Show me one anti-nuclear protagonist mentioning risk assessments and mitigation procedures. If they would, they would have to admit that effective procedures are in place wherever people cared about the placement and number of emergency generators (2 per reactor is not enough, 4 per reactor is standard. The shutdown German reactor at Isar-1, for example, had 8 emergency generators.), wherever they installed filtered containment vents and catalytic converters to prevent hydrogen explosions. All that is standard at least is France, Germany and Sweden. (I don't mention other countries, because I don't know anything about them and I stopped making assumption about such things on March 12th or so.) They would also have to admit that Fukushima Daiichi was one of the worst governed nuclear power plants in the world.
Hence, they don't. It is the pro-nuclear side that must make those points. All argumentation about lack in safety standards undermines the position of the anti-nuclear side, because of the anti-nuke dogma that nuclear power can't be safe, safety standards must not be talked about unless it is to dismiss the present state of safety of some plant. Talking about a lack of safety standards of a plant after an accident reinforces the revolutionary notion that safety standards can actually improve safety (as you could see in the accident-free shutdown in all other tsunami-hit powerplants) - which is not in the interest of the anti-nuclear crowd.
So what does it say about the situation, when the pro-side has to argue with arguments that the anti-side should have brought forth, while the anti-side has basically decided not to argue and resorts of FUD and dogmatism instead?
What is so hard to understand about the upper bound estimate of the average? And why do you think that mentioning deviations below the average (while citing and acknowledging deviations above the average) is misleading and discrediting - while talking exclusively about deviations above the average and not even mentioning those below is not?
We do have numbers regarding natural radioactive substances in the environment and human bodies. Among them potassium-40 which decays into Argon-40, the third most common gas in our atmosphere - about 250 times more common than CO2. We also have numbers regarding decay products of uranium in areas where there are above-average levels of those in the soil. The results show that there is no difference in health even in areas contaminated more heavily than this.
Note that it takes about 60-120Bq of Cs-137 to equal 1Bq of Alpha radiation - because there is a quality factor ("damage multiplier") of 20 involved and Alpha decay has energies between about 3 and 8 MeV, whereas Cs-137 only has a quality factor of 1 and about 1MeV. All those are measured in Bq/kg, because it is a pervasive property of the soil that won't go away.
What the BBC does say, however, is that "Some neighbouring prefectures... are partially close to the limit under our upper bound estimate and, therefore, local-scale exceedance is likely given the strong spatial variability of [caesium-137] deposition," the researchers explained in PNAS.
Note a) the abundance of weasel words and other verbal subterfuge to imply that things are really bad and b) the map shows the upper bound estimate of the average (or so I presume, given the reference to local scale exceedance). Which also means that more local measurements would very likely show that there is land suitable for agriculture (with less than 2500Bq/kg) within the evacuation zone. But of course, we all know that this is a radioactive wasteland where no man shall trespass and all evidence to the contrary is an obvious lie.
Go, read it yourself. You don't even read the links you're posting. And you still haven't said a single word about the amounts and isotopes of plutonium that were found. You're a researcher of the field. You should know them, but obviously they are insignificant.
The offshore oil and gas industry is responsible for a large proportion of the total alpha-emitting radioactivity entering UK waters, as a result of discharges of the ‘produced water’, which contains elevated levels of the naturally occurring radionuclides radium-226 (226Ra), radium-228 (228Ra) and lead-210 (210Pb).
Having searched the CERRIE report for all places in which plutonium was mentioned, not one of them managed to provide either isotopes or amounts of plutonium actually found anywhere. Nor did you. Having done this to no avail, I will not so much as twitch a finger before you stop the subterfuges and provide those numbers. Having pointed out that you are a "researcher involved in the work" you should have very little trouble to provide them and you should do so, as you happen to go around, telling people to provide numbers for you.
You're the researcher, you work for the public - go do your work. Provide the isotopes and amount of Plutonium found at those houses supposedly contaminated by the sea spray of the Irish sea.
In fact, you can find plutonium wherever you care to take samples, because people put them into huge bombs blowing them up all over the world. Some 500 of them all told (not counting subsurface tests). Just saying that you found plutonium at some place without providing isotopes and amount means nothing at all.
But still, just by mentioning plutonium being found somewhere was proof of how badly the Irish sea is contaminated. As a researcher, you should have known very well, that this is insufficient.
Conclusions, anyone?
(Mine would be, that picking a fight and trying to win it by pointing out "I'm a researcher" doesn't work with people who have dealt with enough "researchers" of that field who couldn't tell an atom from a molecule if you put a gun to their head.)
And those 24 references would be which? Please include paragraph, line, isotopes and amount. Those are your demands, not mine. Also, for all I know you're a dog in front of a keyboard.
Strange. Now that it is no longer your argument, you suddenly demand "line and paragraph" and mentioning by "isotope and quantity". None of which you yourself provided so long as it was your argument.
Don't you think that you should stop just dropping the term Plutonium as if this was a viable argument, if you can't even accept it yourself when somebody else does it?
If the similarities are that obvious, how come you are ignoring the differences? Like the number of people living in Belgium.
If Mecklenburg-Western Pommerania had the same population density as Belgium - 350 per km^2 instead of the 75 per km^2 it has, it would have a population of 8 mio people instead of 1.7 mio. And, given the same energy consumption per capita, the share would be down to less than 12%.
Look up what the Mark I containment looks like. The point is the following: the containment is inside a building. What exploded was the building around the containment - which unfortunately also housed all the plumbing and pumps that go into the reactor. A conceptional fault of both the BWR and RMBK (aka Chernobyl) designs. In all other kinds of reactors (PWR as in Three Mile Island, canadian CANDU reactors, British Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors, sodium cooled breeder reactors as the BN-800 and so forth ), none of the plumbing outside of the containment is connected directly to the interior of the reactor.
The best policy is still not to have an explosion in the first place - by using catalytic converters that can keep the hydrogen content of the air below explosive or combustible levels.
Although, actually, the very best policy is not to have hydrogen (and its compounds) anywhere near a reactor. Even better is not to have such a large radioactive inventory in a reactor - as in molten salt reactors, that are purged of fission products once a week or so, instead of once a year. Which reduces the amount of fission products that could possibly be set free in any accident - conceivable or not - to 1-2% the level of conventional reactors.
At the same time this reduces the heat produced by radioactive decay after shutdown. They also feature convective cooling - no pumps are needed to keep the reactor interior from heating up to several thousand degrees and melting through the reactor vessel. In fact, the interior of the reactor will melt through the reactor vessel - but that's a feature, because it flows into a set of storage tanks designed to keep it deeply sub-critical and cooled passively.
The tsunami problems could have been solved/prevented simply by building sufficiently high seawalls (about 10m higher than the ones that were build after the 1896 and 1933 tsunamis) or not settling on the coastal plain. It would have also helped if people had not gone berserk with tsunami warnings after the 2004 tsunami.
(I put this on my blog to avoid cluttering up the comments.)
There is also the case of the Freshwater Sardinella that evolved from seawater sardines that were caught in Lake Taal, after the Mount Taal volcano erupted in the 18th century and closed the direct connection with the sea. Rainwater pushed out the saltwater, but some Sardines survived the transition.
Evolution doesn't take millions of years. (Although, admittedly, the longer the time span the more impressive the results - including those that are impressively resistant to change.)
Or if you feel that a 100W system simply has too much of an impact on your electricity bill.
If you want to keep it running for an average of 10 hours a day, it will consume 365 kWh per year. Even in the USA that's $36.50 per year. In places were people don't waste energy like they own the world - devastatingly poor countries like Germany - you're talking upwards of $100 per year.
What bothers me about this, is that there is a certain likelihood, that the reason why the story was released so early, was not so much that the researchers hoped to get more people to review their findings, as that they might have hoped to get the necessary funding and/or intstrument time for this experiment faster (or even get it at all).
Mind you, running the experiment the way they now do is certainly the right thing to do if you want to measure the speed of neutrinos. The former experiment struck me as highly unreliable and not really suited to do the job - because the initial pulse was so much longer than the time delays they wanted to measure. It would be unfortunate, if this became a precedent to releasing sensationalist findings in order to get the wherewithal necessary to do experiments properly.
It is true that researchers start with simple assumptions. But they must also make sure their assumptions are not too simple. Especially not if those lead to the conclusion that is basically an allegation of the government/TEPCO/whoever having hidden a release of radioactivity as in "This seems to indicate that contaminated air was leaking from the containment as pressure was building up, even before active venting started."
What they should have done, is to abandon their original starting assumptions and explain why they did so. (The paper has some 60 pages, there's enough room for that.) And I'm quite sure they would have done this, but of course, this would have required them to actually understand the accident mechanisms in the first place and not merely model the atmospheric transport mechanisms, which they obviously couldn't be bothered to do. This is all the more important since initial assumptions influence the result of their simulations.
Oh, so that is what we're talking about. If only I had known earlier!
Just about any kind of electricity generation - including the electricity you're using to read this - involves hazardous materials and environmental damage in its generation process. Yes, that means care should be taken. That doesn't make any of them inherently green or un-green, it just means that one power company was an asshat for ignoring all the flaws and not implementing any of the security measures developed in the last three decades. (Which is the same that can be said about Chinese electronics manufacturers.)
We're not talking about some amount of hydrogen creeping through seals by osmosis. We're talking about the pressure inside the containment being high enough to create a gap in the sealing of the lid on the containment (that has to be opened when you change the fuel rods in the reactor) through which the gas could escape - including copious amounts of water vapor. The size of the molecules plays no role here.
And 90% of the geothermal energy is released into the oceans. Oceans not only cover 70% of the earth, they also have much thinner crust with some 10-15km. Continental plates have a thickness on the order of 40-60km, which gives them much better thermal isolation. So, we're down to 4TW of thermal on the continental crust and we're not even talking about accessibility. You can't drill closely spaced boreholes and maintain their associated power stations all over the world. And "all over the world" includes Antarctica, Greenland, Siberia, Kanada, all the rainforests, all the deserts, all the mountain ranges in the rest of the world.
Nor are we talking about conversion factors. For high temperatures (on the order of 500K) 20% are possible, but more commonly found temperatures of 400K practically achieved efficiencies drop to something on the order of 7%.
In general, don't sneer at geothermal for heating, especially in volcanically active areas. But don't kid yourself about its potential to generate electricity.
Slashdot Mirror
Show me one anti-nuclear protagonist mentioning risk assessments and mitigation procedures. If they would, they would have to admit that effective procedures are in place wherever people cared about the placement and number of emergency generators (2 per reactor is not enough, 4 per reactor is standard. The shutdown German reactor at Isar-1, for example, had 8 emergency generators.), wherever they installed filtered containment vents and catalytic converters to prevent hydrogen explosions. All that is standard at least is France, Germany and Sweden. (I don't mention other countries, because I don't know anything about them and I stopped making assumption about such things on March 12th or so.) They would also have to admit that Fukushima Daiichi was one of the worst governed nuclear power plants in the world.
Hence, they don't. It is the pro-nuclear side that must make those points. All argumentation about lack in safety standards undermines the position of the anti-nuclear side, because of the anti-nuke dogma that nuclear power can't be safe, safety standards must not be talked about unless it is to dismiss the present state of safety of some plant. Talking about a lack of safety standards of a plant after an accident reinforces the revolutionary notion that safety standards can actually improve safety (as you could see in the accident-free shutdown in all other tsunami-hit powerplants) - which is not in the interest of the anti-nuclear crowd.
So what does it say about the situation, when the pro-side has to argue with arguments that the anti-side should have brought forth, while the anti-side has basically decided not to argue and resorts of FUD and dogmatism instead?
What is so hard to understand about the upper bound estimate of the average? And why do you think that mentioning deviations below the average (while citing and acknowledging deviations above the average) is misleading and discrediting - while talking exclusively about deviations above the average and not even mentioning those below is not?
We do have numbers regarding natural radioactive substances in the environment and human bodies. Among them potassium-40 which decays into Argon-40, the third most common gas in our atmosphere - about 250 times more common than CO2. We also have numbers regarding decay products of uranium in areas where there are above-average levels of those in the soil. The results show that there is no difference in health even in areas contaminated more heavily than this.
Note that it takes about 60-120Bq of Cs-137 to equal 1Bq of Alpha radiation - because there is a quality factor ("damage multiplier") of 20 involved and Alpha decay has energies between about 3 and 8 MeV, whereas Cs-137 only has a quality factor of 1 and about 1MeV. All those are measured in Bq/kg, because it is a pervasive property of the soil that won't go away.
What the BBC does say, however, is that "Some neighbouring prefectures... are partially close to the limit under our upper bound estimate and, therefore, local-scale exceedance is likely given the strong spatial variability of [caesium-137] deposition," the researchers explained in PNAS.
Note a) the abundance of weasel words and other verbal subterfuge to imply that things are really bad and b) the map shows the upper bound estimate of the average (or so I presume, given the reference to local scale exceedance). Which also means that more local measurements would very likely show that there is land suitable for agriculture (with less than 2500Bq/kg) within the evacuation zone. But of course, we all know that this is a radioactive wasteland where no man shall trespass and all evidence to the contrary is an obvious lie.
Go, read it yourself. You don't even read the links you're posting. And you still haven't said a single word about the amounts and isotopes of plutonium that were found. You're a researcher of the field. You should know them, but obviously they are insignificant.
Having searched the CERRIE report for all places in which plutonium was mentioned, not one of them managed to provide either isotopes or amounts of plutonium actually found anywhere. Nor did you. Having done this to no avail, I will not so much as twitch a finger before you stop the subterfuges and provide those numbers. Having pointed out that you are a "researcher involved in the work" you should have very little trouble to provide them and you should do so, as you happen to go around, telling people to provide numbers for you.
You're the researcher, you work for the public - go do your work. Provide the isotopes and amount of Plutonium found at those houses supposedly contaminated by the sea spray of the Irish sea.
In fact, you can find plutonium wherever you care to take samples, because people put them into huge bombs blowing them up all over the world. Some 500 of them all told (not counting subsurface tests). Just saying that you found plutonium at some place without providing isotopes and amount means nothing at all.
But still, just by mentioning plutonium being found somewhere was proof of how badly the Irish sea is contaminated. As a researcher, you should have known very well, that this is insufficient.
Conclusions, anyone?
(Mine would be, that picking a fight and trying to win it by pointing out "I'm a researcher" doesn't work with people who have dealt with enough "researchers" of that field who couldn't tell an atom from a molecule if you put a gun to their head.)
And those 24 references would be which? Please include paragraph, line, isotopes and amount. Those are your demands, not mine. Also, for all I know you're a dog in front of a keyboard.
Strange. Now that it is no longer your argument, you suddenly demand "line and paragraph" and mentioning by "isotope and quantity". None of which you yourself provided so long as it was your argument.
Don't you think that you should stop just dropping the term Plutonium as if this was a viable argument, if you can't even accept it yourself when somebody else does it?
In the case of Fukushima Daiichi at least, the issue was indeed lack of regulation actually put in place - long before the accident. http://www.interaksyon.com/article/9480/fukushima-long-ranked-most-hazardous-plant
Wrong. It is in seaspray, it is on the beach and it is in everybody's homes, and lungs, and stomachs and what have you.
I'm sure there was also Lead-210 in it - which is almost exactly 1000 times more radioactive than Plutonium-239 ... and occurs naturally.
If the similarities are that obvious, how come you are ignoring the differences? Like the number of people living in Belgium.
If Mecklenburg-Western Pommerania had the same population density as Belgium - 350 per km^2 instead of the 75 per km^2 it has, it would have a population of 8 mio people instead of 1.7 mio. And, given the same energy consumption per capita, the share would be down to less than 12%.
Look up what the Mark I containment looks like. The point is the following: the containment is inside a building. What exploded was the building around the containment - which unfortunately also housed all the plumbing and pumps that go into the reactor. A conceptional fault of both the BWR and RMBK (aka Chernobyl) designs. In all other kinds of reactors (PWR as in Three Mile Island, canadian CANDU reactors, British Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors, sodium cooled breeder reactors as the BN-800 and so forth ), none of the plumbing outside of the containment is connected directly to the interior of the reactor.
The best policy is still not to have an explosion in the first place - by using catalytic converters that can keep the hydrogen content of the air below explosive or combustible levels.
Although, actually, the very best policy is not to have hydrogen (and its compounds) anywhere near a reactor. Even better is not to have such a large radioactive inventory in a reactor - as in molten salt reactors, that are purged of fission products once a week or so, instead of once a year. Which reduces the amount of fission products that could possibly be set free in any accident - conceivable or not - to 1-2% the level of conventional reactors.
At the same time this reduces the heat produced by radioactive decay after shutdown. They also feature convective cooling - no pumps are needed to keep the reactor interior from heating up to several thousand degrees and melting through the reactor vessel. In fact, the interior of the reactor will melt through the reactor vessel - but that's a feature, because it flows into a set of storage tanks designed to keep it deeply sub-critical and cooled passively.
The tsunami problems could have been solved/prevented simply by building sufficiently high seawalls (about 10m higher than the ones that were build after the 1896 and 1933 tsunamis) or not settling on the coastal plain. It would have also helped if people had not gone berserk with tsunami warnings after the 2004 tsunami. (I put this on my blog to avoid cluttering up the comments.)
There is also the case of the Freshwater Sardinella that evolved from seawater sardines that were caught in Lake Taal, after the Mount Taal volcano erupted in the 18th century and closed the direct connection with the sea. Rainwater pushed out the saltwater, but some Sardines survived the transition.
Evolution doesn't take millions of years. (Although, admittedly, the longer the time span the more impressive the results - including those that are impressively resistant to change.)
That doesn't change a thing about the cost of the energy used by the computer.
Or if you feel that a 100W system simply has too much of an impact on your electricity bill.
If you want to keep it running for an average of 10 hours a day, it will consume 365 kWh per year. Even in the USA that's $36.50 per year. In places were people don't waste energy like they own the world - devastatingly poor countries like Germany - you're talking upwards of $100 per year.
The Raspberry is using 1W at full power.
1 or 2 percent of the general population is a market of 70 to 140 million people ....
What bothers me about this, is that there is a certain likelihood, that the reason why the story was released so early, was not so much that the researchers hoped to get more people to review their findings, as that they might have hoped to get the necessary funding and/or intstrument time for this experiment faster (or even get it at all).
Mind you, running the experiment the way they now do is certainly the right thing to do if you want to measure the speed of neutrinos. The former experiment struck me as highly unreliable and not really suited to do the job - because the initial pulse was so much longer than the time delays they wanted to measure. It would be unfortunate, if this became a precedent to releasing sensationalist findings in order to get the wherewithal necessary to do experiments properly.
It is true that researchers start with simple assumptions. But they must also make sure their assumptions are not too simple. Especially not if those lead to the conclusion that is basically an allegation of the government/TEPCO/whoever having hidden a release of radioactivity as in "This seems to indicate that contaminated air was leaking from the containment as pressure was building up, even before active venting started."
What they should have done, is to abandon their original starting assumptions and explain why they did so. (The paper has some 60 pages, there's enough room for that.) And I'm quite sure they would have done this, but of course, this would have required them to actually understand the accident mechanisms in the first place and not merely model the atmospheric transport mechanisms, which they obviously couldn't be bothered to do. This is all the more important since initial assumptions influence the result of their simulations.
Oh, so that is what we're talking about. If only I had known earlier!
Just about any kind of electricity generation - including the electricity you're using to read this - involves hazardous materials and environmental damage in its generation process. Yes, that means care should be taken. That doesn't make any of them inherently green or un-green, it just means that one power company was an asshat for ignoring all the flaws and not implementing any of the security measures developed in the last three decades. (Which is the same that can be said about Chinese electronics manufacturers.)
Go to China and you will see places were people weren't evacuated and got cancer because solar panels were build there.
We're not talking about some amount of hydrogen creeping through seals by osmosis. We're talking about the pressure inside the containment being high enough to create a gap in the sealing of the lid on the containment (that has to be opened when you change the fuel rods in the reactor) through which the gas could escape - including copious amounts of water vapor. The size of the molecules plays no role here.
And 90% of the geothermal energy is released into the oceans. Oceans not only cover 70% of the earth, they also have much thinner crust with some 10-15km. Continental plates have a thickness on the order of 40-60km, which gives them much better thermal isolation. So, we're down to 4TW of thermal on the continental crust and we're not even talking about accessibility. You can't drill closely spaced boreholes and maintain their associated power stations all over the world. And "all over the world" includes Antarctica, Greenland, Siberia, Kanada, all the rainforests, all the deserts, all the mountain ranges in the rest of the world.
Nor are we talking about conversion factors. For high temperatures (on the order of 500K) 20% are possible, but more commonly found temperatures of 400K practically achieved efficiencies drop to something on the order of 7%.
In general, don't sneer at geothermal for heating, especially in volcanically active areas. But don't kid yourself about its potential to generate electricity.