Fukushima Radiation Levels High, But Leak Plugged 322
jmcvetta wrote in with a story about Fukushima radiation levels so high that monitoring devices have been rendered useless. Levels outside the buildings exceed 100 millisieverts in some places. But the good news is that the leak is patched using 1500 liters of sodium silicate.
Units (Score:5, Insightful)
100 millisieverts? Per hour? Per day? Per century? Thanks, Slashdot, for giving us a useless number.
Re:Obligatory xkcd radiation chart (Score:5, Insightful)
100 mS is no joke (Score:3, Insightful)
So according to the chart, if you hang around an area with 100 mS per hour for an hour, you'll receive a dose likely to cause cancer. Hang around for 4 hours, and you get radiation poisoning. That's not a lot of time - it takes days of labor to do anything major. Probably takes 30 minutes just to walk around part of the plant looking for radiation leaks. This must be why it took so long to plug that water leak - no one could hang around the leak for more than brief intervals.
Heck, even refueling a diesel pump - which is just increasing the amount of highly radioactive water you have to dispose of somehow - is going to take 20 minutes at a minimum, right?
I'm sure the workers are doing what they can - sprinting through the hot areas, working in shifts, using automation when they can - but the larger the contaminated area gets and the more fission products leak the worse the problem becomes. If you cannot even enter the building the reactor is in, how can you fix anything? They can't just send in robots and spray concrete willy nilly - if the reactor cores fully melt down and form critical masses at the bottom of the reactor vessel, gigawatts of heat will be produces and burn through any containment.
They need to have active pumps flushing water through the reactor vessels and out to the cooling tower and back again. This is the only method that won't create more and more radioactive water that has to be disposed of. (because right now they are just pumping water in and it leaks out of the reactor vessel and pools somewhere)
But to do that, somehow has to enter the building, install new pumps, fix breaks in the wiring, fix holes in the pipes, install sensors, power it up, and so forth. That's many hours of labor, and beyond the dexterity of what robots can do.
http://xkcd.com/radiation/ [xkcd.com]
Re:Obligatory xkcd radiation chart (Score:5, Insightful)
They fixed th most concerning problem. There not calling the reactor fixed, nor are they saying there is no concern.
Re:Obligatory xkcd radiation chart (Score:5, Insightful)
"the maximum possible damages are basically incalculable"
which is true for almost anything, look at the gulf spill, depending on who the numbers come from it's tens of billions or hundreds.
if you see news of a plane crash and shortly afterwards someone insists that plane travel is still "safer than road travel" do you turn around and shout "air travel cheerleaders should have got on their plane" or "how about you go sift through the wreckage for bodies!!!!"
no?
of course not!
because that would be retarded.
nuclear is safer, not perfectly but it's safer than most of the alternatives.
You're more likely to die on the road to the airport(unless you live really close) but when a plane crashes it makes world headlines and a lot of people die at once.
when a car crashes it makes the local news at most unless it's someone famous.
It doesn't make world headlines but it adds up.
nuclear is kinda like that, you're far more likely to die from lung cancer from living near a coal plant or die falling off your roof while installing solar panels but that's local news stuff.
It doesn't make world headlines but it adds up.
that and scary atoms and radiation.
a smog cloud or a broken neck aren't mysterious and scary.
Re:Obligatory xkcd radiation chart (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Obligatory xkcd radiation chart (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuclear power COULD be safe if we stuck the plant owners with the whole cost of any potential disaster. As it is, they profit but we pay the costs. What incentive is there for them to spend any money on safety, when the taxpayers here and in Japan are on the hook for the damages?
Re: Good, on to the next problem -- reality check (Score:5, Insightful)
Well it does look like they have finally got this under control, at least for the most part.
Plugging one leak does not mean the situation is even close to being under control. Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said [kyodonews.jp]:
... no further leakage has been detected from the pit. But there is a possibility that the water, which has lost an outlet, could show up from other areas of the plant.
The highly radioactive water is believed to have come from the No. 2 reactor core, where fuel rods have partially melted, and ended up in the pit. The pit is connected to the No. 2 reactor turbine building and an underground trench connected to the building, both of which were found to be filled with highly contaminated water.
Thousands of tons of highly radioactive water had already been found in many places outside the reactor buildings even before the direct leak into the ocean was discovered. Is there anything more substantial than crossed fingers and wishful thinking that makes you think the flow of highly radioactive water will halt now that they've plugged the direct outlet into the ocean?
In addition:
According to estimates by TEPCO announced Wednesday, 25 percent of the nuclear fuel rods have been damaged at the No. 3 reactor. The company earlier said that 70 percent of the No. 1 reactor's fuel rods and 30 percent of the No. 2 reactor's fuel rods have been damaged.
Nishiyama said past hydrogen explosions have likely occurred due to hydrogen accumulation caused by the reaction of melted fuel rods' zirconium with steam from the coolant water. But now there is concern that hydrogen could accumulate in the No. 1 reactor under a different process involving radiation-induced decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen.
The installation of billion dollar radiation shielding [monstersandcritics.com] around the reactor buildings has to be delayed until at least September because, of the high level of radioactivity. In other words, they need to wait for the current levels of radioactivity to decay before it is safe enough to install radiation shielding. So, ISTM, the September date is optimistically assuming the ongoing contamination will magically stop. Yet, even if the shielding could be installed tomorrow:
Some experts were sceptical about the feasibility of the measure as the step would have only limited effects in blocking the release of radioactive substances.
That is because the bulk of the release of radioactivity is downward in the water, not upward into the air. The shielding story highlights the challenge they are up against. The level of radioactivity around the plants (and in the plants) is so high, it is impeding their efforts to control the amount of radioactivity escaping. For example, work to restore the primary cooling system for reactor #2 has been halted for almost two weeks because of the high levels of radiation in the turbine building. The radiation level, due to highly radioactive water in the building, is over one sievert per hour. So a worker hits their lifetime dose limit less than 15 minutes. Someone who lingers there for an 8 hour shift will die regardless of what treatment they receive. It's been reported that the level of radioactivity in reactor buildings 1, 2, and 3 is too high to measure.
They are pouring hundreds of tons of uncontaminated water onto (into?) the reactors every day to cool them. Thousands of tons of this water has come out contaminated with radioactivity and has flooded the turbine buildings, tunnels outside the buildings, and the ground. They don't know how the water is getting contaminated or the routes it is taking
Re:Obligatory xkcd radiation chart (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, we must remember all the silicon miners who died in that recent, tragic, solar power mishap.
Things would be much safer if we did not allow people to risk other people's money and lives for their own profit. Pebble bed reactors, anyone? Nuclear could be a great power source, if we made the owners responsible for all damages. Then they would have incentive to pioneer safer technology. As it is, they profit when things go right but we lose when things go wrong.
The two things that have done the most to kill nuclear power are, first, the owners and operators of nuclear plants, and second, the smug, tone deaf nuclear boosters who dog-pile on anyone with concerns over the safety of nuclear power. Berating someone to be less of a worry-wort is hardly the best way to get them on your side.
Got it, pro-nuke crowd? YOU killed nuclear power because you are elitist know -it-alls who have alienated the public by continually attempting to blow smoke up their ass. When something goes wrong, do not immediately begin downplaying people's fears and belittling them for being worried. Have some sympathy, even if you KNOW they are wrong. In fact, the more certain you are, the more you should keep your socially challenged mouths shut.
there are no safe levels (Score:5, Insightful)
I get what you are trying to say with this, but honestly when everyone says its safe, yet these kind of "accidents" can still occur it makes you step back and really weigh the positives and negatives.
For instance, in these plants they are using plutonium mox fuel. That shit has a halflife of 20,000 years. So it wont be completely nonreactive for approximately 250,000 years or 12000 human generations. Sure it shouldn't happen, and there were no doubt many mistakes by this particular company. But even if it is a possibility that this would happen, and it obviously is, should we not reconsider the long term environmental and other effects when we are possibly going to be affecting forward 12000 generations in the future?
So far in my life time (30 years) there have been 3 major nuclear accidents. Does this not at least warrant a second look? There are plenty of these unsafe plants active in the world, and yes I am aware there are safe reactor designs (CANDU). But when you factor in human greed, nuke plants run by the lowest bidder, should we even be doing it?
I was VERY pro nuclear power before this complete mess that has happened. Even though we will run out of uranium by 2100, even though fuel stays reactive for tens of thousands of years. But honestly, if the japanese cant even do it right, what hope do we have for any country out there?
The timescales alone are enough to make one pause. Can you really trust the next 12,000 generations of man to not have any accidents with spent fuel? Is that something that we should be burdening our future generations with for a short term gain today?
Further reading: 'No safe levels' of radiation in Japan [aljazeera.net]
Re:Obligatory xkcd radiation chart (Score:5, Insightful)
And THAT is the problem with limited liability in general, people can make decisions that impact billions of other humans, perhaps even killing or maiming thousands, and they get ten million dollar bonuses for "making the tough decisions."
Your example does not hold water, because I am not a corporation, I do make a living from driving, and I keep my car maintained. The nuclear power industry is, to use your example, a school bus driver who will only pay for fifty year old school buses, does not pay for proper maintenance, and boozes it up while speeding through residential areas. Oh, and I only carry the minimum insurance mandated by law, in fact, I payed to have the law written to my standards, and by law YOU must pay if I kill a bunch of kids with my reckless activity.
In general, if an activity is so potentially dangerous that no one could possibly insure it for the likely amount of damage it will cause, that activity will never become a business. Unless of course the people standing to profit from said activity are allowed to write the laws governing it themselves. Nuclear power and offshore drilling are unique in that, rather than being required to carry insurance sufficient to cover costs (which would make the business absolutely unprofitable), we, the taxpayers, are on automatically responsible, no court proceedings or bankruptcy necessary.
Do you understand what that means? The insurance industry, the industry that calculates risk, has calculated the risks of nuclear power and they want nothing to do with it. It is, according to the experts, too risky to insure. Maybe you are okay funding some fat cat CEO by covering the potential risk while letting him take home the profit, but I am not.
Where did you get the idea that the nuclear power industry pays into a fund? Do you have some kind of citation for that? I'm pretty sure they do not.
Re:Obligatory xkcd radiation chart (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear could be a great power source, if we made the owners responsible for all damages.
They used to be. And then anti-nuke idiots decided that wasn't enough. So to prevent any improvements in the nuclear industry, they continued their scare mongering so no one would get an MRI until the name was changed. As a result, people were both scared and stupid.
This had the effect of preventing old reactors from being replaced (like what you see in Japan). It meant new reactors were financially impossible. Insurance companies stopped wanting to cover these plants because of a massive number of fraudulent (fraudulent and unknowing ignorance - see anti-nuclear idiot scare mongering above) claims dating back to Three Mile Island.
Basically, idiot scare mongering anti-nukers were very successful in making the world a more dangerous AND expensive place. Energy costs went up. The cost of running and maintaining nuclear plants went up. As a result, nuclear subsidies became standard far and damage caps were required.
So literally, the only benefit of being an anti-nuclear idiot is everything is more dangerous and more expensive than reasonably should be. And that's all in thanks for providing the cheapest, safest energy source known to mankind, which in turn keeps all other energy sources cheaper.
There isn't an anti-nuke idiot who doesn't have blood on their hands. The really sad thing is, people are ignorantly scared of nuclear power but should really be scared of anti-nuclear idiots.
Re:Obligatory xkcd radiation chart (Score:4, Insightful)
My thyroid is messed up too. Not an apologist, just a realist. Even if it kills me, Nuclear kills far less people than coal.