by ionizing radiation.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
How is this important?
Yes, I stand by the basic intent and meaning of my sig line - that in opposing the madness which our once proud nation has inflicted upon itself, we who perceive this evil clearly should not reduce ourselves to the petulant and childish behavior which has profited Trump. We should not reduce ourselves to name calling or calls to violence. This idea frightens you, yes?
Or a case where it's too expensive to lose a droid - send humans who can't afford the legal costs to sue you.
And we have not even started to tackle the problem of dismantling non-melted down reactors and storing spend fuel.
I don't understand your claim "not even started".
What about (say) Dounreay and the work of the NDA?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
Let's do a cost comparison as you suggest. Here's a graph of nuclear power generation over the last 45 years. Generation has been about 2300 TWh per year for the last 20 years. The 25 years before that ramped up roughly as a triangle, so call it 2200/2 = 1100 TWh per year average.
This gives us a total of 73,500 TWh generated by nuclear power over the last 45 years. 20*2300 + 25*(2200/2) = 73500.
Using a global average electricity price of $0.20 per kWh, this is $14.7 trillion dollars worth of electricity generated by nuclear over the last 45 years.
Chernoby cleanup costs (current and future) are estimated to total $235 billion, Fukushima is estimated to be around $200 billion. Three Mile Island was about $1 billion. These are the only major commercial nuclear accidents in history, and their total cost is estimated to be $436 billion.
$436 billion / $14.7 trillion = 0.02966. Or about 3%.
So the cleanup costs for nuclear accidents is about 3% of the price of the electricity nuclear generates. Or 0.6 cents per kWh. This is so "excessively more expensive" that it would cost the average American home less than $8/year. (Average American home uses 10,812 kWh/yr * $0.12/kWh average electricity price * 20% of electricity produced by nuclear * 3% cleanup cost = $7.78/yr.)
Insurers refuse to cover nuclear because of how statistics work. The more incidents there are, the narrower the bell curve and the more confident you can be about predicting how many accidents will happen. A 10d50 will be much more likely to yield a result near 55 than a 2d50 is to yield a result near 51. Consequently, even though their long-term mean is almost the same, a bookie will give you better odds on the 10d50 because it's more predictable and thus harder for them to lose money on it.
Nuclear plants generate massive amounts of power. You need about 10 coal plants to equal a single nuclear plant. Several thousand wind turbines. Consequently you need much fewer nuclear plants to meet your energy needs compared to these other power sources. So even though statistically nuclear plants are safer than other power sources (mean accident rate is lower), their small number means there's larger uncertainty about how many accidents will happen. Insurers compensate for this by erring on the safe side (for them) and charging much higher rates. e.g. If there are 100 nuclear plants and the mean says 1 will suffer an accident in 30 years, the insurer may err on the safe side and charge a premium based on, say, 2 or 3 accidents, just in case they get a bad die roll. Whereas if there are 1000 coal plants and the mean says 10 will suffer an accident in 30 years, the insurer can be much more confident that even if they get a bad die roll, they can charge a premium assuming only 15 accidents and still make money.
Perhaps they will have to go back to using a photoelectron tube as used in very early video cameras.
In other words Yes folks, the fuel is indeed outside of the reactor core.
Let's, for a moment, consider what words were spoken inside the TEPCO media relations meeting;
This is exactly the kind of slimy trick the Nuclear Industry PR would use to downplay evidence of fuel being outside of the reactor, maybe I've been napping however I've not seen the headline Evidence of Nuclear Fuel Found outside of Fukushima Reactor Core anywhere. I'm just supposed to be comfortable that it's inside the containment as if it's no big deal that it didn't melt *INSIDE* the reactor where it should be.
M: Susan, make sure the by-story runs that it is *inside* the containment, we need to make sure the fans have a counter argument. People, we're running with the robot broken down story and that we think it might have kinda possibly run into a tad bit of radio stuff,, we have to get on top of this before the mainstream get a hold of the news. Susan, where are those overalls!
This article from the Japanese daily contains the video feed from the robot. Above the hole you can see the base of the reactor pressure vessel. Your statement seems a trite summation considering the evidence discovered.
It's perfectly reasonable to be angry about the incompetence that led to this disaster, what's weird is trying to say it's no big deal. The international community who shares the coasts of the pacific ocean will suffer the consequences of this over a very long time. This is what a big deal is.
I don't see any justification for supporters of nuclear energy to play the same morally superior dogmatically skeptic attitude they have had over the last decade anymore, this is an INES7 scale accident. Information is available now, and people can read so what need is less downplaying so we can figure out the nature of the mess the nuclear industry has left us and where these 3 cores are.
Evidence of reactor fuel found outside of the Fukushima reactor is the information and the nuclear industry is very carefully avoiding any further criticism.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
You are yet to defend these figures from from the last time you posted it.
This is the cost to *ESTABLISH* cleaning up Chernobyl, how do you support that these are the current and future costs? We have not established the clean-up costs for Fukushima, only estimated, incurring and accumulating.
I have not looked at the status of TMI, have all the core elements been removed? Don't we still have to dismantle the facility? Will it require a New Safe Containment? Will Fukushima?
How much does it cost to dismantle a reactor core that has been operating for 60 years. Will every Nuclear reactor need a NSC to dismantle it?
I guess Lake Karachay and Hanford were done on purpose so do clean up costs there count? Hanford alone is $112 billion and climbing.
What about the cost of the 'non-major' accidents added together, are those costs externalized, like carbon?
What about the cost of spent fuel containment, not the test site at Yucca, a site that can contain radio-products without leaking?
Infrastructure to said containment facility (incidentally, that's why you want to pick a place that works)?
Cost per reactor decommissioning?
What about decommissioning of Enrichment facilities?
Mine tailings clean up, or are those costs externalized onto other countries?
It would be interesting to see the impact of decommissioning even if you ignored everything else. I think it has only been done once and on 150Mw reactor, IIRC it was Yankee Rowe. I dug out the number for you.
A controlled shutdown of a functioning reactor, it cost half a billion dollars to clean-up and it was only 137 Megawatts, less than a quarter of the size of TMI-2. You have to wait decades to allow the *really* radioactive elements to decay. This is because new and highly radioactive elements are created in the reactor core. It's still not something that has been addressed in an industrially proficient way that makes the sites safe or 'greenfeild'. Considering the 104 reactor sites around America are multi-core the United States will be looking at a conservative estimate of a quarter of a *Trillion* dollars, at todays prices, on reactor decommissioning alone.
NPPs are underwritten by the Price–Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act. The value of the insurance subsidies for damaged caused are forced onto the taxpayer. Geothermal, wind and Solar don't get that kind of massive underwriting of liability as a form of corporate welfare because they don't need it. That's the flip side of Capacity Factor.
if these did not exist no one would invest in nuclear power as the liability cannot be calculated. Imagine what a hypothetical Indian Point INES7 accident would do to the asset value of NYC. How do you calculate that liability?f these did not exist no one would invest in nuclear power as the liability cannot be calculated. Imagine what a hypothetical Indian Point INES7 accident would do to the asset value of NYC. How do you calculate that liability?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It is a bit arbitrary definition of "major" to include only Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Miles Island. There have been many other major accidents (some more serious than TMI) and many smaller ones. Also "cleanup" costs do certainly not include all costs to society. But anyway, nuclear is not economical anyway. We are just talking about how much less economical it would be, if properly insured.
where is that cup of tri-lithium when you need it :|
False equivalence.
You are comparing entire power stations with several reactor units to individual units inside coal fired power stations.
Shame on you.
This type of argument one of the reasons why there is such distrust of nuclear power. You are making it worse for the technology that you are advocating.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few....or the one.
Organic plastic, yes; glass light-pipe (old-school, like that used in 1976 Buick Station Wagon instrument lighting): not a problem.
So I looked it up and this is not actually true. That stuff degrades due to radiation exposure, too. But if you dope it with germanium then it can allegedly handle quite high exposure without darkening. So, no recycling the stuff from your Buick (which probably has degraded due to repeated flexing, like the stuff in my 1982 Mercedes) but it's not going to be horribly difficult or expensive to come up with something that can do the job.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This isn't a surprise to anyone. What do you think is contaminating all that water they pump out of the basement? Why do you think you can measure a dose outside near the plant? The evidence overwhelmingly showed it was a meltdown and the fuel escaped the reactor and some has even escaped containment. The latter is the real problem - a better containment design, and they wouldn't have all this contaminated water because it wouldn't leak like it does. Nor would it have contaminated the surrounding town.
Why go inside? Why dont just seal it with concrete?
You missed the "just about".
Even dumbing things down to the max doesn't seem to be enough to avoid misunderstandings here.
We'll yes and no - one could tether the robot with a fiber optic cable. Keep the stuff on the robot pure optical and put the sensors somewhere else away from the neutron radiation.
Well, why can't we externalize Harry Reid costs? By the way, most of those costs you suggest are externalized have already been payed for internally, and the decomissioning fund is healthier than every single union retirement fund in the US. So yes, that's also already been paid for.
Stop lying.
It was an inside job.
I'm describing what happened with TMI and some changes made after the incident.
A major problem was not having any idea what the failure actually was and where it was due to lack of monitoring. That made responding to the failure very difficult.
A typical fertilizer plant of the time had more rigorous monitoring because nukes were relatively new and considered to be very safe. The reactors still running from the 1950s were barely monitored at all so in the warning signs before an accident would have been very difficult to spot making it difficult to avert an accident.
Does that clear things up?
Technically the robots were broiled
Frying: cooking by immersing in hot oil.
Sauteing: cooking by contact with hot oil.
Roasting: cooking a solid food by contact with hot air.
Baking: like roasting, but with a food that turns from a liquid to a solid.
Broiling: cooking by exposure to radiation.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
530 sieverts per hour is an insane level of radiation.
Since 1 Sv = 100 rem, we're talking about 53,000 REM per hour, a level that would indeed kill you dead in under a minute.
For scale and comparison, the average dental x-ray image exposes you to only about 2 or 3 millirem.
So....530 sieverts per hour is like getting ~26,500,000 dental x-rays in an hour.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
it is *inside* the containment
So? That's what the containment is for.
As for the rest of your dramatization: You do understand that the anti-nuke people aren't smart enough to tell the difference between your made-up script and actual news?
False equivalence.
You are comparing entire power stations with several reactor units to individual units inside coal fired power stations.
Shame on you.
Maybe he's comparing radioactivity released in the atmosphere?
Get godzilla to head that way. I'm sure he can tamp it back in the ground.
Slashdot could benefit from adding another negative modifier showing negative intent – in addition to the Troll modifier.
I suggest Misinformation, or FUD, or perhaps FAKE NEWS.
Such a modifier would have been useful for the post above.
You don't know what you're talking about again, Kendall.
You say after posting to an article referring to radiation levels encountered IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE EVENT, not today.
Are you retarded? I didn't say anything about levels at the time, much less in the the sea or in the air. Do you know where ships operate? Hint: It starts with SEA.
The truth is (as the article I posted notes) that CURRENT levels are very low, almost in the range to be able to drink, certainly no danger to ocean life or anyone on the beach. You could literally bathe every day in the output from the plant without harm. Do you deny that? Post a link that denies that FACT.
Or by all means continue to spread your panicky news about an event that in the end was not nearly so bad as it was made out to be. No matter that you come off looking like an idiot, I'm sure in your own mind you are actually smart *rolls eyes*.
I'll let you have the lat word since anti-nuke trolls just LOVE to prove how stupid they are by writing even more to remove all doubt.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Welcome to slashdot, Ray Steverns!
One of many of his "Power Tools" (one of the best songs of all time).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbEwjUtBEXE
And as soon as these winds die down, I'll collect a few power tools and go work on my Cadillac . . .
hawk
"This likely means that the melted fuel burned through its pressure vessel during the meltdown in March of 2011, and is sitting somewhere nearby."
LOL!!!!
Yeah, its sitting nearby alright, half way to china.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
This isn't a surprise to anyone.
Indeed, this is exactly the kind of slimy PR stunt the nuclear industry would pull.
The evidence overwhelmingly showed it was a meltdown and the fuel escaped the reactor and some has even escaped containment.
That's what everyone expected, not what everyone knew. I'm sure we would hear from nukkers claiming there was no evidence of core material being outside the reactor while Tepco was telling us it is contained in the pressure vessel, had anyone made that argument.
M (whose name is Yuichi Okamura, the company spokesman for nuclear power) now tells us “it’s highly possible that melted fuel leaked through".
The latter is the real problem - a better containment design, and they wouldn't have all this contaminated water because it wouldn't leak like it does. Nor would it have contaminated the surrounding town.
The 'real' problem is the nuclear industry flaunts, ignores regulation or just won't pay for improvements to their plants that would prevent accidents like this. This disaster shows us the consequences of running nuclear power in a corporate structure with a for profit motivation. Chernobyl showed us that the same failures come from a government run facility.
That tells us the real problem with nuclear power is the corrupt nature of human beings. Our neocortex might be evolved enough to design a nuclear reactors however our mammalian and reptilian brains certainly aren't evolved enough to run them. Consequently, the real issue for nuclear power is evolutionary lag in the brains of the human beings, not some shiny new reactor design with unknown design basis issues.
Running nuclear power without accident is asking humans to outsmart their own nature, that's the 'real' problem.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
it is *inside* the containment
So? That's what the containment is for.
Did you miss the part where the explosions damaged the containment building and the radio-isotopes are leaking into the ocean. i.e the containment isn't containing
As for the rest of your dramatization: You do understand that the anti-nuke people aren't smart enough to tell the difference between your made-up script and actual news?
You nutty nukkers with your 'US' and 'THEM' attitude. The lies of the nuclear industry are being exposed by their own incompetence and the rest of us have to clean up the mess. It should be people like you who argued ferociously and demeaned everyone one with concerns, the way you are doing now, that should be forced to get in there with shovels and clean up the mess the way you *forced* nuclear power onto us.
Instead we see you abusing the responsibilities of free speech to anonymously criticize and make baseless claims unsupported by evidence. How pathetic.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Global average of $0.20 per kw/h???? Are you serious? Wholesale rates are nowhere near that. Try between 3 and 6 cents.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Well, look at it another way. Every human action carries risk. Standing up from your chair after reading this, and you might get a brain aneurism and die right there. No countermeasure against a risk is perfect. So to be fair, with nuclear it's not about trying to make the risks zero, but to make the risks (translated to dollars) significantly less than the value of the energy created. Now, a 100 billion clean kind of ruins the value proposition for nuclear. In fact this one accident might push the net balance of value (compared to alternatives) for nuclear in Japan all the way into the negative. Or not.
As for "slimy PR stunt", I guess. I'm not going to dispute that the nuclear industry in japan has the same problem that the oil industry in the USA has. The wealthy companies have too much power compared to the regulators who are supposed to oversee them.
Remember, nobody has been killed directly from Fukushima, and probably only a handful of people who were wading in that dirty water in the basement picked up enough of a dose that they have a noticeably higher chance of eventual cancer. Oil industry gets people killed all the time. And the net effect of decades of the oil industry operating is devaluing real estate all over the planet. Fukushima only really contaminated the nearby town and some of the water right off the coast.
All I'm saying is, it doesn't mean nuclear was a bad decision. Remember, just now, 40 years later, are solar panels starting to not suck.
Something that is not economical when insured is not economical when uninsured either, except if it falls exactly into a small range. The thing is just that in the uninsured case the cost is put on society and society does not understand risk-management at all. That is why any technology that can do a lot of damage run uninsured is just complete madness.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Probably not even then, because all the nuclear fuel critically needed for space exploration will have stupidly been burned to make electricity. The sheer level of stupidity is staggering.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I mean if you had stuffed a human inside a clean efficient liberal approved natural gas plant, they could have lived forever in the thousand degree heat. It is only nuclear radiation that is dangerous. No one has ever died at a conventional power plant or fallen off a roof while installing PV cells.
I wonder if they were using CCD's or CMOS for image devices rather than the old school vidicon tube. Plus I wonder if the vidicon would be more robust in a high radiation environment?
Seems like with the state of the US power grid there are potential issues far beyond Fukushima : http://www.matstein.com/blog/400-chernobyls-solar-flares-emp-and-nuclear-armageddon/
At least with Fukushima, they had people trying to get the situation under control. A grid down situation in the US would be pretty grim.
The difference is a risk I take on myself as opposed to a risk that is imposed on me. Nuclear power imposes a risk that only the supporters of nuclear power want to take and supporters of nuclear power see no problem imposing that risk on communities that don't want it.
To be fair there is no net energy return with nuclear power anyway so the energy generated is offset against future generation expending energy to clean up the mess our generation leaves behind.
Well that's not fair either. These people entire community has been obliterated and they have been scattered around Japan where they are treated like an unwanted unfortunate unwelcome presence. The mental health issues alone from this disaster *is* a disaster.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
WAIT. Just fucking wait a while.
We're fucking impatient monkeys in charge of cleanup projects. Almost as bad as when wer're impatient monkeys driving cars.
Yes, seriously: If it's too hot to send robots in then just wait.
Sending shit in which breaks down and obstructs later efforts does no one any favours.
That which is wildly radioactive doesn't spend very long before it becomes a lot less radioactive. The only priority at the moment with Fukushima is to plug any leaks in the vessel. Come back in 20-30 years, as has been done with Three Mile Island and it'll be much easier to deal with.
Around 1500 people _died_ in the evacuations from Fukushima province. Not a single one of those deaths was remotely caused by radiation, but a large number of them were caused by sheer terror of radiation thanks to decades of propaganda depicting melting skin and cancers. That simply doesn't happen unless you're stupid enough to climb into the reactor vessel.
The reality is that for all the hype about what was sprayed around the province, letting everybody stay put would have caused a spike in cancer levels somewhere between 0 and 1% over the normal rates. Instead, the japanese government slashed allowable levels by 90% and as a direct consequence caused panic by declaring areas which were perfectly safe to suddenly become "dangerously radioactive" - thanks to normal background levels that had nothing to do with the reactor breach.
It's about time some of the antinuclear activist groups were hauled into court for causing unnecessary death and suffering by distributing wildly inaccurate propaganda that generated fear and panic. It's also about time we had some sensible public discussion about what is and isn't safe.
Yes, the reactors were badly run. Yes, the executives deserve to be in court - as do the regulators. yes, the company should be on the hook for cleanup costs.
The mishandling of the evacuations can and should be on the heads of the people who went above and beyond what was necessary, after buying into alarmist propaganda.
The raw fact is that as "unsafe" as it is, current nuclear technology is statistically 300,000 times safer than burning coal. Molten salt systems would be a at least a couple of orders better, with significantly lower waste generation and high proliferation resistance (Yes, you can get U233 or Pu238 out, but they're so heavily contaminated with red hot gamma emitters that they're useless for bombmaking without massive centrifuge or gas separatrion setups and unlike natural uranium separation, the radiation is hot enough to kill anyone standing close for more than a couple of minutes)
Ocean acidity has shifted 30% since the dawn of the industrial era. Oceanic oxygen solubility is decreasing slightly. methane hydrates are bubbling out int he arctic ocean - mostly around the Leptav sea, with an increasing risk of a clathrate blowout catastrophe at least as big as the Storegga Slide. It really won't take much of a push to trigger an anoxic oceanic event before the end of this century - and if that happens, rising sea levels will be the least of the problems for the remaining 10-15% of humanity who survive to see it.
Standard human physiological response to decreased oxygen levels is to thicken the blood. That works fine for short periods but leads to congestive heart failure if the stress is maintained - otherwise known as altitude sickness. The only people who'll survive if global oxygen levels decrease markedly (they could go down to 10% or lower if geologic records of past events are any indication) will be the descendants of those who've evolved to live at high altitudes (mostly tibetan/nepalese peoples)
Just wait for the reactor to cool off, then robots can go in safely, just like they're doing at Three Mile Island and just like they're doing at Chernoybl. Meantime consider that if US nuclear plant radiation emission levels were applied at conventional power stations, every single coal plant on the planet would be shut down tomorrow. If japanese standards were applied, so would all the gas and oil burning plants.
Yes, some radioactive bits are leaking into the ocean.
To put it in perspective, the amount of radiative material that's getting out is LESS than you'd find being emitted from the chiminies of a 1000MW coal burning power plant.
Burning coal puts radioactive shit into our atmosphere to the tune of _at least_ six chernobyl-class meltdowns _EACH YEAR_. Yet this is happily ignored by the antinuke protesters because it's inconvenient to acknowledge it.
And yet, that's _nothing_ compared to the amount of radioactive crap carried around in the lungs of each and every smoker on the planet. Shall we treat smokers as toxic radiological waste?
Yes, you can (just) detect radioactive products in the water from Fukushima on the US western Seaboard. In general it's a change from 8 radioactive particles per 10 cubic metres of water to 9 radioactive particles per cubic metres of water. Go and compare them with the levels detectable after the Bikini Atoll tests, or for more recent examples, the 1970s atmospheric tests at Mureroa Atoll. (Hint, they're significantly less and people weren't overly worried about those)
It's about relative risk. Radiation exposure doesn't result in three-eyed fish or cancers. That's chemical toxins - like coal slurry ponds (responsible for the _2_ largest environmental disasters in the USA since 2001). Radiation usually kills cells, and the effects of exposure are either you die if you get a massive dose, or you don't die.
Even the extremely radioactive lungs of a smoker don't cause them to develop cancers. The culprit for that seems to be when the polonium in those lungs breaks down to berylium (which is _extremely_ carginogenic and not at all radioactive)
Radioactives can be detected from a distance and dealt with. Chemical toxins are quiet and things like arsenic are a gift that just keeps on giving. (Depleted Uranium is classified as a radiological hazard. The actual poisoning path is as a toxic heavy metal in the same family as lead. If exposed to weapons-grade plutonium you'll probably die of chemical poisoning long before the radioactivity has any chance to affect you.)
We fear radiation accidents in the same way we fear aircraft crashes despite being hundreds of times more likely to be killed driving to the airport. It's not a rational thing and it pays no attention to hard statistics.
But that irrational fear of the unlikely death frequently causes us to be killed by the more mundane, common hazards - people deciding to drive long distances instead of flying being a classicexample.
1500 people died of stress-related causes in the Fukushima evacuations. The only injuries due to radiation were a couple of minor burns on the ankles of a half dozen staff working in the reactor buildings - and they healed within days.