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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.
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..
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.
Actually, a lot of the resistance against nuclear energy is people who are (rightfully, it turns out) distrustful of the nuclear industry.
Let's face it, we've been fed a diet of PR, if not outright lies from the very start about the risks and costs of nuclear energy. By now, anything that comes out of an industry shill's mouth can be assumed to be untrue by default.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Yeah, all the radioactive waste has short half-lives and by 2016 they'll be able to clean up the mostly harmless waste. [sarc]
Seriously though, Tepco lied and said the reactor cores didn't melt down, so what else have they lied about.
We're told the clean-up is safe and no-one is getting ill. Then we're told the Yakuza are in charge of hiring, they're hiring homeless people and workers rights are being ignored. That doesn't sound like a recipe for safe working conditions to me.
How the Yakuza went nuclear
Atomic mafia: Yakuza âcleans upâ(TM) Fukushima, neglects basic workers' rights â" RT News
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
It's an onion of bullshit opposed by bullshit, though. Nuclear is fundamentally rather cheap and rather clean, using sane designs (not designs where it fucking melts into oblivion if it doesn't have constant active cooling, jesus christ what is wrong with those people), and using reasonable accounting based on rational pollution opportunity cost comparisons.
That is true *fundamentally*. In practice, nuclear has to spend so much on safety as to cause less than 1/100th the deaths of fossil fuels and even then people are still completely terrified over non-events (from a harm to human life standpoint) like Three Mile Island, people talk ominously about half-lives without ever once mentioning phrases like "Love Canal" or "Centralia" as points of comparison, economical designs are opposed by blowhards like Carter, etc.
It's worth focusing on alternatives mostly because there's too much bullshit to cut through, too many misconceptions and assholes protecting their jobs to make nuclear reform realistic. Unfortunately, there's not an ideal drop-in replacement for nuclear, particular not for larger megaproject sizes that could put a serious dent in pollution whilst simultaneously raising capacity and lowering costs in anticipation of the electric automobile revolution. Maybe they could drop a huge geothermal plant in Yellowstone... yeah, I'm sure the Greens would be perfectly OK with that, if it meant stopping global warming.
Yes, but coal is shit and oil is shit and they both kill people all the time. And also cause global warming, contaminate fish with toxic heavy metals, etc.
The argument against shitty nuclear designs is (for the sane and knowledgeable among us) thus more about cost than risk to human life, and since you're talking about already-built stuff then most of the costs are already sunk and if there's no easy migration path you're probably better off simply spending more effort on backup equipment and contingency plans. This is completely ignoring the public relations aspect of nuclear, which I've no idea how to manage and at this point probably isn't fixable.
But yeah, you've fully grasped one side of the coin: "Nuclear experts are full of shit."[1] The other side of the coin is the comparison to alternatives, and speculating how much cheaper nuclear could go if we reduced certain safety measures[2] while still keeping the death toll lower than fossil fuels, which is something virtually no one bothers doing. Nuclear being expensive remains a self-fulfilling prophesy as long as you refuse to take off the blinders.
1. This is true of most experts, but particularly experts in controversial or highly politicized fields who have grown insular, defensive and/or polarized over time.
2. Not relaxing the safety measures to prevent catastrophic "everything is now fucked" incidents like Fukushima so much as allowable radionuclide release during normal operation, perhaps allowable radiation exposure levels adjusted to end up being as dangerous as working in a coal mine, etc. Also, there's some common sense shit like designing reactors and sites that can store all of their waste on-site that no one seems to be talking about, but is perfectly doable in principle and would at the very least least nerf one very common complaint.