Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Its Reactors' Melted Uranium Fuel (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo: Earlier this year, remotely piloted robots transmitted what officials believe was a direct view of melted radioactive fuel inside Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant's destroyed reactors [YouTube] -- a major discovery, but one that took a long and painful six years to achieve... Japanese officials are now hoping that they can convince a skeptical public that the worst of the disaster is over, the New York Times reported, but it's not clear whether it's too late despite the deployment of 7,000 workers and massive resources to return the region to something approaching normal.

Per the Times, officials admit the recovery plan -- involving the complete destruction of the plant, rather than simply building a concrete sarcophagus around it as the Russians did in Chernobyl -- will take decades and tens of billions of dollars. Currently, Tepco plans to begin removing waste from one of the three contaminated reactors at the plant by 2021, "though they have yet to choose which one"... Currently, radiation levels are so high in the ruined facility that it fries robots sent in within a matter of hours, which will necessitate developing a new generation of droids with even higher radiation tolerances.
Friday a group of Japanese businesses and doctors sued General Electric of behalf of 150,000 Japanese citizens, saying their designs for the Fukushima reactors were reckless and negligent.

Comments

Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[jez9999]

I always like to remind people that this thing was older than Chernobyl. This was NOT a modern nuke plant with decent safety features that went meltdown. There is no comparison.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[interkin3tic]

Holy cow, I thought you were trolling! Thank you!

Re: Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

I just did a quick calculation, and the doses those robots are being exposed to would kill a human in about a minute.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

I like to remind people that practically all nuke plants are old and don't have decent safety standards, and that it will always be this way because nobody likes to decommission an expensive nuclear power plant if it can be kept online just a little bit longer. Hence Fukushima.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[AmiMoJo]

Why was it not upgraded or decommissioned when the flaws became known? The manufacturer said it was okay to keep it running. The regulator said it was okay. It wasn't.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[93 Escort Wagon]

Which is another good example of why we need effective government oversight, and regulatory agencies with actual enforcement power - despite it being trendy in some circles to claim things would be better if only the government would get out of the way.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[iggymanz]

I like to remind people that 23 of the same stupid GE Mark I reactor design are in use in the USA

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[b0s0z0ku]

Even so -- it melted down. It didn't catch fire and burn for weeks like Chernobyl, because GE designers weren't insane enough to put graphite in close proximity to superheated steam. C + H2O -> H2 + CO

Chernobyl was actually an older class of reactor, even though it wasn't physically older than Fukushima. Based on 1940s plutonium production reactors (and likely, a secondary design consideration was production of plutonium from natural uranium), not really a civilian design.

The Chernobyl design has a few advantages like ability to be refueled while in use (each fuel element had its own steam/water tube that could be isolated) and ability to run on unenriched uranium. But those were outweighed by the disadvantages of the basic design, lack of containment, and poor execution (control rods that increased power when first inserted due to poor design!).

Interestingly, reactors with the same design as the failed Chernobyl plant are still running in Russia proper, though the plants in the former republics and satellite countries have been shut down.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[b0s0z0ku]

The design wasn't terrible -- placing it and its backup generators in a tsunami zone was the terrible part.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Waffle Iron]

Indeed, no true Scotsman would ever run this kind of reactor.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[boudie2]

The following 23 U.S. plants have GE boiling-water reactors (GE models 2, 3 or 4) with the same Mark I containment design used at Fukushima, according to the NRC online database:
Browns Ferry 1, Athens, Ala., operating license since 1973, reactor type GE 4
Browns Ferry 2, Athens, Ala., 1974, GE 4
Browns Ferry 3, Athens, Ala., 1976, GE 4
Brunswick 1, Southport, N.C, 1976, GE 4.
Brunswick 2, Southport, N.C., 1974, GE 4.
Cooper, Brownville, Neb., 1974, GE 4.
Dresden 2, Morris, Ill., 1970, GE 3.
Dresden 3, Morris, Ill., 1971, GE 3.
Duane Arnold, Palo, Iowa, 1974, GE 4.
Fermi 2, Monroe, Mich., 1985, GE 4.
FitzPatrick, Scriba, N.Y., 1974, GE 4.
Hatch 1, Baxley, Ga., 1974, GE 4.
Hatch 2, Baxley, Ga., 1978, GE 4.
Hope Creek, Hancock's Bridge, N.J. 1986, GE 4
. Monticello, Monticello, Minn., 1970, GE 3.
Nine Mile Point 1, Scriba, N.Y., 1969, GE 2.
Oyster Creek, Forked River, N.J., 1969, GE 2.
Peach Bottom 2, Delta, Pa., 1973, GE 4.
Peach Bottom 3, Delta, Pa., 1974, GE 4.
Pilgrim, Plymouth, Mass., 1972, GE 3.
Quad Cities 1, Cordova, Ill., 1972, GE 3.
Quad Cities 2, Moline, Ill., 1972, GE 3.
Vermont Yankee, Vernon, Vt., 1972, GE 4.
This was from five years ago. Didn't check to see how many ar still operational but they're definitely old.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[iggymanz]

design IS terrible, billed as not needing containment building which is the real issue. sure another reactor facility could have failed if put in same place, but would have proper containment. that stupid design was the problem

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong, moron. The design IS TERRIBLE and vastly outdated.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[b0s0z0ku]

BWR Mk. I reactors have a containment.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[franzrogar]

Despite being old, as you clearly states, you must agree that it was MUCH better designed than Chernobyl.

It suffered an earthquake and a tsunami and it was "properly" (mind the quotes) contained, nothing like Chernobyl.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[iggymanz]

yes, a containment *vessel* and it failed 3 out of 3 times in Fukushima, because the design including that vessel is stupid.

Again, no containment building + stupid design = disaster.

Re: Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

Or turn them into a superhero.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[farrellj]

Practically all *American* designs are old, and don't have good safety standards. On the other hand the CANDU reactor design is *very* safe, and this has been proven time and again.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[hainesbridge]

And you know this how? Have you ever been to a BWR site? Have you ever taken any courses in BWR technology? Do you know anything at all about the FLEX and SAFER programs? Can you explain how 10 CFR 50 is structured and it's applicability (assuming you're in the U.S.)? Or are you just yammering about things for which you have no direct knowledge, but since it is on-line and no one knows who you are, you feel empowered to call other people morons?

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[thegarbz]

Indeed, no true Scotsman would ever run this kind of reactor.

That's not a no true Scotsman fallacy. You just wouldn't build a reactor like this anymore period. It wouldn't pass any government regulators, IAEA regulations, or any hazard analysis. The only reason these shitty old things are still running at all is because the entire industry was hamstrung into being unable to modernise by greeny psychopaths.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

Your a moron.

Re: Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Type44Q]

And every one of them is west of the Rockies...

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

9 out of 10 Nuclear Engineers agree. The 10th would, but is currently suffering the effects of radiation poisoning from operating one of these reactors.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[hey!]

Old it may be, but to this day a number of reactors similar to the GE model that melted down continue to be run around the world and in the US. In fact there's one not far from where I live: the Pilgrim Nuclear Power station has the same GE BWR-3 with Mark 1 containment as Fukushima Daichi 1.

Chernobyl's vintage is neither here nor there; it is an entirely different Soviet design in a completely different design lineage.

But where both Fukushima and Chernobyl are relevant is the role that managerial misconduct and operational error played in the disaster. It is not the technology of early reactors that concerns me so much as the capacity of organizations to run such things responsibly.

Re: Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[boudie2]

Er, east of the Rockies ... most are east of the Mississippi.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Solandri]

The nuclear parts of the plant itself survived both the earthquake and tsunami just fine even though both events were well beyond the plant's design specifications.

The failure was loss of power to run the plant's cooling systems. Basically, the tsunami swamped the backup power generators and contaminated the diesel fuel reserves for the generators. The destruction of the surrounding roads prevented new generators and fuel from being brought in in a timely manner. And when they eventually did arrive, workers discovered the power couplings for the trucks were different from the ones the plant used, and they had to gerry-rig a connector. All of this took critical time which could've mitigated the severity of the accident. This wasn't an explosion like Chernobyl, it was a gradual event as the cooling water slowly evaporated allowing the fuel rods to melt.

A single diesel generator situated on higher ground with an independent fuel source could've prevented the entire accident. Instead, in stereotypical Japanese fashion, they placed all the generators in a neat row right next to each other in the basement, where the tsunami swamped all of them simultaneously. See, the thing about redundant backup systems (e.g. multiple generators in case some do not function) is that they have to be different to be redundant. If they're the same model, in the same location, using the same fuel source, then any single event which affects one generator will affect all the generators, defeating their redundancy. In fact the two newer reactors at Fukushima on higher ground were just fine because their generators and fuel supply worked as intended. They just didn't have a really long extension cord to reach from those generators to the problem reactors. Basically the failure at Fukushima was the same as when you store your backup drive next to your computer (although the consequences were much more severe). If your house burns down or you're burglarized, both your computer's main drive and your backup drive will be lost. Because you're storing both in the same location, the redundancy of a second copy is defeated by any event which affects that entire location.

Fukushima wasn't a failure of nuclear power. It was a failure of backup (non)redundancy which had nuclear consequences. Basically, because of unwarranted paranoia about nuclear power, everyone concentrated on going over the nuclear parts of the plant with a fine-toothed comb to make sure it was safe. As a result, the non-nuclear backup systems didn't get enough scrutiny, and that's what failed.

It's like airliner safety. Air travel is already far safer than other modes of transport. But because any airplane crash gets disproportionate news coverage, we spend billions of dollars trying to reduce the couple hundred airliner deaths per year even further. Meanwhile the tens of thousands of people dying each year in car accidents gets very little attention. Even including the estimated future cancer deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power is still the safest power source we've invented (yes, safer than wind and solar based on both on deaths and lost man-days per unit of electricity generated).

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

A pit installation for generators along a coast is insane.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed the point. Sometimes a problem can become an opportunity. What they, the Japanese researchers learn about radiation hardened robots (think solidified carbon gas, an article on Slashdot a decade ago) will be a good tool to sell.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Mashiki]

It was upgraded, several times. There were also upgrades in the pipes for other things relating to safety. The earthquake hit *before* that happened. Don't forget that anything nuclear related is a hot-topic in Japan which has a very active and aggressive anti-nuke circle of environmentalism. NIMBYism and lawsuits hampered a lot of what was going on, that doesn't absolve TEPCO of liability, but sometimes people are their own worst enemy. Let's look at a different situation, in a different country like Canada. Where an in-land research and medical reactor that supplies 75% of the cobalt-60 and 50% of the technetium-99m used in nuclear medicine(worldwide) is nearing 70 years old, there's been a replacement reactor in the line for 25 years based on a new generation of CANDU series reactors instead of the old MAPLE reactors, and it was supposed to be done over a decade ago. Much safer, with redundant no-operator shutdown systems. Multiple lawsuits, multiple environmental impact studies, multiple anti-nuke NIMBY protests and on and on, and on.

That replacement reactor still isn't online FYI. Chalk River has been in operation for 68 years. Next year it's supposed to be shutdown, but will likely be granted a waiver because the new reactor still hasn't been completed and the demand for medical isotopes is increasing. And there is zero capacity for production anywhere else.

And before someone says "but you don't live near a reactor" or some other bullshit. Let me say that I live a stones throw from Bruce Nuclear, on the east-wind side. Topping out at nearly 6400MW? It's not small, rather it's the 2nd largest in the world.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[AmiMoJo]

The nuclear parts of the plant itself survived both the earthquake and tsunami just fine even though both events were well beyond the plant's design specifications.

That is incorrect. The plumbing for the cooling system was damaged by the earthquake. The tsunami damage made it impossible to check it in the aftermath, and the fault went unnoticed until it was too late.

That fault, specifically a key valve stuck in the wrong position, meant that the water that was pumped in to cool the reactors from fire engines was diverted to storage tanks. If it had reached the reactors then the explosions and meltdowns might have been avoided.

Fukushima wasn't a failure of nuclear power. It was a failure of backup (non)redundancy which had nuclear consequences.

To two are inseparable and for all intents and purposes one and the same.

But because any airplane crash gets disproportionate news coverage, we spend billions of dollars trying to reduce the couple hundred airliner deaths per year even further.

Is it that, or is it because the potential consequences of a disaster, like an aircraft going down over a city, are very serious? Also, the cost is relatively small compared to the profitability of running an airline. The main issues they have are fuel/pollution, noise and airport capacity. Safety costs come pretty far down the list.

Re: Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[CustomBuild]

Sure about that?

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Waffle Iron]

No matter what issue is raised with any nuclear reactor technology, somebody on this site pops up to say that would never happen if we only used reactors with some different element as fuel, some different physical layout, some different size, some different cooling scheme, yada, yada, yada.

Or they'll blame lack of progress on the "greens".

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[ChumpusRex2003]

The BWR 1 containment is a small containment. The small volume has the advantage of smaller diameters, hence supposedly the hoop stress should be smaller under hydrostatic load, making it relatively material efficient and easy to build. However, this was a very early design, and when the Mk3 containment was being designed, more robust analytic techniques revealed some significant concerns in the overall containment strength. In the US, the BWR operators formed a consortium to investigate and mitigate these problems, which they subsequently incorporated into their plants. In turn, this led to a number of lawsuits against GE as the cost of the upgrades were substantial.

Additionally, the small containment volume and small volume of in-containment water to act as thermal mass gives very poor performance against prolonged, simultaneous failure of containment cooling, and failure of reactor cooling, resulting in heat being dumped into containment. Prolonged total electrical failure was not anticipated at design time, and led to exactly this situation at all 3 fukushima plants. This led to rapid rupture of the containments once reactor cooling was lost. The latest designs of reactor in construction at present have containment volumes approaching 10x that of the BWR1 containment, as a result, pressure rises in accidents would be substantially lower and slower.

This risk was recognised by the manufacturer and the NRC (in their document NUREG-1150), and in 1987, the NRC published a circular to all BWR plants in the US, giving instructions to plant operators, that if reactor cooling is threatened, the plant operators should initiate containment venting as a matter of the highest priority; this would result in a controlled filtered release, but prevent containment rupture and long-term uncontrolled release.

In Japan, this risk was not acted upon. Whether it was communicated by the manufacturer to the government is not public. However, the TEPCO management had a policy where reactor operators were not authorized to initiate containment venting on their own, and required direct authority from senior management. Due to difficulties in communication, it took hours before the request was acted upon. At that point, rather than authorize venting, senior management decided to refer the matter to the government. Logs from the plants show that in all 3 cases, containment pressure dropped substantially before venting was finally authorized, indicating that the containments had ruptured during the delay for authorization.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[AmiMoJo]

Which proposal specifically are you talking about? From what I can tell the delays have been mostly due to expensive accidents at other plants needing to be understood and mitigated, not to mention changing the economics of the new plant each time.

Economics are what has killed off the nuclear renascence. Renewable energy got cheap really fast, nuclear just gets more expensive as new failure modes are found, and the promises of new designs and things like thorium don't pan out.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Mashiki]

Renewables didn't get cheap really fast in North America. The price per kWh is still double to quadruple(market cost to break even is $0.20-0.83kWh) the rate that a nuclear reactor here has for the "refueling and refitting" cost in it's last 10 years of production life(around $0.08kWh). The only 3 power production methods that are cheaper are hydro-electric(0.04kWh), natural gas(0.05kWh) and coal(0.03kWh). In North America, it's cheaper to build a dam, flood huge tracts of land, and be profitable in less than a decade, then it to build windmills in the mountain passes.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[93 Escort Wagon]

You’re aware that this discussion isn’t about an American reactor... right?

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is another good example of why we need effective government oversight, and regulatory agencies with actual enforcement power - despite it being trendy in some circles to claim things would be better if only the government would get out of the way.

Agreed.

There may be a better term, but of late I've kind of boiled it down to something akin to a false religion, although perhaps not in how the term is ordinarily used. People have been indoctrinated in beliefs that can be largely or completely dis-proven by science or simple data. They filter all their responses through these beliefs, and facts that disagree with those beliefs are simply filtered out. I suppose another term is willful blindness, but to me it still seems like some strange and twisted form of faith. I'm not against faith, I just don't think we should look to our faith for answers to questions better answered by well science, data, and simple observation.

It is all over and represents such a stack of issues. The "faith" in tax cuts. The "faith" that climate change is fiction. The "faith" that Roy Moore is a godly man, despite all evidence to the contrary. The "faith" that there is some kind of persecution of white people that must be addressed. People believe this stuff and their beliefs often don't square with reality. They belief that by not allowing new nuclear plants they are safer, while the truth is that the older plants are just forced to run longer and keep getting band aid fixes. A very common false believe is to believe that the horrible thing on the news is likely to affect them, but the odds are usually tiny.

I don't have a solution for this, beyond a better educated society that values lifelong learning in all things. People need to doubt and to question. Truth is seldom as simple as a sound bite.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[MrKaos]

Fukushima wasn't a failure of nuclear power. It was a failure of backup (non)redundancy which had nuclear consequences. Basically, because of unwarranted paranoia about nuclear power, everyone concentrated on going over the nuclear parts of the plant with a fine-toothed comb to make sure it was safe. As a result, the non-nuclear backup systems didn't get enough scrutiny, and that's what failed.

If you read The Official Report you will find that it was a belief system that nuclear power was a safe high tech energy source that appropriate upgrades weren't performed to the installation due to collusion between the Operator (TEPCO) and the regulator (NISA and NSA).

This shows the dangers of dogmatic skepticism, social proof and imposing a idealistic belief system onto the nuclear industry.

The Fukushima accident shows that the nuclear industry learned nothing from the Chernobyl accident, which is also a conclusion made by the report.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[blindseer]

Nobody likes to decommission an operating nuclear power plant because they know it will be difficult to replace it once shut down.

As it is now the USA has about 1000 GW of electrical generation capacity, and demand is growing (slowly). A single nuclear reactor will produce about 1 GW of power. No big deal, right? So what if we shut one down? Well, that might be true but there are about 100 nuclear power reactors in the USA, we can't shut them ALL down or the lights go out. Due to the near 24/7 operation of these reactors they have a much larger impact on the grid than just the generation capacity alone might indicate. Even though the generation capacity is 10% of the total they produce 20% of the electricity we use.

Shutting down 2 GW of nuclear capacity is like shutting down 3 GW of coal, 5 GW of natural gas, 7 GW of wind, or 8 GW of solar. If we start to shut down nuclear reactors, and with no new reactor in it's place, that means a lot of windmills need to be erected. That's ignoring the difference between base load nuclear to unreliable wind and solar. We can manage base load nuclear pretty well on a daily and seasonal scale with a few pumped hydro storage dams like the Tennessee Valley Authority does at Raccoon Mountain. Managing this on a hour or minute scale like wind and solar, is a quite different problem. This would be a very expensive problem.

If we want to shut down old nuclear we need to build new nuclear. Anything else means lots of natural gas getting burned, very expensive unreliable energy from wind and solar, or rolling blackouts.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[b0s0z0ku]

American design, by good old GE...

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[blindseer]

CANDU does not describe a single reactor, or single reactor design. There are hundreds of CANDU and CANDU-derived reactors in the world and all built 2 or 3 at a time, meaning dozens of variations on this theme.

They are safe designs, and I'm not disputing that. I'm saying that we can't say CANDU is any more or less safe than an American reactor unless we narrow that down some.

This safety of CANDU comes at a cost. They use heavy water which adds to the capital cost, that initial charge of heavy water is very expensive for needing so much. Later CANDU reactors reduce the need for so much heavy water by using light water in some loops. Using light water means that these CANDU reactors cannot use natural uranium any more, they must use enriched fuel. Needing enriched fuel means losing the inherent safety factor of natural uranium.

I believe the use of heavy water by Canada was more of a political choice than that of safety. Canada no doubt did not want to rely on a foreign nation (even one as friendly to them as the USA) for it's fuel and did not want the political ramifications of operating their own enrichment facilities. Something has changed in that calculus since it appears they've abandoned the natural uranium reactors for the future.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Altrag]

Americans have plenty of new designs as well. The problem is the existing reactors that were supposed to be decommissioned 20 years ago but just get continually retrofitted instead because money >> lives or the environment.

Re: Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[LesFerg]

Yeah, forget about combat robot competitions, this is a whole new challenge.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[blindseer]

Or they'll blame lack of progress on the "greens".

That seems like blame that is well placed. Or have the "greens" changed their minds and support new nuclear power construction now? I do know such exist, I'm pretty sure they are still rare.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Altrag]

Yeah, what were those bastards thinking! They should have been able to foresee and use 60 years of future reactor technology development to ensure plants still operating 20 years after their designed lifespan don't have problems!

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Altrag]

Which is why much of the development in nuclear reactor technology has focused on physics-based shutdown modes rather than relying on human or even mechanical intervention when something goes wrong.

But none of that helps existing reactors that are still using previous generation technology too much.. and yeah, human error is a huge ongoing concern with those. I'm sure people are a lot more cautious in the wake of Fukushima, and will be as long a Fukushima keeps popping up in the news once in a while.. but after that dies down, there's a good chance laziness and greed will start taking over again until another disaster strikes and we rinse and repeat until the last of these ancient reactors is finally offline -- one way or another.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[blindseer]

They would have been replaced 20 years ago if the federal government would just issue licenses to build new reactors. I recall reading how a single reactor was held up in getting it's license issued for more than 40 years. FORTY YEARS !!!!!

We can get a natural gas power plant approved in a week, a new hydro dam in a couple years, but it takes a decade to get a nuclear power plant approved. This is not acceptable and we should no longer accept it. We should see these plants get approved in months, not years. Perhaps even approvals granted in weeks if using a standardized proven design.

There are about 100 operating nuclear power reactors in the USA. If we want to see them all replaced in 10 years then we'd need to see a new nuclear power reactor license issued nearly once every month. If we want to do it in 3 years, then that's 3 every month. I guess President Trump better get going on that, he's got about 3 years left before the end of his term.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Mkkby]

They didn't mention the stored fuel pools. The region is still in grave danger until they get the stored fuel to higher ground. This is many times the amount of material as the cores, and it's not well contained.

Another quake/tsunami can happen at any time. Six years is already a lot of risk taken. Are they going to take decades for this too?

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[dgatwood]

No matter what issue is raised with any nuclear reactor technology, somebody on this site pops up to say that would never happen if we only used reactors with some different element as fuel, some different physical layout, some different size, some different cooling scheme, yada, yada, yada.

That's because they're almost always right. Whenever a problem is identified in a nuclear reactor design, manufacturers work to update the designs so that future power plants won't exhibit those problems. As a result, the known flaws in existing reactors have been solved in new designs, and the only thing standing in the way of replacing all those old reactors with reactors based on newer, safer designs are NIMBY pseudo-environmentalists who have somehow convinced themselves that if they prevent new nuclear generators from being built, the need for base load will somehow magically go away.

Re: Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

The worst thing that could happen for you is if they actually put her in jail, because then you wouldn't have "what about Hillary?" to trot out instead of doing what you should be and worrying about your own Nutcase in Chief.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Paradise Pete]

This safety of CANDU comes at a cost.

Seems like money well spent.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but it was an American designed reactor.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Jeremi]

Yeah, what were those bastards thinking! They should have been able to foresee and use 60 years of future reactor technology development to ensure plants still operating 20 years after their designed lifespan don't have problems!

The above pretty much sums up the fatal flaw of nuclear power -- a nuclear plant must function reliably for decades and sequester its nuclear byproducts for centuries. Human designers simply aren't up to the task of planning that far into the future, hence even the best-designed reactors sometimes fail due to unforeseen circumstances. That's true of every other technology as well, of course, but in most other technologies the costs of an occasional failure are acceptable.

Re: Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, it's the safety changes, not the 8,000 lawsuits about bullshit and the decades of red tape. Good to know.

No, you're just a lying sack of shit.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[hcs_$reboot]

I always like to remind people that Fukushima is located in an earthquake friendly zone, near a subduction zone, facing the pacific ocean where it's prone to tsunamis that might be huge.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[angel'o'sphere]

The plants in Chernobyl and Fukushima are completely different designs and based on completely different technologies.
It does not matter which one is/was older.

This was NOT a modern nuke plant with decent safety features that went meltdown.
That is completely irrelevant. Fukushima melted down because it hat no cooling, due to misplaced emergency power generators. It bottom line had nothing to do at all with the design of the plant itself.

However it is astonishing that they where not able to bring a ship in front of it and supply emergency power from that ship.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Xylantiel]

Fukushima wasn't dangerous because it was old. That's just dumb. It was dangerous because the operator, TEPCO, didn't re-site the backup generators to higher ground or raise the seawall when the regulator told them to. And, as another poster here points out, their protocol for (not) venting was just dangerous. If the operator had done any of these things the way they were supposed to, the accident would not have happened, despite basically the worst possible tsunami disaster, though there might have been a minor release of radiation if venting was necessary. I hope nobody listens to you when you "remind" them of the things you say because you don't know what you are talking about.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[angel'o'sphere]

That's ignoring the difference between base load nuclear to unreliable wind and solar.
You still don't know what base load actually means but continue to torture us with your rants.
Hint: the axis of "base load" to "peak load" and the axis of "undispatchable (unreliable is simply wrong)" versus dispatchable are two axises that don't even cut each other and don't form a coordinate system.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[angel'o'sphere]

No, they only needed to put the walls high enough.

Every coast is a Tsunami region, even if they are more common in some areas and less common in others.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Maxo-Texas]

There's one in florida which has only 20' high generators in a concrete bunker. Waves have exceeded that height (storm surge hasn't) within 60 miles of that site but nothing's being done to change it.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[angel'o'sphere]

though both events were well beyond the plant's design specifications.
No they where not.
The plant is designed for a 6.5 quake or something. And that is exactly what happened at the plant site, probably weaker. The 9.3 quake was 450miles away!

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[angel'o'sphere]

The plumbing for the cooling system was damaged by the earthquake.
That is incorrect, too :D
There are pipe damages ... no idea which.

Main problem was: no power. The plant relied on power from the grid. But the grid was gone as the earthquake destroyed the masts of the power grids.

So it relied on the emergency power generators, which were flooded by the tsunami.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Xylantiel]

No, this shows the dangers of regulators and operators prioritizing their own benefit over public safety. (That is stated multiple times in that report.) That report finds things almost entirely related to corruption and dysfunction in Japan's nuclear industry and regulation: "NISA (the regulator) did instruct TEPCO to conduct an anti-seismic backcheck, but by not completing the backcheck as originally scheduled, TEPCO effectively invited the accident that followed." The regulator should have put TEPCO out of business long ago, but that doesn't change the fact that the greedy bastards at TEPCO ignored their responsibilities to public safety to make more money.

The actual quote from the report is:

This conceit was reinforced by the collective mindset of Japanese bureaucracy, by which the first duty of any individual bureaucrat is to defend the interests of his organization. Carried to an extreme, this led bureaucrats to put organizational interests ahead of their paramount duty to protect public safety.

Only by grasping this mindset can one understand how Japan’s nuclear industry managed to avoid absorbing the critical lessons learned from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl; and how it became accepted practice to resist regulatory pressure and cover up small-scale accidents. It was this mindset that led to the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant.

Specifically, your broadening from "Japan's nuclear industry" to the world's nuclear industry is inappropriate and misleading.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[blindseer]

undispatchable (unreliable is simply wrong)

I know that English is not your first language but what else do you call an energy source that you cannot rely upon to be there when you need it? That's unreliable. Calling it "undispatchable" is just happy mouth noises trying to cover up that it cannot keep the traffic lights running at night.

The word "undispatchable" shows up as a non-word in three of the spell checkers I've tried. A more appropriate word might be "intermittent" which is also just happy mouth noises that mean the same as unreliable.

I heard a power engineering student refer to unreliable energy like solar and wind as "negative loads". That makes sense from a power plant operator perspective. Before this person is effectively two things, a meter showing the load and a lever to control the output of this "dispatchable" power plant. As the load goes up the lever for output gets pushed up. Since solar and wind is not something the power plant operator can control it just shows up on the equation to be balanced as a negative load.

Oh, and "dispatchable" shows up as a non-word on my spell check too, so that could just mean my electronic dictionary needs an update. It could also mean I should use words like "reliable", "controllable", or something else instead.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[rl117]

All the Scottish power reactors have graphite cores, actually. They are CO2-cooled graphite-moderated AGRs, a much safer design than BWRs.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[AmiMoJo]

They had emergency power on site, in the form of batteries and mobile generators, fairly quickly. They had emergency pumps (fire engines) on site quickly too, certainly in time to stop the disaster. They failed to work because of earthquake/tsunami damage.

Re: Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Reverend Green]

Or just mandate that nuclear power stations be fully insured against meltdown etc on the private insurance market. Which would make then instantly uneconomic to operate, if they could even find an insurer willing to take on such insane risk.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

>Fukushima wasn't a failure of nuclear power. It was a failure of backup (non)redundancy which had nuclear consequences.

Cancer didn't kill him! It was just a failure of his organs when surrounded by cancerous cells.

Re: Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

Donald Trump kicked my dog while Vladimir Putin egged him on! I saw it with my own eyes!!!

Re: Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Reverend Green]

Let me get this straight... You're posting on the internet, but you're using a spell checker instead of Google to look up a technical term? Let me guess - you drive for Uber, but use a paper map for navigation?

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[AmiMoJo]

the only thing standing in the way of replacing all those old reactors with reactors based on newer, safer designs are NIMBY pseudo-environmentalists

Really, it has nothing to do with the huge cost of writing off those older reactors and decommissioning them, and then building brand new ones?

To give you an idea, the new nuclear plant at Hinkly in the UK is the most expensive object on earth. They couldn't find anyone interested in building it until they offered unprecedented subsidies for its entire lifetime, and even then it wasn't until the Chinese decided to invest that it went ahead. During that time, environmental protests were almost non-existent and there were no environmental lawsuits, not least because it is being build on the site of an existing plant (which is also cheaper because it has infrastructure in place).

I think you will find the problem is economics, not opposition from environmentalists.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the disaster would have been averted easily. It could occur, because someone didn't think about every possibility. This is exactly the reason that nuclear energy is not safe enough. You include every possibility you can think of in your model. Then you can calculate that the probability of disaster in 30 years 0.001%. You judge that you take the risk, even though the cost of disaster is 100B$. But you did not account for everything you didn't think about, because it's outside your model. Then in reality you have only a 99% chance (which only god knows exactly).

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Barsteward]

have you not heard of battery storage attached to solar and wind energy production that the plant operator can control? It can feed the grid quicker than any plant that needs powering up to to cover peaks.

Re: Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[blindseer]

I used Google as one of my spell checkers. I thought it'd be easier to lump that in with my browser internal spell checker and the dictionary app included with Mac OSX. Google "auto corrects" that with "non-dispatchable", BTW, so let's go with that instead. It still makes my browser highlight it as a misspelling but it at least doesn't make my head hurt to read it.

Since you made me doubt myself and go back to Google I'll discuss what I found clicking on some of the links. We seem to agree on what defines dispatchable power. With non-dispatchable I'll see some that call this only reliable power sources like coal and nuclear. That would mean wind and solar would be defined as intermittent. If wind, solar, coal, and nuclear are lumped together as non-dispatchable then the distinction is made between base power and intermittent power.

So, there seems to be two camps that divide the power sources differently. Those that define two groups, dispatchable and non-dispatchable, they still separate non-dispatchable into base and intermittent. Those that define three main groups do away with "non-dispatchable" and group power into dispatchable, base, and intermittent. Perhaps some of this distinction comes from the idea that "dispatchable" means it can be managed on a fine gradient. This leave "non-dispatchable" meaning if the power is there then it must be taken.

Nuclear power is sometimes considered neither dispatchable nor non-dispatchable as it cannot be given fine control but it can be refused. Refusing to take nuclear power can be for many reasons, including economic, physical, and legal. In Germany they are sometimes forced to refuse nuclear power as the law defines solar and wind as "non-dispatchable" and therefore must be bought at the price defined by law even if cheaper nuclear is available. Nuclear can be considered non-dispatchable as it is very inexpensive. Output can be changed but changing output suddenly, up or down, causes physical stresses and may involve penalties by some regulator for imposing such stresses or forcing the purchase of more expensive power. Changing output back to where it was quickly may be impossible physically due to the build up of elements in the reactor, as well as the stress it can cause on the reactor. This may simply mean that nuclear is "non-dispatchable" not that it can't be refused but that it won't.

What it comes down to, by my understanding, is that defining wind and solar as non-dispatchable can only be due to legal reasons. In many cases wind and solar will in fact be more expensive than natural gas but the utility cannot refuse or "dispatch" this power legally. The non-dispatchable nature may exist solely in law not due to economic pressure or physical limitation like what often happens with nuclear power.

What some may not realize is that by refusing or "dispatching" nuclear power the costs to the nuclear power plant now increase. They are still paying for rent, insurance, staff, and so on, but they can't sell. So when they do have the chance to sell power their spot energy prices just went up.

No wonder Germany's electricity prices are so high, they are forced to pay for the expensive wind and solar and then also pay the nuclear power engineers and technicians to sit on their hands with an idle plant until the wind stops and the sun doesn't shine.

A bit from the Wall Street Journal (via non-paywalled site) on the electricity crisis in Germany:
https://www.thegwpf.com/german...

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[thegarbz]

No matter what issue is raised with any nuclear reactor technology, somebody on this site pops up to say that would never happen if we only used reactors with some different element as fuel, some different physical layout, some different size, some different cooling scheme, yada, yada, yada.

Well yes that's kind of how logic and technical progress works. We do the same thing for everything we have developed as a species. Every single piece of technology that had some inherent risk has had that risk reduced through technical progress over the past 50 years. Cars are safer, planes are safer, ships are safer, houses are safer, oil refineries, chemical plants, and the key one: Nuclear reactors are safer.

The only thing that sets nuclear apart from the rest of our specie's progress is that for everything else we have adopted the newer modern technology, modern designs, and slowly phased out old ones. It's why you can't buy a car without seatbelts. It's why airbags and ABS are standard. It's why commerical buildings need fire doors and fire proofing.

The only outlier is nuclear. So whatever happens with the existing nuclear plants, the answer IS the same, it wouldn't happen on a modern design, and the lack of progress is fundamentally due to a scare campaign by the greens. That is just what happened to the industry. You can close your eyes, plug your ears, and shout la la la all you want, but the people who give this reply on Slashdot will continue to rightfully do so.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[nojayuk]

Who's going to pay for this battery storage? It costs money on top of the cost of the solar and wind installations (typical costs are $200 million per GWHr of storage). Fuel-derived power stations such as nuclear and fossil carbon (oil, gas, coal) don't need batteries or other storage such as pumped hydro. They can meet instantaneous demand if there are enough generating plants to cover the peaks. Wind/solar plus battery might not last long enough if the weather conditions cause problems and they need to be built out beyond instantaneous demand requirements to recharge the expensive battery systems for the bad times. This costs a lot more too.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

in stereotypical Japanese fashion, they placed all the generators in a neat row right next to each other

You'd think they'd have learned something from the U.S. in Pearl Harbor!

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[MrKaos]

your broadening from "Japan's nuclear industry" to the world's nuclear industry

Yes, I did. I should avoid posting before breakfast while attempting to recall a report I read four or more years ago.

Correction: The Fukushima accident shows the Nuclear Industry learned nothing from the Chernobyl accident.

My statement, not the reports, that was the conclusion I came to when I saw the Fukushima reactors exploding, I stand by it.

is inappropriate and misleading.

Well, you've got your opinion and I've got mine.

I hope you found the report enlightening, thanks for pointing that out.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[nojayuk]

Reactors built in the 1970s have all been upgraded and improved during rebuilds, inspections etc. They all have digital controls, better pumps, new valvegear, improved safety equipment etc. Cost is no object for these upgrades, pretty much.

The dreaded car analogy -- existing 1970s reactors are like a Ferrari built in the 1970s but it's been fitted with anti-lock brakes, modern tyres, the engine's been retrofitted with an emission control computer and fuel injection, the passenger compartment has been strengthened and fitted with airbags etc. etc. From the outside it still looks like a 1970s deathtrap, in reality it's similar to a 2000-series modern design. It's not got all of the goodies like proper crumple zones in the bodyshell but generally it's a lot safer than the original design. It's one of the reasons nuclear power plants are at the bottom of the killing-people-to-generate-electricity tables.

Re: Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

You are emitting High Grade Bullshit. The same accident would have happened one year after comissioning, if a Tsunami had happened then.

They simply discounted the Tsunami risk during DESIGN.

Modern reactors have exactly the same post-fission cooling problem. You must remove about 100MW of heat even when the reactor is scrammed. For days.

Re: Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

If a CANDU is scrammed and cooling pumps go down, its core will melt.

Stop the bullshitting. Explain why CANDU is supposed to be magically safe.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[jbengt]

We can get a natural gas power plant approved in a week, a new hydro dam in a couple years . . .

You're dreaming.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[ChumpusRex2003]

That is incorrect. The plumbing for the cooling system was damaged by the earthquake. The tsunami damage made it impossible to check it in the aftermath, and the fault went unnoticed until it was too late. That fault, specifically a key valve stuck in the wrong position, meant that the water that was pumped in to cool the reactors from fire engines was diverted to storage tanks. If it had reached the reactors then the explosions and meltdowns might have been avoided.

That's not really correct. The reason why the reactors were not cooled is more complex, and more related to delays in getting equipment to the correct sites. As well as loss of redundancy in electrical systems (all the switchgear taking mains power at multiple voltages, generator power and the UPS systems were all located in the same room at ground level.) As all key electrical switchgear and circuits were damaged at source, restoring electrical supply was very difficult - operators were carrying car batteries, or portable generators around the plant, and activating valves and instruments by going directly to a target device and splicing wires directly to the battery or generator.

At Unit 1, the accident progressed very quickly. The emergency core cooling systems were powered by AC electricity, so once the diesel generators stopped, these systems were unavailable. The normal gravity-powered shutdown cooling system (located outside containment) was locked out by a failsafe in the containment leak detection system. Under leak conditions, the containment system is sealed and all valves/pipes penetrating the containment are automatically closed and locked. Due to the unanticipated event of UPS protected circuits losing power while unprotected AC power circuits remained powered, the leak detection system went into failsafe mode, sealing containment and locking out the normal shutdown cooling system. (A simultaneous failure, or failure of UPS power following failure of mains power would not have resulted in such a lock out). The lock out meant that even when operators built a 120 V battery out of car batteries and spliced it to the shutdown cooling system operation valve, the system failed to operate.

The loss of cooling led to a rapid rise in reactor pressure, to a level above that at which fire pumps would be capable of delivering. However, by the time, injection started (14 hours after loss of cooling), the reactor had depressurised itself. The likely explanation being that the core had already melted, and that the combination of molten debris, high heat and pressure levels had cause the reactor pressure vessel to rupture. Of note was that a substantial amount of time was spent equipping the shutdown cooling system with auxiliary water supplies from fire pumps, in the mistaken belief that it was operating normally.

At units 2 and 3, the progression was slower. These reactors had steam powered emergency cooling systems, which started and continued to operate for long after their 4 hour design target (12 hours for unit 3 - when it was manually switched off in preparation for water injection, 72 hours for unit 2, when it stopped on its own). However, as these were steam powered, they required that the reactor be pressurised. Because manually depressurising the reactor would stop cooling, operators waited until the cooling systems had stopped on their own, before attempting injection.

At both units 2 and 3 there were long delays (nearly 12 hours) while operators tried to depressurise the reactors, and verify depressurisation prior to injection commencing. This would have been sufficient to allow for core melt in both cases, as in both cases, valves had to be operated manually by connecting compressed air cylinders directly pneumatically operated valves. This was done, and injection started. However, injection was inadequate. The reason for the inadequate injection is not clear, but it is thought the most likely explanation is that the pumps used for water injection simply were no

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[jbengt]

Fuel-derived power stations such as nuclear and fossil carbon (oil, gas, coal) don't need batteries or other storage such as pumped hydro. They can meet instantaneous demand . . .

Coal cannot respond to instantaneous demand.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the design WAS terrible. And similar GE reactors around the USA have the same deficiency.

Do you realize that the POWER that feeds the cooling system comes from diesel generators?
Do you realize that those diesel generators are always running and there is no automatic transfer switch that allows the power from the nuclear plant itself to power the cooling?
So a constant supply of diesel fuel is needed to keep the plant cooled.

When the tsunami hit, the diesel generators were swamped and shutdown (hydraulic lockup as water isn't compressible). There was no way to cool the reactors at that point. Done. Finished. You might argue that placing the generators at ground level was the mistake, but I would argue the entire idea of having the plant cooled by diesel generator power ALONE was a huge mistake.

Why not make it use both the nuclear power AND diesel power?

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[nojayuk]

By "instantaneous" I mean(t) "the demand this instant" which is remarkably predictable for a given grid, the time of the year, the time of the day, the weather conditions etc. Rapid CHANGES in demand are the purview of gas turbines, usually "combined-cycle" (CCGT) for modern builds plus maybe on-demand hydro and pumped-storage. It's more common for coal plants to idle at low output to be ready to meet sudden but expected peaks -- the classic consumption peak in Britain used to be the electric load pulse during a commercial break in an evening TV program as millions of households switched on a 2kW electric kettle on to make a pot of tea. Britain now has few coal power plants and a shitload of CCGT to generate electricity so it's less of a problem than it used to be. The increase in watch-on-demand TV and the likes of Netflix has also knocked this back a bit.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[thegarbz]

Reactors built in the 1970s have all been upgraded and improved during rebuilds

And precisely zero of that incorporates "inherently safer design", the gold standard of safety developments over the years that generally come only with decomissioning and replacement of old reactors, ... replacements which have been hamstrung.

A car analogy right back at you: Your 1970s deathtrap can't be retrofitted with crumple zones, and no there's no 1970s car on the road which has had it's passenger compartment strengthened. All of that was achieved through attrition as those 1970s era vehicles break down and die, something which we have continuously denied the nuclear industry over the past 40 years.

While you're looking at 1970s cars, take a look at the modern requirements for owning a classic car. None of what you have listed is included, the only requirements are driver and front passenger seatbelts. Yeah okay they have modern tires, but really that does little to nothing on classic old suspension systems and chassis. In your modern 1970s car even back seat drivers are expendable, no need for seatbelts there. ... though given some of them that may not be a bad thing ;-)

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[nojayuk]

The car analogy is just that, an analogy. Upgraded 1970s reactors are a lot safer than when they were first commissioned. New-build reactors of similar design (the basic PWR and BWR) are even safer than the upgraded 1970s reactors currently running today. There are possible (and as yet unproven and not yet deployed) upgrades coming in terms of ceramic fuel pellets and fuel rod structures which withstand overheating to a greater extent than existing fuels and they should, I repeat should be a retrofit for existing reactors to further increase their safety margins in case of a meltdown.

The bad news with the 1970s reactors are the two core safety components, the reactor vessel and the containment structures. They can't be replaced easily or at all in most cases. They can be improved -- a number of reactors have had their control heads replaced, containments have had new venting and cooling systems added but they're too expensive to swap out or replace entirely. In at least one case an attempt to "fix" a containment compromised the reactor's safety sufficiently that it was shut down permanently.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[coofercat]

It's pretty easy to say "We've fixed the problem, it'll only take you $20 billion to get the benefit of it though".

Someone above mentioned aeroplanes - when they have any sort of problem, the solution is found and retro-fitted to all planes of the same model. Thus we have lots of progress in that area. In nucular, we don't because almost nothing gets done to bajillion different ancient designs already running around the world. That, plus the need to squeeze another few years of use out of an existing reactor, or to squeeze a bit more capacity out of one, and you've got a pretty sorry looking future ahead.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[dgatwood]

Actually, depending on the nature of the problem, some of the changes do get retrofitted to some extent. IIRC, there were a bunch of changes to the backup power infrastructure in existing power plants after the Fukushima disaster to reduce the risk of generator failure in the event of external power loss—things like moving the power distribution boxes away from areas that might flood, for example.

But the really big stuff often requires major changes to the containment building, changes to the reactor vessel design, plumbing changes, etc., which tend to be infeasible without a long-term shutdown. For those sorts of changes, you almost have to wait until they build a new plant, or at least add a new reactor to an old plant.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe Nine Mile 1 was not refueled in March of this year. FitzPatrick is shutting down early January of next year. Going to be weird looking out over the lake without the cooling tower cloud.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[sheph]

I would agree that society should be better educated. But it's kind of hard with the level of bias and distortion of facts. It used to be that if you wanted to be educated you had to want it. Work for the money to buy your own books and spend long evenings pouring over them and trying to understand. Now days information is relatively free flowing. With the click of the mouse you can "learn" just about anything. Turn on the TV and it will tell you everything that's going on in the world (from the perspective of the teller). What details are emphasized, left out, embellished, manipulated, etc. creates public perspective. Kind of like going after Roy Moore while downplaying Harvey Weinstein. Not saying one is any better than the other, but there are definitely teams where sides have been chosen and there are different standards for friends than there are for enemies. This is true for all sides. So where do you get that education? That is purely based on unbiased facts? Even science is very polluted by predetermined outcomes bought and paid for by the research grant. Whether it's governments or corporations the money is the common denominator in shaping the outcome. Where even science, data, and observation are dependent on what is included and excluded to arrive at a predefined conclusion. What do you know about "climate change" other than what you've been told by the scientists you trust? Have you done your own research? Did you have all the data required to reach your conclusion? Was that data pure? I'm not trying to push a particular agenda other than attempting to point out that even science is largely dependent on faith. Your perception is made up of what you choose to accept, and what you choose to reject.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[AutodidactLabrat]

No.
ANY energy is a net gain
The problem isn't "continuous on" since nukes aren't continuous (refueling ring a bell?)
The problem is lack of cushion, margin or if you like, "batteries" (there are so many non-electrochemical storage technologies they cannot be listed)
No, the problem for the Energy Profiteers is neighborhood distribution makes no money for the banks who hold 2 TRILLION in construction bonds.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[G00F]

pseudo-environmentalists who have somehow convinced themselves that if they prevent new nuclear generators from being built, the need for base load will somehow magically go away.

I state something close, but IMO, better: Pseudo-environmentalists convicne themselves if they prevent newer nuclear reactors being built, the old ones will go away.

What they don't realize is by preventing anything to replace the old ones, the old ones can't go away. This has been Californias problem with any kind of power plant since like the 80's, and has to import it.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[dgatwood]

Really, it has nothing to do with the huge cost of writing off those older reactors and decommissioning them, and then building brand new ones?

You're subtly conflating two different things—the desire of the operator to operate a plant beyond its design life and the government-granted license to do so. Power plants are granted an operating license for a certain number of years. If they want to run the plant past its design life, they have to get extensive inspections and apply for a license extension from the NRC (and in some cases, license extensions from state-level organizations on top of that).

The cost of dismantling a power plant means that power companies have a strong incentive to ask the government for extensions of their operating license. That doesn't give the government any incentive to grant the extension, though. The sole reason that the regulatory agencies have such a strong incentive to grant the extensions is because those plants produce critical base load, and there are no new nuclear plants to take their place, which is largely because of the NIMBY movement, not because a power plant can't pay for its decommissioning costs during its design life.

It costs about $320M (on average) to decommission a single unit in a nuclear plant. If you assume that each unit is 1 GW (for example), and assume a 30-year design life running at full power the whole time, that decommissioning cost accounts for only about 0.125 cents per kWh. Mind you, they don't run plants at full tilt all the time, and not all power plants use such powerful generators (500 MW generators are pretty common), so the cost can vary somewhat, but the point is that it is readily absorbed within the 2+ cents per kWh that the power plants charge for power. So clearly, they are economically viable, at least in areas that need that much power.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[MercTech]

Old does not mean lacking modern safety features with all the upgrade programs over the years.

The failure at Fukushima was in not accounting for the effects on emergency cooling of a record high tsunami.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[MercTech]

The government needs to be consistent in its oversight nuclear power plants to justifiable engineering standards rather than pandering to the political opinion of the moment.

Light water reactors such as used in the U.S. were originally designed for a 40 year lifespan. The limiting item is neutron embrittlement of the core pressure vessel. When you hear about a license being "extended" it means that based on samples of the core vessel being tested, it is good to go for a longer period of time.
    Licenses are extended beyond the original design criteria based on hard science not political opinion.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[iggymanz]

you do realize that venting, even with filtering, is poisoning the environment (including people)? it's still a "you failed to protect the public" scenario.

That 1987 system wasn't good enough, so in 2012 NRC made another reccomendation for hardened vents...and then in 2013 another for the venting to remain functional even after core damage because of some benefit (keep the damn thing from exploding by poisoning the environment even more

yes, stupid design with bandaids put on by the NRC

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[AmiMoJo]

The conflation is because the two are intrinsically linked. The NRC does most of its work on paper, looking at design documents and the risk assessments that the manufacturer did. Most of the "inspection" is examining maintenance records, not physically examining the plant.

When the operator wants to extend the working life of the plant, the manufacturer has to be involved in that decision. The manufacturer is under pressure to agree in order to improve the economics of their product and benefit from on-going contracts to maintain it.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Barsteward]

Who pays for the coal or gas at the moment - thats an ongoing cost along with its ongoing mining, transportataion and pollution. Battery is a one off cost initially and if it needs replacing/upgrading in the future and it can respond in seconds unlike fossil power.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Barsteward]

The UK grid is investing in more and more batteries to cater for storage of wind/solar power to help even out the usage.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[PauloftheWest]

This shows the dangers of dogmatic skepticism, social proof and imposing a idealistic belief system

You mean politics?

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[MrKaos]

This shows the dangers of dogmatic skepticism, social proof and imposing a idealistic belief system

You mean politics?

I mean refusing to update information about the reality of the nuclear industry, accepting something as fact because it is popular and having a personal vision of the nuclear industry that doesn't reflect reality.

Politics is a different domain, insofar as at a political level nuclear industry assets, like a proposed reactor, are used as tax credits for the oil and coal industry.

Oil and Coal industry political lobbying is what destroyed practical burner reactor technology that used plutonium and DU to mitigate the waste problem created by the nuclear Industry whilst creating hydrogen and electricity. Why would oil and coal want that when they can heap blame on NIMBYs and greenies while fleecing taxpayers... and so on..

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Agent0013]

I don't understand why you think this aspect of human nature will ever change. Regulatory capture, corporate greed, belief that the alignment of many disasters will not happen at one time, thinking your backups will work when needed, etc. Even if the generators weren't in the basement, there are still things that can happen to damage them and the same disaster would have happened again.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Agent0013]

So it will only take a few hundred more melt-downs and explosions before we have gotten every little thing figured out, right? When you think you made something fool-proof, then someone invents a better fool. We still don't have concrete that lasts as long as the Romans, and nothing we have build will last as long as the pyramids or stone hinge. What makes you think we can build something that is impervious to a nearly unlimited array of catastrophic events.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[angel'o'sphere]

That escaped me.

Then the damage due to the earthquake on the plant was server when widely published, or I simply missed it.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[AmiMoJo]

This didn't come to light until about a year after the accident. NHK has done some great documentaries about it, most of which are on YouTube.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Altrag]

The problem isn't duration, the problem is cost. We did design for decades -- around 4-5 decades for most plant designs of that era. Trouble is 4-5 decades came and went and rather than following the original design (ie: decommissioning the plant,) politicians came along with a "well its expensive and hey, what's the worst that could happen?" mentality.

That is, its human stupidity we're constantly failing to design for. Every time we try, someone comes up with a stupider human (and then we elect them to office..)

We've also known how to deal with a large part of those byproducts for decades -- reprocess them. But we don't do that because the process produces a small amount of weapons-grade material which would add up pretty quickly given how much waste we could theoretically be reprocessing and politicians decided that it better to just store hazardous waste (frequently unsafely) than risk "someone" stealing it and making their own bombs. Though given the fact that everyone who wants to make a bomb seems to have no problem sourcing the uranium, the current president is the most likely "someone" in this case with that whole request to boost the nuclear arsenal by 10x for no purpose other than to justify his ego and love of hyperbole. So maybe the politicians of yesteryear were smarter than I give them credit for!

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[Agripa]

Human designers simply aren't up to the task of planning that far into the future, hence even the best-designed reactors sometimes fail due to unforeseen circumstances.

Human designers do not have the authority to plan that far into the future. That belongs to management.

Re:Fukushima was older than Chernobyl

[angel'o'sphere]

I heard about it, but did not know it was so server.

Which bits are the fuel?

[Harlequin80]

Watched the video but there is no annotations or sound. Does anyone have any better ideas as to which bits are fuel?

To me they could just be driving around a sunken ship for all I can identify.

Re: Which bits are the fuel?

[Anonymous Coward]

The stuff that looks like molten metal, and the gravel-like pieces are my best guesses. Basically anything that doesn't look man-made and isn't rust-colored.

Old enough to predate modern computer analysis.

[Anonymous Coward]

And BWRs were chosen at the time for performance and efficiency, not safety. Plus I am pretty sure those reactors were about 20 years past their accepted usable life, so claiming they are unsafe after operating them far longer than their expected lifespan without doing your own retrofits seems pretty negligent on the part of the owners to me.

If this had failed a few years into the reactor's life, maybe I would agree with them, but they've had 30 years of warning on these exact reactor designs to shut down and replace them, and they chose to keep them running without taking adequate precautions themselves. I hope every one of the TEPCO executives gets irradiated for their part in this disaster.

Re:Old enough to predate modern computer analysis.

[Agent0013]

So they are decades past their designed life span. So what? Do you think the nuclear reactors we have in the states have been decommissioned when their lifespan is over? They haven't! Instead they get their lifespan extended so it can continue operating. And profit needs to be made, so don't go trying to tell me that they spend unlimited amounts of money making them safe. They are as safe as anything can be when controlled by humans that make mistakes and corporations that only care about profit.

droids with even higher radiation tolerances

[Anonymous Coward]

Give them AI too. What could possibly go wrong.

Re:droids with even higher radiation tolerances

[93 Escort Wagon]

As long as there’s a smelter nearby, so if necessary we can trick the robots into falling into big vats of molten metal, we’ll be fine.

Re:droids with even higher radiation tolerances

[Anonymous Coward]

I say we send R2D2 first. C3PO is way too cute.

they'll keep it

[bugs2squash]

rename the plant as an experimental facility for radiation testing electro-mechanical systems. Like a wind tunnel but for radiation exposure

Re:they'll keep it

[AmiMoJo]

The idea was to make it possible for the residents of nearby towns to go back. Aside from anything else that is the cheaper option; if people can't go back then they will have to be compensated for everything. Property, businesses, jobs, farms...

Until the plant is safe that can't happen. There is also the decontamination, which has been going pretty badly. But since legal decisions are making it look like full compensation is the only option anyway you could be right, it might just become a write off. I'm not so sure though, I think national pride will require it to be cleaned up.

Re:they'll keep it

[Anonymous Coward]

rename the plant as an experimental facility for radiation testing electro-mechanical systems. Like a wind tunnel but for radiation exposure

It would be fun to be able to design these bots, though that is not a task my company does. Still, I wonder if we can't go ultra simple? What about something like a bot based only on hydraulic lines, with a fiber optic camera? Can you pass a video image with pure fiber and no electronics? I'm assuming the hydraulic fluid could be controlled by a pneumatic valves. By using air to control movement, you don't need a return line for it. That leaves you with a fiber optic bundle, a send and return hydraulic line, and some smaller bundle of low pressure air lines. The hydraulic fluid might be better to replace with water, since they already have equipment on site to handle that. I'm assuming it might change the pistons and such. Assuming your just dumping the return water in a bin for processing, you should be able to handle some pretty hot areas since the water is carrying the heat away. It might also be required to have all joints on the bot move back and forth periodically just to keep removing heat from the cylinders. I'm not clear what material you would make the lines out of though, though if you keep the water moving, they can keep themselves cool, to a point. (When the bot is not moving the water sent would just cool the bot and return back to the main point.)

Actually can it go even simpler? Is there a way to control a valve by varying the pressure in a line? I'm less sure if that would work for everything, though it would be interesting to study. Perhaps water pulsed at 40hz moves the right track forward? (I know you could build electronics to interpret, but those electronics might fry in those conditions.) Could mechanical resonance somehow be used to control flow?

Re:they'll keep it

[tlambert]

It would be fun to be able to design these bots, though that is not a task my company does. Still, I wonder if we can't go ultra simple? What about something like a bot based only on hydraulic lines, with a fiber optic camera? Can you pass a video image with pure fiber and no electronics? I'm assuming the hydraulic fluid could be controlled by a pneumatic valves. By using air to control movement, you don't need a return line for it. That leaves you with a fiber optic bundle, a send and return hydraulic line, and some smaller bundle of low pressure air lines.

It has been discussed.

The major issue is that the amorphous microscopic structures are particularly prone to radiation induced discoloration of the fiber optic lines. This is worse for the transparent and translucent thermoplastic copolymers, such as methylmethacrylate or polycarbonate.

You'd be replacing the optical fiber fairly frequently, particularly if it were a modern plastic, rather than true glass, although glass will have similar issues.

You end up with coloring in both the visible light regions, and in the IR and UV bands.

This is commonly known as "browning".

While technically, you could throw a laser through the fiber to heat and/or otherwise cause fading.

However, it's going to happen in and around 10^10 Rad.

You can read the original paper by W.H. Cropper here; it was published in 1962:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

[Note: fees may be involved, if you access this through the Wiley site]

Re: they'll keep it

[Anonymous Coward]

Tragically, because we are forced to fix it, there could be some great opportunities to assist our offworld progress.

Robots taking our jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of people willing to do this kind of work. Why didnâ(TM)t we send people.

Re:Robots taking our jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

The pile of dead people would obstruct the view.

Re:Robots taking our jobs

[b0s0z0ku]

That was the Soviet solution after Chernobyl -- they even called them "bio robots".

Re:Robots taking our jobs

[Opportunist]

A few days later they were relabeled Walking Ghosts.

Re:Robots taking our jobs

[MrKaos]

That's a fucked up way to die.

Re:Robots taking our jobs

[Opportunist]

No kidding.

What really blows is that for a few hours, maybe even a day or two, you feel like you're actually getting better, even though you're certainly going to die.

Re:Robots taking our jobs

[MrKaos]

No kidding.

What really blows is that for a few hours, maybe even a day or two, you feel like you're actually getting better, even though you're certainly going to die.

Great, that's just...great.

Walking Ghosts, I'd never heard that before - that is fucked.

International problem

[MrKaos]

We need an international effort to resolve this issue. The international community can bring a lot more resources and focus to resolving the issue than TEPCO can.

Re:International problem

[Altrag]

Resolve what issue? TEPCO is perfectly capable of handling the local clean up (whether they want to or not is another question..) Of course there's only so much that can be done no matter what resources you have (for example, trying to relocate the reactor core is probably not a thing that will ever happen.. trying to move it would expose the environment to far more radiation than just leaving it where it is and capping it in concrete like they did at Chernobyl.)

The larger issue of ancient reactors still being in fairly widespread use.. yes there should be an international effort to resolve that. Unfortunately when you're talking on the scale of $20-50bn to replace each of those old reactors combined with the typical human mindset of "it can't happen to me" or "I'm better/smarter/more careful than they were," it becomes less easy to get those things decommissioned.

Info...

[XSportSeeker]

I'll just repost my comment from Gizmodo here, some info to kill some potential myths.

It’s bad, and it’ll probably take a long time to be solved... ultimately getting to some point similar to Chernobyl. Not in the same scale I mean, but like years from now they’ll just encase the whole thing in concrete and abandon it there because there’s not much else to do.

Let me tell something about this for people that might be reading and getting a wrong picture out of it, because I also did and just learned recently about some stuff. People should know that for the vast majority of Fukushima prefecture, life remains going like normal. The area affected that people had to evacuate was a radius of around 20 to 30km (12 to 18 miles), which is of course still a lot, but just a small fraction of Fukushima as a whole, which has almost 750 square kms (288 square miles).

It’s nothing to laugh about, but I think some people imagine something like the entire prefecture, or half of Japan being a radiation infested zone or something. Fukushima is the 20th out of 47 prefectures in terms of population, 3rd in area, the capital city wasn’t affected.

I was watching a channel that made a tour around major onsen cities in Fukushima, awesome stuff. Radiation wasn’t a concern, even when they went to a coastal city about an hour away from the power plant.

Again, it’s not to diminish how serious the disaster is, but the thing is, we get a whole lot of reports talking only about the disaster zone, so much that it seems that it’s a huge area that is unlivable. It’s not.

Re:Info...

[whoever57]

And the additional thyroid and other cancers over the lifespan of the people living there? What about that?

Re:Info...

[suutar]

I'm afraid your numbers are off. The prefecture of Fukushima has about 13,750 sq km. 750 is less than the area of that 20km evacuation circle.

Your point, however, is well taken.

Re:Info...

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't make stuff up. Fukushima prefecture has an area of 13782 square kilometers, and an evacuation area with a radius of 30km covers 1400 square kilometers on land and as much sea. That's one tenth of the entire prefecture and one third of a percent of the total area of Japan. Japan is mostly very mountainous and most land use is on the coasts, so one third of a percent of the total land mass sounds much less dramatic than it is.

Re:Info...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have they already happened? Or do you have a crystal ball.

Again - this is not like Chernobyl. Not even close.

Re:Info...

[AmiMoJo]

Fukushima had other interesting effects that are hardly ever mentioned.

The "nuclear renaissance" died that day. It was already looking shaky because of high costs and increasing competition from renewables, but Fukushima really was the death knell. In the short term everything paused while people tried to figure out what went wrong and make sure it couldn't happen again, and in the longer term it caused the focus for clean energy to move elsewhere.

Japan lost all its nuclear power in one day. All plants offline for an extended period of time. It wasn't the economic disaster some predicted, and while it did result in additional pollution it also resulted in some very significant energy savings through improved efficiency. It actually gave many manufacturers a boost as energy saving features became major selling points and people bought new gear to help their country.

Of course given the choice you wouldn't do it that way, but it proved something important. It proved that nuclear was not essential, which greatly strengthened the anti-nuclear movement's arguments.

Re:Info...

[MrKaos]

It’s bad, and it’ll probably take a long time to be solved... ultimately getting to some point similar to Chernobyl.

They will have to dismantle the reactors.

Not in the same scale I mean, but like years from now they’ll just encase the whole thing in concrete and abandon it there because there’s not much else to do.

The main issue is the ground water and the amount of highly radioactive water the site leaks. Encasing the site in concrete will not solve that problem so it has to be dismantled.

The site continues to leak about 400 tons of highly radioactive water into the Pacific each *day*, that's 876000 tones of radioactive water so far, and climbing.

Inevitably this accumulates in the food chain so the sooner we resolve the situation the less damage will be done to the human genome and our foodchain.

Re:Info...

[Altrag]

I'm going to go ahead and disagree with you on that. Sure there was a couple of panic buttons pressed when Fukushima happened, especially in Europe, but at the same time China is constructing a huge number of new plants to meet their ever-growing energy needs without further damaging their environment (barring their own meltdown of course, but I'm going to assume that they're using one of the more modern designs that significantly reduce the possibility of that happening.)

At the end of the day we still have a problem that only nuclear can solve: Its still our only source of base load electricity that doesn't pump huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Geothermal's and tidal power are great but extremely location-dependent, and neither solar nor wind are reliable enough to run as base load.

If/when Elon Musk gets his battery tech up to the level where they can store and supply sufficient energy to act as base load when the sun is down and the wind isn't blowing, then we might have something to talk about but until then we're stuck with the choice of fossil fuels and their climate change implications, or nuclear and its meltdown potential. And its a lot easier to engineer around the latter if we ever decide the put the political and monetary power towards doing so.

Re:Info...

[Altrag]

The Pacific weighs, as a very rough estimate from some Googling, around 7.5x10^17 tons. Your 876000 tons of waste is a bit over one ten billionth of a percent.

I certainly wouldn't want to eat any local fish from that region (dissipation rates certainly aren't that fast!) but the overall effect outside of that region is minuscule.

Re:Info...

[blindseer]

Of course given the choice you wouldn't do it that way, but it proved something important. It proved that nuclear was not essential, which greatly strengthened the anti-nuclear movement's arguments.

If nuclear was not essential then why is Japan building new nuclear power reactors now? They expect to have 20% of their electricity from nuclear by 2030, at least that's what I read on Wikipedia.

Large nations like the USA, Canada, and Russia, can spread wind and solar power over large tracts of land to avoid localized effects like weather and daylight shifting. Japan is an island nation that is on not so friendly terms with the nations on the nearest large land mass. Their hydro power is limited and wave power is not a developed energy source yet. They don't have much choice but to turn to nuclear power.

They can import coal and oil for their electricity for only so long. This is not a long term solution for them. This is costing them a lot of money, and as even you admit it is reducing air quality.

The "nuclear renaissance" died that day.

No, it was merely delayed.

We will have to be building a new nuclear reactor somewhere in the world every week to just keep up with the shutting down of old coal and nuclear. That's going to happen at some point unless something better comes along. For an island nation like Japan it's not going to be wind and solar.

Re:Info...

[blindseer]

Inevitably this accumulates in the food chain so the sooner we resolve the situation the less damage will be done to the human genome and our foodchain.

What elements are producing this radioactivity? As I understand it the largest source, as far as the ground water is concerned anyway, is tritium. Tritium has a half life of 12 years. Tritium is a naturally occurring element, life evolved with it in the environment, so it's not near the risk that other radioactive elements might pose. It exists as heavy water and so it just mixes in the ocean, with all the rest of the heavy water on Earth.

All the radioactive iodine in the water, which had people freaking out at the beginning, is effectively gone now. We can still detect it but that says more on the sensitivity of our equipment than any risk to life. With a half life of days, months, or millennia it's either gone or radioactive in only the strictest sense of the word.

Merely saying the water is radioactive is meaningless. Depleted uranium is radioactive too but we use it regularly as a radiation shield, as it's radioactivity is more theoretical than anything since it's so low. How radioactive is it? What are the radioactive elements it carries?

About the only elements of concern now are strontium and cesium, those have half lives in the decades and can accumulate in bones. The rest are either so inert that they have no biological role or such long half lives that they pose no risk outside of the quantities seen in the core itself.

Re:Info...

[hcs_$reboot]

there’s not much else to do.

They could throw a clean carefully designed H bomb in that area, radiation will be gone.

Re:Info...

[angel'o'sphere]

http://fukushimaontheglobe.com...

Re:Info...

[angel'o'sphere]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Info...

[angel'o'sphere]

That is the problem with you americans.
To (1) dumb to look on a map and not informed about (2) technology that is developed outside of the USA.
1) Japan is a chain of islands that is about 2000km long. It is impossible that they have not enough wind ... e.g.
2) Their hydro power is limited and wave power is not a developed energy source yet. Both wrong.

Re:Info...

[angel'o'sphere]

As I understand it the largest source, as far as the ground water is concerned anyway, is tritium.
That shows exactly how dumb you are. You _understand_ nothing about anything that has something to do with "nuclear".
Tritium ... in a burned down reactor?
Tritium ... in the ground water?

Hint: you can look up what Tritium is on Wikipedia. Or in a book about Chemistry.

All the radioactive iodine in the water, which had people freaking out at the beginning, is effectively gone now.
Wow ... and how does the Iodine know that according to your idea the effects are gone now? Hu?

Re:Info...

[blindseer]

I actually wrote a (short, I''ll admit) report in college about the power grid in Japan. They barely have the infrastructure now to keep the north islands connected to the south islands reliably. To get them to produce enough wind AND have this transmitted reliably across their nation would be quite expensive. The north and south divide is actually two separate power grids, one running 50HZ and the other 60HZ.

This is far from trivial. You can claim that the wind always blows somewhere in Japan but that does not mean it will be cheap. They are building islands for airports, you think that it's going to be easy to put up windmills? They can out windmills out on the water but what happens to that with the next tsunami?

Re:Info...

[blindseer]

Rather than just mock my ignorance how about you inform me?

How does the iodine know my ideas? It doesn't know, it tells me. The half life of iodine means all but trace amounts decayed to inert xenon by now. I say "effectively gone" because any radioactive material cannot be said to every be truly gone but it's "effectively gone" because it would take the most sensitive instruments we have to see it's there.

Go look up tritium on Wikipedia yourself, there's a section on Fukushima there. This tells me you didn't bother to read Wikipedia before you directed your rant at me.

Re:Info...

[Interfacer]

In fairness, The US has vast amounts of essentially flat space where you can easily build and maintain large solar or wind farms. Japan doesn't have that feature.

Re:Info...

[AmiMoJo]

There are no new nuclear plants being built in Japan at the moment. Everything was put on hold in 2011. There was one plant that was due to start construction in 2016 as an extension of an existing one, but it is still paused.

Re:Info...

[AmiMoJo]

All new nuclear approvals in China were put on hold indefinitely in 2011. The only plants being built there were approved and started before 2011.

Re:Info...

[dunkelfalke]

Caesium 137 for example.
https://www.whoi.edu/news-rele...

Re:Info...

[nojayuk]

All new nuclear approvals in China were put on hold indefinitely in 2011. The only plants being built there were approved and started before 2011.

You keep saying this. I keep proving you wrong.

There was a hiatus in building existing reactor projects and approving the construction of new nuclear reactors in China after 2011. They restarted the existing builds and started commissioning new projects in late 2012. Some of the new reactors that started construction in 2013 will be online by 2019 or so.

Tianwan units 3 and 4, started construction Dec 2012 and Sep 2013, expected to be online Feb 2018, Mar 2019.

Yangjiang units 5 and 6, started Sep 2013 and Dec 2013, expected online 2018 and 2019.

And so on. The pipeline for approval, start of construction and bringing reactors online to the grid in China should produce four or five reactors a year for the next few years.

Re:Info...

[Anonymous Coward]

And the additional thyroid and other cancers over the lifespan of the people living there? What about that?

Still less than if they burned coal in a plan the same size and age as Fukushima. How's the cancer rate in West Virginia? What does the annual physical and free blood workup provided by the national health service detect in those coal ash spill communities? What's that, you don't check the poorest people who live in the most polluted areas as a matter of course? No wonder the US isn't in the top twenty for health indicators anymore.

Re:Info...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am just sick and tired of reading this rubbish.

Japan does not have coal or oil in any significant quantities.
Yeah and...!?!?

But the earthquakes and tsunamis demonstrate something
else. Geological activity. There is known Geothermal resource
in Japan. Huge quantities. Third largest in the world. Something
like 20 GWatts of known power resource. That's enough to replace
something like 60% of the existing Nuclear plants. But Japan uses
less than 1GW. Why? Politics, not Engineering. Dont want to upset
the local communities by 'stealing' their hot spring water. My god, might
lower the temperature by 5%. And the national parks where some are
located? Impossible, even though sideways drilling has been around
for decades.

The truth is much simpler. The LDP and Tepco (and other power cos)
dont want to change. Easier to stay with what you know. And having lots
of Nuclear power stations means you need enriched Uranium and Plutonium
Hence the 20+ ton stockpile of Plutonium, much of it weapons grade. On
some level I cant blame Japan for wanting to keep that, given the rough
neightbourhood. But it has lot of knock on effects.

Japan should ramp up Geothermal big time. Simple as that. And no-one
is even talking about offshore Geothermal. That's also a possibility in an
Island nation like Japan. When a Geothermal plant fails catastrophically
there are impacts, but not Fukushima style. A entire installation in the
Philippines was destroyed in a massive storm a few years ago. You dont
hear much about that though.

Re:Info...

[Anonymous Coward]

Same Island - Honshu.

Kanto and Kansai have different frequency for sure.

That's because of Political differences many years ago.
Different standards imported from the USA in each area.

It's not really an issue normally though because both areas
are so big that each can handle their own fluctuations.
There are some converter nodes that do the frequency
conversion, but only a few GW. Since both Kansai and
Kanto had to shut down their Nuclear stations, it is an
irrelevance in this situation though.

Re:Info...

[AmiMoJo]

Building doesn't start the instant the project is approved. All of the ones you mention were approved or in the late stages of approval before March 2011.

Re:Info...

[MrKaos]

Inevitably this accumulates in the food chain so the sooner we resolve the situation the less damage will be done to the human genome and our foodchain.

What elements are producing this radioactivity?

The one that concerns me the most is Plutonium Chloride, highly soluble and readily absorbed into blood and bone as an Iron analogue. I'd expect an alpha emitter that energetic to do a lot of damage inside the body, especially if it is organically bound. IIRC Oppenheimer said it was fatal in the microgram range or it will turn you into spiderman, I can't remember which one is right.

Depleted uranium is radioactive too but we use it regularly as a radiation shield, as it's radioactivity is more theoretical than anything since it's so low.

It also has spontaneous criticality which makes it 10 times more radioactive in bursts as it decays, pyrophoric when used as a munition where it burns into a ceramic DU ash which is an inhalant. It's responsible for creating the next generation of X men in Iraq, so much cheaper and harder to remove than land mines.

Re:Info...

[nojayuk]

The various state organisations and power generating companies in China have plans laid out for various nuclear reactor build projects which won't start for years if not decades assuming permission is given and funding found. If you classify these as being in "late stages of approval" then they will be pouring concrete on new reactor projects in 2025 or even later although most of these planned projects still have a lot of work to be done before the first concrete is poured.

You seem to be under the impression there's a limited number of such projects in the pipeline and when they're either completed or abandoned or never started at all then that's it, China will not construct any more reactors because of Fukushima. I find that odd.

Re:Info...

[mjwx]

I'm afraid your numbers are off. The prefecture of Fukushima has about 13,750 sq km. 750 is less than the area of that 20km evacuation circle.

Should still be enough area for a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel.

How do you say "Don't just stand there, come in, com in" in Japanese

Re:Info...

[AmiMoJo]

assuming permission is given

They won't be. The current policy is to not approve any new reactors.

Re:Info...

[angel'o'sphere]

Japan would obviously jump on off shore wind, now as most countries do that.
For wind farms on the country side you don't need flat land btw.
And solar panels imho should be in cities or over roads anyway and not on "useable land".

The citing of the plant was certainly negligent

[dfenstrate]

Fukushima's site was dug down to make it easier to build. Just up the coast, closer to the epicenter, Onagawa was built higher above the water line, and they even included a basin to maintain an ocean water supply to the safety related pumps for the duration of a tsunami. They escaped the Earthquake and Tsunami largely undamaged. In fact, Onagawa actually served as shelter after the Tsunami.

Re:The citing of the plant was certainly negligent

[whoever57]

If they had just put the backup generators on higher ground, things would not have been as bad.

Re:The citing of the plant was certainly negligent

[AmiMoJo]

The problem is that nuclear plants are so expensive there is great reluctance to shut them down when it becomes apparent that they are not as safe as was originally thought. It's still happening with other plants, where re-examination after the March 2011 disaster has determined that there were previously unknown faults or flood risk in the area.

Re:The citing of the plant was certainly negligent

[Anonymous Coward]

solar panels on the roof feeding batteries mounted to the roof/ceiling.
the main thing (as with chernobyl) is a lack of arrogance & denial:
#1. they knew it wouldn't survive a tsunami in 2008.
#2. they turned off the emergency cooling because workers thought it would be ok
#3. they never tested the steam powered cooling in 40 years
#4. they goofed around for 3+ hours before restarting emergency cooling
by saturday it was a full on shitshow with workers still trying minor fixes because they were in full denial that the cores were at risk of melting.

oh and the dirty secret you wont hear is that many workers fled the plant and didn't return.

Re:The citing of the plant was certainly negligent

[MrKaos]

That's why SONGS was shut down, and they have a lot more fuel in their storage pools that Fukushima does.

Re:The citing of the plant was certainly negligent

[Anonymous Coward]

SONGS was shutdown because of heat exchanger issues, not because of flooding concerns. They screwed up the anti-vibration bar calculations on the steam generators which caused them to fail within a few fuel cycles, versus around 40 years which is what they were designed for. Because of this failure, it was no longer economical to run the plan and it was shutdown.

Re:Yes but if something does go wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

you probably still wont be able to deal with it very well.

Most of the plants running are older ones.

[Anonymous Coward]

And newer ones haven't run long enough to know how to keep them running. Moreover when Chernobyl went kablooie, the west, especially you, bleated on about how it was because it was Russia doing it, not the competent nations like the US, France and Japan... Kinda changed your tune since then, at least on why it wasn't going to happen elsewhere, if not the claim it wouldn't happen at all...

Re:Most of the plants running are older ones.

[hackwrench]

The comment was on what it would take to not have it happen at all. :Unfortunately as other posts have stated there are still old designs running.

Re: Most of the plants running are older ones.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fukushima would have been much worse if it did not have an expensive containment.

Tshernobyl was a cheapskate design without concrete containment, which is why much more stuff leaked out.

Fukushima behaved exactly as designed; they had not considered how to cool the reactor with the emergency diesel generators flooded by tsunami. Plus they hoped and prayed instead of immediately airlifting portable fire pumps to the reactors for evaporation cooling.

Even the Japanese Prime Minister was a sheep who preferred to send firefighters but never busted the site. Cowardism.

Re: Most of the plants running are older ones.

[Anonymous Coward]

The GE design is still sound, IF one has reliable emergency cooling water flow.

ANY new design, including these mythical molten salt reactors will have EXACTLY the same issue.

100MW cooling IN ALL EVENTS is what you need. Disregard the marketing bullshit of "new" designs.

All your story says is how dangerous man is.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because if it doesn't kill an animal in one generation, then there's little reason for the species to die out, since reproduction happens before it dies from radiation poisoning. But when it comes to humans, we prefer to kill them entirely if they're no use to us, and that stops reproduction.

Warranty Period on Nuclear Reactors?

[LeftCoastThinker]

The two questions I have is why was Fukushima still active after 30 plus years? What exactly is the warranty period for nuclear power plants.
  I would love to get a 30 year warranty on my car or phone. I see they are trying to sue GE... Who issued permits in Japan for this plant? Typically responsibility shifts to the operator after power plants are completed and functioning well since regardless of design or workmanship you can easily destroy a power plant through incompetence or insufficient maintenance.

It is also interesting that the reactor survived the quake it'self but was essentially destroyed by the tsunami.

There is this concept in liability law called Act of God. The Japan Tsunami qualifies if anything ever did. That event killed 15,894 people in a first world country, and as far as I am aware is the highest death toll event in a first world country in at least 70 years outside of war. The Tsunami wave reached a peak height of 133 feet. That is Biblical level apocalyptic disaster right there.

Re:Warranty Period on Nuclear Reactors?

[b0s0z0ku]

Licensing time in the US is typically 40, often extended to 60 years.

With expensive items (buildings, factories, trains, aircraft, etc), lifespans of this type are typical.

Re:Warranty Period on Nuclear Reactors?

[MrKaos]

The two questions I have is why was Fukushima still active after 30 plus years? What exactly is the warranty period for nuclear power plants.

TEPCO voided any implied warranty by not operating the installation according to the criteria GE specified. Thus they exposed two Design Basis issues, which created hydrogen and caused the explosions.

There is this concept in liability law called Act of God. The Japan Tsunami qualifies if anything ever did.

Not really, the reactor was rated to 600Gal for earthquakes and survived the quake. The operator installed back-up generators where they could be flooded and did not perform the upgrades to the sea wall to protect it from a Tsunami.

Not an act of God, it's an act of Criminal Negligence by the board of TEPCO and some of them have been charged.

That is Biblical level apocalyptic disaster right there.

That is how the French described it.

Re:Warranty Period on Nuclear Reactors?

[WoTG]

IIRC, extended to 60 years, but only after a major refit and re-licensing process.

Re:Warranty Period on Nuclear Reactors?

[Anonymous Coward]

The two questions I have is why was Fukushima still active after 30 plus years?

Because people don't build nuclear plants for short term operations.

What exactly is the warranty period for nuclear power plants.

Till confirmed decommissioning.

I would love to get a 30 year warranty on my car or phone.

Ok? So?

I see they are trying to sue GE...

Suing. As in "filed a lawsuit" in court. No trying. Doing.

Who issued permits in Japan for this plant?

Duh.

They've already been admitting to their copious failures. It won't change the lawsuits, since there was also a documented policy of hiring former regulators.

Typically responsibility shifts to the operator after power plants are completed and functioning well since regardless of design or workmanship you can easily destroy a power plant through incompetence or insufficient maintenance.

That's nice, but GE would be responsible for their design faults nonetheless, as they would be certifying their own actions.

It really doesn't help them that it's documented that employees quit over objections to GE's conduct.

It is also interesting that the reactor survived the quake it'self but was essentially destroyed by the tsunami.

No, what's interesting is that you have little command of the facts. The reactors were destroyed by a failure of the diesel generators being unable to operate their cooling mechanisms since they were sited improperly and damaged by the flood.

The reactors themselves were in no way destroyed by the tsunami.

There is this concept in liability law called Act of God.

Doesn't apply if evidence indicates that the design implementation was flawed. Namely if it would have failed in another event.

The Japan Tsunami qualifies if anything ever did. That event killed 15,894 people in a first world country, and as far as I am aware is the highest death toll event in a first world country in at least 70 years outside of war.

The 2010 Russian Heat wave killed over 50,000, the 2003 European Heat have likely did about the same across a few countries, with several individual ones possibly reaching that level.

Of course, several disease outbreaks have killed more than that, such as the Hong Kong Flu or the AIDS epidemic.

But it doesn't matter, the problem with the Fukushima site was not related to the vast majority of those deaths at all.

The Tsunami wave reached a peak height of 133 feet. That is Biblical level apocalyptic disaster right there.

And yet that wasn't a factor for two other nuclear plants. Sorry.

You're just going to have to accept that it was a bad design decision. Fukushima Daiichi was a failure of human creation.

I'd suggest getting out of GE stock, but you should have done that 20 years ago.

Re:Warranty Period on Nuclear Reactors?

[LeftCoastThinker]

License to operate and expected lifespan I can agree should be long as you describe, but I would be shocked at more than a 5 year warranty period from the builder. Things wear out and in capital equipment especially it is up to the owner to follow the PM schedule or suffer the consequences.

Re:Warranty Period on Nuclear Reactors?

[angel'o'sphere]

The 2004 Tsunami in Asia killed close to 300,000 people, in various countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

That is Biblical level apocalyptic disaster right there.
There were higher tsunami in Japan ... in old times they marked the hight with marking stones. It was well known that the walls/dams of Fukushima were below the marks.

Re:Warranty Period on Nuclear Reactors?

[angel'o'sphere]

but I would be shocked at more than a 5 year warranty period from the builder
Then be shocked.
In Europe by law large constructions have a warranty of minimum 30 years.
A nuclear plant falls in that category. Actually every power plant or bridge does. So does a sea going ship or an air plane.

Re:Warranty Period on Nuclear Reactors?

[johannesg]

If your car or phone was built to the same standards, and had proper maintenance applied throughout its lifetime, it would last a lot longer as well. Of course you would be using a 30-year old car or phone, something you would probably consider to be completely unacceptable: the car uses far too much fuel and doesn't have any modern safety features, and the phone doesn't do any of the things you'd want a phone to do. The same is true for nuclear plants: we have much safer designs now.

Unfortunately we cannot build them, because of the great success of the anti-nuclear lobby.

It's a bit of a shame really. If we had continued building nuclear plants we might even have avoided the whole climate change discussion - or we might have been worried about global cooling, and discussing how much CO2 we need to release into the atmosphere to keep the temperature comfortable. But hey, at least the environmentalists won that round...

Re:Warranty Period on Nuclear Reactors?

[Anonymous Coward]

> That is Biblical level apocalyptic disaster right there.

I saw no cats and dogs living together.
https://youtu.be/9S4cldkdCjE?t...

captcha: burial

Re:Warranty Period on Nuclear Reactors?

[Anonymous Coward]

The two questions I have is why was Fukushima still active after 30 plus years? What exactly is the warranty period for nuclear power plants.

  I would love to get a 30 year warranty on my car or phone. I see they are trying to sue GE... Who issued permits in Japan for this plant? Typically responsibility shifts to the operator after power plants are completed and functioning well since regardless of design or workmanship you can easily destroy a power plant through incompetence or insufficient maintenance.

It is also interesting that the reactor survived the quake it'self but was essentially destroyed by the tsunami.

There is this concept in liability law called Act of God. The Japan Tsunami qualifies if anything ever did. That event killed 15,894 people in a first world country, and as far as I am aware is the highest death toll event in a first world country in at least 70 years outside of war. The Tsunami wave reached a peak height of 133 feet. That is Biblical level apocalyptic disaster right there.

As a counterpoint to your nationalist outrage, I'd just like to point out that I've worked for GE and they are incompetent cunts.

Re:Warranty Period on Nuclear Reactors?

[AmiMoJo]

An act of god has to be unpredictable. The flaws that lead to Fukushima going to accident to disaster were known and even corrected by GE in later designs, but they didn't retrofit to older reactors or tell the operators to stop using them. Doing so would have been incredibly expensive.

Re:Warranty Period on Nuclear Reactors?

[olau]

Unfortunately we cannot build them, because they are so expensive.

Re:Warranty Period on Nuclear Reactors?

[johannesg]

Unfortunately they are so expensive, because of intense lobbying efforts against them. The machinery and buildings themselves are nothing special. It's all the opposition that drags the process out almost indefinitely that makes it so horribly expensive.

Re:Warranty Period on Nuclear Reactors?

[LeftCoastThinker]

Key distinction in death count: FIRST WORLD COUNTRY. I MADE THIS DISTINCTION IN MY POST...

Your odds of surviving natural disasters greatly depends on the level of modernization in your country. California has 30M people living there and just as many earthquakes as Mexico, but 142 fatalities since 1980 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... vs Mexico with 46,000 with a population 4x larger than California. The difference is level of modernization...

Re:Warranty Period on Nuclear Reactors?

[angel'o'sphere]

More likely building standards.

Re:Warranty Period on Nuclear Reactors?

[LeftCoastThinker]

...which only exist in first world countries who have the money to build to them and spend the money to enforce building codes...

Installed at many US sites

[MrKaos]

I always like to remind people that this thing was older than Chernobyl. This was NOT a modern nuke plant with decent safety features that went meltdown. There is no comparison.

So often we've been reminded that the 'positive void co-efficient' safety feature of these reactors made a Chernobyl style explosion impossible, yet it happened. Rendered ineffective because TEPCO by-passed requirements to operate the reactors safely.

It's reasonable to remind people it's the same type of reactor installed at Fukushima is operating in many locations throughout the U.S.

Re:Installed at many US sites

[b0s0z0ku]

Nit to pick --

for maximum safety, you want a negative void coefficient.

i.e., you want output power to reduce by design when voids (from steam bubbles) develop in the cooling system.

Chernobyl actually had a positive void coefficient, one of many design issues that lead to the accident.

Re:Installed at many US sites

[MrKaos]

Nit to pick --

for maximum safety, you want a negative void coefficient.

Indeed, thanks for pointing that out.

Make it a Nature park

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of "return the region to something approaching normal" turn it into a nature park. Wildlife thrives in regions without man. Chernobyl Teams with wildlife, The Korean DMZ teams with wildlife, now Fukushima can team with wildlife not by spending billions to clean it up but by spending nothing and ignoring it.

100% Pneumatic/Hydraulic Automatons!

[Zurkeyon3733]

How about... DON'T keep throwing electronic filled lead-covered monstrosities at this problem and expecting a different result? The use of ZERO electronic systems, in a high pressure fluid or air based and actuator controlled unit driven by pumps and control sets from a safe distance, would seem to make much more sense. Using a PURE fiber optic camera that is nothing but a lens on the Radiation facing side, with a disk of fresh lenses behind a lead shielded enclosure. All being illuminated by a fiber optic light source, fed from the safe end... The technology for such machinery exists right now and is WAY less expensive than trying to shield electronics against such ridiculous amounts of Radiation. I assume the seals and other surfaces would need to be regularly changed out from exposure, but could be made hearty enough to do REAL work inside the damaged reactor core. Vs, just staring at it for 10 minutes while the equipment melts. This approach could also benefit from being able to test the resistance of basically EVERY composite on the planet to the effects of extreme radiation. We would be learning SOOOOO much right now. Yes its a disaster, but with the right tools we could be teaching ourselves much MORE about our darkest enemy. (JustMy2) Fin.

Re:100% Pneumatic/Hydraulic Automatons!

[Anonymous Coward]

Somewhere in Japan, a steampunk rescue mecha doujin circle is forming. The manga will be glorious.

Re:100% Pneumatic/Hydraulic Automatons!

[drinkypoo]

Fiberoptics become opaque when exposed to severe radiation for extended periods. You can't be exchanging fluid with your robot and you can't be replacing seals. So you could use pneumatics, but no existing control system permits for fine control of any kind with all the control hardware on the controlling end using pneumatics, that's a difficult problem.

I propose really fancy-pants bowden cables to solve the motion problem. I don't have a solution for the glass problem. Bowden cables are cheap enough that you might be able to just keep deploying cheap marionettes, though.

Re:100% Pneumatic/Hydraulic Automatons!

[angel'o'sphere]

When I worked the first time with "robots" and automatic machines around 1986/1987 they all were pneumatic (air, not oil).
I doubt the technology degraded over the last 30 years so much ....

Re:100% Pneumatic/Hydraulic Automatons!

[drinkypoo]

When I worked the first time with "robots" and automatic machines around 1986/1987 they all were pneumatic (air, not oil).
I doubt the technology degraded over the last 30 years so much ....

It's not about degrading. It's about having the control hardware near the radiation source, and how you can't do that.

Re:100% Pneumatic/Hydraulic Automatons!

[stoatwblr]

standard silica fibre, perhaps, but there _are_ rad-resistant fibres.

https://www.fujikura.co.uk/pro...

The problem with bowden cables or anything else you might think of as driving "cheap marionettes" is that means even more clutter/obstructions to cleanup in years to come. if you can't go in there and return/extract the device safely, then don't go in there at all. High radiation levels become low radiation levels in a surprisingly short period of time, with or without human intervention.

Re:100% Pneumatic/Hydraulic Automatons!

[angel'o'sphere]

You can do that by shielding them, or completely remote control the bots via wire.
An electric engine does not fail because of radiation, perhaps a battery would.

Re:100% Pneumatic/Hydraulic Automatons!

[drinkypoo]

You can do that by shielding them, or completely remote control the bots via wire.
An electric engine does not fail because of radiation, perhaps a battery would.

The motor won't. The control electronics will. The sensors will. You can't put any of that stuff on the robot. Even glass becomes cloudy in the presence of radiation. Radiation actually affects silica, which is why rad-hardened electronics use other substrates. But the radiation around the core is so intense that even those can't hold up.

The "robots" are going to have to be marionettes, and they're going to need a way to keep shoving new visual fiber down to the bot as the old stuff degrades, because the fiberoptic cable itself will go opaque. They will have to be driven with linkages or bowden cables or something else basically impervious to radiation (it can be embrittled, but that will take long enough to be of little concern.)

Re:100% Pneumatic/Hydraulic Automatons!

[angel'o'sphere]

The control electronics will.
It won't have control electronics, those will be in the remote controlling device.

The sensors will.
Which sensors? Radiation detection? Temperature?
Except for CCDs there hardly is anything that can fail.

The "robots" are going to have to be marionettes
Exactly :D

Re:Still got years on Shrub's emails

[HornWumpus]

DNC owned the justice department/FBI for 8 years, had their chance.

Now they can defend and wait.

The company that operated the reactors

[Anonymous Coward]

was negligent. They also were slack about maintenance because doing it right was expensive. Nuclear power plant cannot be run for unguaranteed profit. Because if you do so corners will be cut somewhere with deadly consequences. Just remember that the executives of a corporation does not care about the public. They care only about themselves and their stockholders.

impressed and disgusted

[epine]

They believe that by not allowing new nuclear plants they are safer, while the truth is that the older plants are just forced to run longer and keep getting band aid fixes.

Your two "they"s aren't even the same group. The first "they" are the Illiterate Hillbilly Collective. The second "they" are people either: A) already living too close to an operating reactor of an old design, or B) potentially living too close to a forthcoming reactor of modern design.

Second, "truth" is never singular. It might so appear from far away, but this illusion never survives a long march.

Third, it's amazing what horrible things people are "just forced" to do until something comes along that properly lines their pockets.

It's not like sites suitable for modern, safe nuclear power plants are a dime a dozen, either. The technology might be newer and better, but the available construction sites might be far inferior. Unless you build right beside the old piece of glowing junk.

Finally, if we did revive the nuclear industry to build 100 spiffy new reactors, who is to say they would stop there? Or that any old reactors would be shut down, even so?

Nothing about the nuclear industry ever screams "just".

Apparently a rationalist screed, yet somehow you managed to pack the daily triple of live wires in a single sentence, nevertheless.

Colour me impressed and disgusted.

Re:impressed and disgusted

[Anonymous Coward]

The technology might be newer and better, but the available construction sites might be far inferior. Unless you build right beside the old piece of glowing junk.

Finally, if we did revive the nuclear industry to build 100 spiffy new reactors, who is to say they would stop there? Or that any old reactors would be shut down, even so?

Okay, I'm confused. Why exactly would building a new reactor on an old site then shutting down the old reactor be a bad thing? Sure some sites maybe are unsuited for any reactor and all should be shut down and some times another fuel source makes better sense, but surely having a current generation reactor operating is better than an older one?

Meh, all I'm seeing is the usual trite crap about there is no point in trying as it will all end badly regardless crap that you see in the gun debate and such.

At any rate here are my ultimate conclusions:

1. Yes I like everyone else would love to have a magical solution with no down sides.
2. I'd rather build new nuclear plants on the same sites (if those sites are suitable) than keep old and more dangerous reactors running. That is contingent on closing the old reactors. If it is done in an orderly manner it is certainly manageable.
3. Right now of the other major cleaner sources of energy you have natural gas and solar. Natural gas isn't perfect, but it isn't nearly as bad as a lot of others. Still, we can't rely on it forever.
4. Solar might be the future, well solar plus battery, but I'm not convinced yet that it is for everyone, and I don't see how it solves the problem of heating homes in the dead of winter.
5. Nuclear, particularly as a base load source, does solve various problems, and doesn't emit CO2. The problems it does have remaining are not really engineering problems, save for the waste, which is fairly small. The biggest problem is safety, which can be compromised by incompetence, greed, or more likely a combination.

The choices aren't easy, but not choosing to work towards solutions that protect the environment is not a path I'd ever recommend. Sure some of our energy needs can be reduced through insulation and such, and some by solar, but there still seems a pretty decent space for base load power. The only way around that would be to have a solar capacity that allows everyone to live and stay somewhat warm even on the coldest days of the year.

robots aren't the answer?

[cb88]

So from what I've read they have problems with for instance the cameras in the robots degrading due to the radiation....why not do something like run a fiber optic bundle + use hydraulics to control machinery remotely with no electronics near enough to the radiation to affect it?

An abundance of caution

[Martin S.]

An abundance of caution is a pretty wise move given the circumstances.

Orange stuff?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the orange stuff alive ?

Frying robots

[stoatwblr]

Alternatively, they could just let it cool down a bit before trying, which is what was done at TMI. (It's being disassembled now) and will be done at Chernobyl (which will take a bit longer as the mess is bigger there)

The only "problem" at Fukushima which needs immediate attention is to plug the leaks that are allowing low level radionucleides into the ocean. Theyr'e not actually dangerous levels but people are spooked.

What about Japan's responsibility?

[sheph]

I have a hard time understanding why Japan is going after GE as though they had no involvement in the process. They had their own scientists, and government regulatory body examining the design. They didn't just leave everything up to GE. They looked over that design and gave it their blessing. Were they unaware that tsunamis are common in Japan? Or that pumps require a working generator to run (preferably above sea level). How many decades has that plant been generating without incident? It seems pretty dishonest to now lay all the responsibility at the feet of GE.

You Mean 'RC Cars' ....nothing new here

[Anonymous Coward]

RC Cars have been around since early 1980s at least. Why do we call them Remotely piloted Robots? Trying to make yourselves feel smarter about reinventing the wheel?