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Japan Confirms First Radiation-Linked Death Out of Fukushima (bbc.co.uk)
Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare announced for the first time that a man employed at the Fukushima nuclear power plant died of lung cancer linked to radiation exposure. "The man, who was in his 50s, died from lung cancer that was diagnosed in 2016," reports the BBC. "Japan's government had previously agreed that radiation caused illness in four workers but this is the first acknowledged death." From the report: The Fukushima reactor suffered meltdowns after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and a tsunami in March 2011. Cooling systems were wrecked at the plant on Japan's north-east coast and radioactive material leaked out. The employee who died had worked at atomic power stations since 1980 and was in charge of measuring radiation at the Fukushima No 1 plant shortly after its meltdown. He worked there at least twice after it was damaged, and had worn a face mask and protective suit, Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare said. After hearing opinions from a panel of radiologists and other experts, the ministry ruled that the man's family should be paid compensation.
However, this was the worst accident and it required ppl to go in due to screw-ups. So, yeah, there will be more.
This is why we need SMRs, or 4th gen reactors, that will not have these issues.
Problem is, that 3rd gen reactors continue to be built. Worst, we have given the tech for 3rd gen to China and they, with their quality, are now building those reactors.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The first two were found in the basement turbine room a few days after the accident. But if "out of Fukushima" implies "out of" as opposed to "in", sure.
Those deaths were not due to radiation. Best guess is that they sheltered there from the tsunami but the wave flooded the room and they drowned, and the radiation came later. A possible radiation link to their death would be they drowned in radioactive water, meaning that if they died from acute radiation poisoning then it only killed them sooner and would have drowned anyway. In either case it was the tsunami that killed them and any possible link to radiation in the cause of their death is ambiguous at best.
The article in on the first confirmed death from radiation that came from the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The other two deaths were not confirmed to be related to the radiation as a more likely cause is the turbine hall being flooded and they drowned.
What I find rather disturbing in all of this is that they knew of a risk of a tsunami flooding the plant but dug out several meters of dirt and rock to lower the plant closer to sea level. Some of that might have been necessary since the bed rock was eroded and unstable but they still dug deeper than many deemed necessary to make it easier to bring in building materials from ships, and to make the cooling pipes to the sea shorter (and therefore cheaper).
When issues were discovered TEPCO dragged their feet to make changes to address threats of flooding. The possibility of the diesel backup generators getting flooded was known. They still had power available from the grid to drive cooling pumps, and batteries. The triple redundant safety systems failed because no one could fathom something so large that it could take out the grid, render the generators unusable, and do so with such damage that it could not be repaired before the batteries ran dead.
This one in a million occurrence of events happened and we still saw only one confirmed death from radiation. Is nuclear power dangerous? Of course. Nuclear power is also the safest energy source we know of. Japan doesn't have a lot of options on getting electricity where they are. They don't have a lot of land for putting up solar collectors and windmills, or much for hydro power. They shipped in a lot of coal while they checked out all their reactors and this impacted air quality. Had they kept doing that then they'd see far more deaths from air pollution.
Nuclear power doesn't live in a vacuum, if it's not nuclear power then it's something far more deadly.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
A nuke plant might operate for 60 years. All the waste must be safely stored. Storage is not free, and security is expensive.
A hydroelectric dam will last that long too, as will a coal fired power plant. These sites must also be kept secure. Storing the spent fuel on the same site as the nuclear power plant is common practice, meaning the storage may not be "free" but it is minimal and included in the cost of constructing and maintaining the site. If the Democrats hadn't been holding up nuclear material disposal sites like Yucca Mountain for 30 years we'd have had this problem solved. There is no storage problem but what the Democrats created.
Some of the waste becomes safe in 30 years,
Actually 30 years is the half life of some of the more dangerous isotopes. A "rule of thumb" on when this becomes safe is ten half lives, so more like 300 years.
but Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years.
First of all Pu-239 is a very valuable material for nuclear fuel and weapons, storing this as "waste" is idiotic. Second, the radiation flux is an inverse of the half life. The longer the half life the less radiation it emits in a given time period. With a half life this long it is effectively inert. It's still a heavy metal and so should be handled with care, much like one would treat lead. it's also something that is not known to blow away, dissolve in water, or otherwise move from where it's put. There's far more dangerous isotopes to deal with than Pu-239.
That sort of kills any idea of "cheap in the long run." In the long run, the short run, any way you slice it, nuclear power is the most expensive way to generate electricity ever conceived, and will remain so.
Really? Perhaps you could provide a source for that. Oh, and include the storage costs for that wind and solar, because that's going to be necessary to match load to supply.
That said, we still need nuclear power and will need it for probably 100-250 years, and we should be building more plants. But eventually, sooner than later, the entire nuclear industry must be decommissioned and mothballed, because we have safer, cleaner, greener, less complicated and less expensive ways to generate electricity.
100 years? Well, that's convenient. That's something no one reading this could ever confirm on their own. In that time we'd probably find a way to deal with all the radioactive waste we produce now and nuclear power will be powering colonies on Pluto or something.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.