Leak Found In Fukushima Tank Holding Radioactive Water 189
The fallout from tsunami damage at Japan's Fukushima plant isn't over yet. New submitter OldJuke writes "Tokyo Electric power Co. said about 120 tons of the water are believed to have breached [a water storage tank's] inner linings, some of it possibly leaking into the soil. TEPCO is moving the water to a nearby tank at the Fukushima Dai-chi plant — a process that could take several days ...More than 270,000 tons of highly radioactive water is already stored in hundreds of gigantic tanks and another underground tank. They are visible even at the plant's entrance and built around the compound, taking up more than 80 percent of its storage capacity. TEPCO expects the amount to double over three years and plans to build hundreds of more tanks by mid-2015 to meet the demand."
THIS DID NOT HAPPEN (Score:3, Insightful)
This did not happen. Nothing to see here.
There are no problems with nuclear power. It is good and glorious.
No one will ever be harmed by nuclear power. You can trust it. It is good.
Sincerely, the Slashdot nuclear re-education committee
Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN (Score:5, Informative)
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Right now we're talking about US and Japan, both of whom have ample geothermal resources - as does all of South America, Indonesia - the entire Ring of Fire.
There are some places that geothermal isn't apt for, but as the technology evolves they grow fewer. You would think Russia isn't a geothermal powerhouse, but they have the Siberian Traps [wikipedia.org] and have more potential even than the US. North and South America, Russia, India, China, Pakistan all have ample geothermal resources, and that's the home of 90% of
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Geothermal is the baseload power that is the perfect counterpoint to wind and solar. It can be ramped up at dusk and down at dawn; increase output when the wind doesn't blow, and decrease it when it does. It can exceed its base for years while alternative plants are being built and then decrease it to avoid depleting the thermal resource. You can't do any of those things with nuclear power.
America's poster child for geothermal, situated in the world's most geothermally active region, is perpetually over budget and under production and also produced a superfund site in the earlier years of its operation, because they were burying the slurry produced by pressure-washing the turbines in drums off of butts canyon rd. More recently (and ongoing) they've had to pump treated sewage into the ground (as an available source of water) to keep what production they do have up, because they have depleted t
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Ah, Drinkypoo, you're the local NIMBY for this one. Sorry, but that's how it is.
When you call me a NIMBY because I'm reporting the facts about geothermal power in the USA, you make yourself a slashbot. You're no different from all the idiots who shake pom-poms for nuclear power even as it is abused to horrible, long-lasting effect. It's a nice theory that geothermal power would be good for the USA, but the fact is that it won't change anything. It can be done wrong, and because this is the USA, it will.
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Not all of them. But that's not what you're talking about, is it.
ALL sources of energy, and ALL construction leads to deaths. So does driving cars. The question is, what's a reasonable balance.
It isn't clear to me that fission power is a net benefit. It may be, but all the governments cook the books and subsidize various energy provision methods in such varying degrees that I find it impossible to be sure. It *is* clear that the companies won't build and operate the plants without governments idemnifyi
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Thank you for proving that you are a complete knuckledragger.
Nuclear already triggered at least 2 non survivable contaminated zone onearth. And the mass casualties will only be seen in 10 to 20 years. (or at least mass thyroid cancer patients).
Plus you are totally ignoring the several workers death by cardiac arrest of cleanup workers or the untraceable illness of the unproperly declared/registered/followed cleanup temp workers.
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You clearly don't mean what you say, or shouldn't, as cockroaches have been found eating the insulation inside working nuclear plants. And, IIRC, radiodurans has been found within the core of working reactors. (Not, of course, where the temperature was above the boiling point of water.)
If you mean places that are officially too dangerous for people to reside there, yes, there are many. Within the reactors, e.g. If you mean the official exclusion zones, people have lived there for years. I don't know ho
Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN (Score:5, Informative)
Coal must be the most often used straw man ever. Coal is not the only other way of generating electricity. Japan in particular has vast geothermal resources, for example.
Japan wanted nuclear because it made them look modern and technologically advances (everyone was at it in the 60s, which is also when they developed the world's first high speed train and launched their first satellite). They also wanted it because it means they could build a nuclear weapon in a few months if necessary, but don't actually need to become a nuclear sate with all the antagonism that would generate.
Every nuclear plant in Japan went offline at once, and they coped. No blackouts during the summer. No collapse of the economy or return to an agrarian society. If anything is spurred demand for more efficient products as people wanted to do their bit to help. The US seems to assume that more watts = better life, where as Japan, like most places, assumes that less watts and less pollution through efficiency = better life. They have a lot of cool tech now like whole-house battery packs - wouldn't you love you have a whole house UPS powered by free energy from the sun?
So despite pressure on politicians from energy companies and certain parts of industry to restart reactors it is unlikely that the majority will ever come back online due to public opposition and the rapid rise of renewable energy and more efficient devices. People also look at what has happened to the people who used to live near Fukushima and the farmers and fishermen who live in the wider area, and they don't want it to happen again in a country that has regular large earthquakes and occasional tsunami.
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"wouldn't you love you have a whole house UPS powered by free energy from the sun?"
I could have that now, and save thousands by fabbing some of it and installing all of it myself.
It's not cost-effective for what I want, which is to be able to run my heat pump, appiances, power tools, welders and air compressors.
If you want one and your needs are less, there are plenty of resources online. Have at it.
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I don't think you understand the concept for a UPS. The idea is to keep essential stuff like your fridge running when the power goes out, so all your food isn't ruined. Maybe run the TV to watch the news, get some idea of when power will be back on too, or charge up your mobile phone.
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Except that
- they had to restart one nuclear power plant in the south because they had not enough electricity to keep factories running
- east of japan is running every one of their old coal and their current LPG plants at maximum and imports billions yen worth of fossile fules every month
Of course Japan didn't fall back to a pre-industrial civilization, but if there is nothing done, it will no longer be a big industrial nation because it is just not economical feasable to run industry in a country where the
Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN (Score:4, Insightful)
Wut? Exercise and eat as healthily as you like. Just don't expect that to "effectively" prevent cancer if you are exposed to significant amounts of radiation.
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Indeed, I said prevent, not cure. It is a healthier lifestyle that is the likely cause for the people exposed to the Hiroshima bomb to have a lower than average cancer rate.
Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not totally clear. A strong immune system can often kill off a cancer before it becomes a problem. Usually before it's detected. (Admittedly, not always. Sometimes it's a cance of the immune system. Or of an area that the immune system can't reach.)
So, yes, some of it's chance. Some of it's your genetic history (epigenetic as well as inherent). Some of it's diet. Perhaps some of it's exercise...though I'm not clear whether exercise creates or prevents it, or perhaps both.
Note that the dose of radiation that gives one person cancer will leave another unaffected. This is a combination of lottery and everything else. It's not pure lottery. But it's also not pure everything else.
What you CAN say is that if you expose a population to a certain level of radiation, then number of cancers will increase by a certain amount. There are large error bars except at the extreme ends, and possibly there, but it's still a reasonably defensible statement. (N.B.: *I* couldn't make that statement, as I can't quantify any of this. But I assert that there are those who reasonably can make that statement, though they *ought* to be more explicit about the error bars than I ever hear them being.)
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Why, whenever anyone says anything the slightest bit negative about nuclear power here on Slashdot, does someone come and start whining about coal?
Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN (Score:5, Insightful)
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If we want nuclear power to succeed, and it should, we need to look at the real problem - lack of regulation.
Bull shit. Fukushima Daiichi failed for two reasons. One, because it was built where it should not have been built (at the insistence of General Electric, and forced upon Japan by the US Gov't.) Two, being built where it should not have been built, it was then built without taking into account existing historical records concerning flooding and taking adequate measures to protect the system from flooding (e.g. a great wall-esque seawall, offsite backup power or at least elevated generators, et cetera.) Both
Re:THIS DID NOT HAPPEN (Score:5, Insightful)
No amount of regulation would fix the problems with Fukushima Daiichi
No, but it would've stopped it being built there in the first place without the proper protections against tsunamis.
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There is actually some serious doubt over whether you can build a nuclear plant that could survive a magnitude 9 quake and tsunami if it happened near by. By the time the quake reached Fukushima it had dissipated much of its energy, but it still damaged the plant's cooling system and quite possibly caused this leaking as well.
Nuclear plants in Japan are designed to survive a magnitude 7.5 quake, based on the assumption that most of the force will be lateral. Since the scale is logarithmic the difference bet
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I think his poiint was that regulation CAUSED it to be built where and how it was. Regulation can't solve the problem when the regulators ARE the problem.
That said, the US has many such plants that weren't imposed on it by regulators, but which are kept running despite regulations because the operating entities have more political pull than do the regulators (or at least the technologists of the regulatory agency). So again, regulations aren't the answer, though if they were properly enforced they would b
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Because its an easy target? Probably also because the relative panic over nuclear power rubs geeks the wrong way: "Those peasants are being anti science again. WHY won't they look at the math?!".
I don't think that is very fair. I'm a geek and I've been explaining the dangers of Nuclear power from an engineering and science perspective for many years now.
I understand the dogmatic type of person you are talking about but I think it has more to do with social proof and the beliefs a person holds about Nuclear Power than being a geek. It's pretty easy to get lulled into complacency by the nuclear industries propaganda and the long term nature of the industry.
There are a lot of aspects to the issues
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Because a typical coal plant causes more dollars in health problems, and puts more radioactive material into the environment, than a typical nuclear plant. And then there's the carbon dioxide.
The nuclear industry likes comparing to coal (Score:3, Interesting)
Why, whenever anyone says anything the slightest bit negative about nuclear power here on Slashdot, does someone come and start whining about coal?
Coal is traditional and cheap. Coal-fired plants have the least startup cost and the quickest time to operation. Nuclear proponents need to sell their advantages over coal. They have a point - to a point - but like all admen they are blinded by the money.
If the entire US converted to nuclear power electricity generation (beyond the huge share we get from hydroelectric) that would not slow down US coal mining, natural gas or oil production a whit. The coal would be shipped overland by trains, the gas an
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Slashdot is supported in part by coal industry shills.
You know, if Slashdot were really supported by every flavor of shill that is attributed to this site, then Dice Holdings picked a great meal ticket. Given the fact that Slashdot has just now figured out part of unicode (and then blundered several steps back with the mobile site), I find this a bit hard to believe.
Or maybe Timothy et. al. are just getting rich. Filthy rich. 1% rich.
Or maybe not.
The value of a free thing approaches zero (Score:2)
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There might actually be a ring of truth, though for the opposite cause and not on slashdot specifically.
The coal industry has a very powerful lobby. The coal union itself is very powerful, far more powerful than the corporate interests. Combine the two though and you have a great combination for retarding nuclear research and development.
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...er, I mean nuclear industry shills, not coal industry. By the way, where are all the coal industry shills? If Slashdot is overwhelmed by nuclear apologists, it's kind of weird that the coal industry hasn't noticed and sent some of their own.
Local television and radio stations in my city (Pittsburgh) have coal and natural gas shill commercials at least once every commercial break. Range Resource and Consol Energy are the biggest offenders on telling us how fracking and coal power do not fuck up our environment [patch.com]. When documents say otherwise, they dissapear [npr.org].
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That statement means nothing in absolute terms. You need to compare it with something else for a meaningful insight.
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Bah! Little league. (Score:3, Interesting)
Hanford Washington USA
April 02, 2013
"A nuclear safety board has warned a key U.S. senator that underground tanks holding radioactive
waste at the nation's most contaminated nuclear site pose a possible risk of explosion."
http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2013/04/nuclear_safety_board_warns_of.html [oregonlive.com]
I as everybody else in this area are "down winders". A tank blows we will certainly know about it.
These tanks have some of the most radioactive materials "contained"; the left overs of
30 some years of Plutonium production.
A lot of work has been done to the tanks to stop the leaks that have "flowed" for many years.
The leaks are now... well one can't say as everyday it's different; tomorrow they may well be gone.
I'm sure if they could, they would have by now so not sweating it myself.
Such is our bane for helping stop the japs.
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The UK has similar problems with radioactive waste and contaminated water stored in open pools where the birds can get at them and leaking into the ground. It seems like once all the profit has been made the power companies running nuclear sites suddenly lose interest and aren't even willing to spend money building reliable storage.
Fukushima's leak is unforgivable since such forces should have been accounted for in the design (which was only rated for magnitude 7.5 quakes). There have been questions ask abo
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Such is our bane for helping stop the japs.
Nah, such is our bane for divorcing science from policy. There are people who want to buy up that 'waste' that endangers you and your family and 'burn' it as fuel in more advanced reactors, eliminating 97% of the waste and converting that highly-radioactive 300,000 year waste into minimally-radioactive 600-year waste in the process.
Their efforts have been (and are being) thwarted by the same people who want to tax and regulate the carbon economy.
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Here's the PowerPoint version [fairewinds.org] so's you don't have to sit through 30 minutes of video.
And how bad is that? (Score:2)
And when you read "highly contaminated water", remember that bananas [forbes.com] are too radioactive to meet Japanese food
The problem with nuclear power is (Score:2, Offtopic)
Cost cutting, and imperfect solutions.As well as other things that happen in The Real World to fallible human beings.
Why everyone on slashdot defends to death nuclear power is beyond my understanding. The waste lasts for tens to HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of years. You cannot possibly ensure anythings containment on that time scale.
We have a molten planet full of heat, a source a few tens of km away from every person. We have a fusion reactor wirelessly sending power to the planet. People need to figure out that
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Why everyone on slashdot defends to death nuclear power is beyond my understanding. The waste lasts for tens to HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of years.
Who cares?
I mean, seriously: you're worried that someone might get cancer hundreds of thousands of years in the future?
You really think that's something worth worrying about?
In even a single thousand years, our descendants will be living in space or in caves, depending on whether or not we listen to the doomsayers. Worrying about nuclear waste thousands of years in the future is just insane.
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Yeah, not worrying about the future has brought us all sorts of good things historically...
Or not.
Re:The problem with nuclear power is (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue is that were treating stuff as ubber scary that's far less dangerous that what goes up coal plants smoke stacks. Things less radioactive than coal get treated as major problems that we have to contain forever we might as well just throw the stuff into the furnace.
Spent fuel rods are the major highly radioactive bit and those should be reprocessed to make more fuel rods. We don't because that reprocessing is also a good way to get weapon grade bits. Pretty much anything that's radioactive enough to need to be contained over huge periods is radioactive enough to run a reactor. Other bits are non issues.
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The waste lasts for tens to HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of years.
A pretty standard "nuclear is scary" misleading and incorrect piece of truthiness. Most of the activity is gone after just a century. Its still not all that good for you in the same way lead is not good for you. But its not in the same league it was at the start.
Guess how long you have to wait for DDT or asbestos to become safe? Its over a few HUNDREDS of TRILLIONS of years. Along with many other very toxic and very poisons chemicals that we do in fact spill and contaminate local areas with all too frequ
Radioactive water has been leaking all along (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2265732/Mike-Murasoi-fish-contaminated-radiation-Fukushima-nuclear-disaster-2-500-times-legal-limit.html [dailymail.co.uk]
It's painfully obvious that this is caused by ongoing leakage of radioactive water from the plant. In contrast, there has be a reduction in radiatons levels on land http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201303120107 [asahi.com]. It's unlikely that biological concentration in the food chain is the primary cause after two years of radiation decay and sea water dilution.
If you don't trust the Japanese government, this would explain why they are prohibiting non-government organizations from sampling the ocean near the plant location. They say it's still too dangerous.
The motivation for a coverup is that ongoing radioactive ocean contamination would be a huge international incident. China, Korea, Taiwan, Viet Nam, Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines would all protest. There would be reputational repercussions, diplomatic turmoil and possibly economic sanctions. There is still a lot of hostility in the region from WW2, and this would be just the issue to reopen those wounds. Not to mention current rivalry over ocean areas that have China, Tiawan and Japan sending naval vessels to tiny islands with disputed ownership.
Solution: Energy from Thorium (LFTRs) (Score:4, Informative)
Whenever I see a new article on the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster,
I am reminded of the ADVANTAGES (better cost, safety, waste, political
implications, etc.) of Liquid Fluoride THORIUM Reactors (a.k.a. LFTR's,
already being developed around the world (in various phases of R&D, eg,
in China, India, Taiwan, & [privately] USA).
More people need to know about the opportunities of this -safer- green-
energy source, so they can decide for themselves whether it's time to
-push- for regulatory changes, that will -ease- the transition to Thorium,
in our time.
Introduction: Kirk Sorensen's recent TED-talk
More details: (search YouTube.com for
"Thorium remix"
and take your pick)
Re:Solution: Energy from Thorium (LFTRs) (Score:5, Informative)
Whenever I see a new article on the aftermath of a 40 year old plant disaster, I am reminded of the ADVANTAGES of pretty much every modern reactor design.
This is much the same as when I look at cars which didn't have seatbelts, crumple zones. Imagine if we outright banned them rather than investing serious research into making it safe. LFTR is one solution. I like the idea of the design and using thorium for fuel in general, but it is far from the only safe solution. There are several passively safe reactor designs out there from the Westinghouse AP1000 (which is basically old school with passive safety systems added) to molten sold reactors which basically are like your LFTR expect without the thorium.
Thorium is just a fuel. Sure it's a safer one, but the principles of passive and inherent safety can be designed onto many other systems too, and a modern reactor doesn't generate anywhere near the waste of their ancient brethren.
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Cars are actually a pretty good comparison to make. We do everything we reasonably can but mistakes and outright stupidity still cause accidents. There are alternatives that are much safer (mass transport) but funding is an issue, not least because auto manufacturers have a powerful lobbying arm.
In the long run we are trying to get away from humans driving at all, to the much safer alternative of self driving cars. Turns out no matter how good the technology human beings will always be the weak link. Public
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citations?
If Thorium is so great, where are these "flying car" power plants?
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Sorry what? How did you get from thorium to flying cars, and if you want citations just type any of the above model reactors into wikipedia and follow the citation trail, or just google passive nuclear safety and pick any link on the first page.
This isn't secret classified stuff.
Or switch to solar. (Score:2)
When solar was more expensive than nuclear there was a reason you would go for nuclear, but now solar has an advantage in most latitudes. Yes, it requires a large area for production, but it can just go over existing structures etc.
Offtopic but: why complain about the Chinese subsidies that make non-Chinese panels uncompetitive? Just BUY those cheap Chinese panels and have cheap power!
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I'm not sure why you would say this. It is true that you could not have a power network with ONLY solar power without any sort of energy storage, however the big advantage of solar power is that the production is high when it is required - i.e. during the day. So power companies can take advantage of that and increase their output during peak hours using solar PV energy.
Re:Solution: Energy from Thorium (LFTRs) (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that all the research reactors have had major issues and are still tens of billions of dollars away from being commercially viable. Even then people will want to see one running for at least a decade before investing heavily in new thorium plants because they will worry about unforeseen costs. In the mean time everyone will just take the safe bet and build the same old stuff they have been building for decades.
Things do not move quickly in the nuclear industry, especially when huge amounts of risk are involved. Remember that they will have to convince the government to subsidize and insure the plant as well, adding years to the process.
In the mean time renewables will rocket ahead, and now we have the somewhat risky (from an investment point of view, not safety) but still orders of magnitude better than nuclear shale gas. Even coal is cleaning up, unfortunately. Honestly, I think we will see commercial fusion before we see widescale deployment of thorium reactors.
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This is quite false.
Lets start with the basics. 232Th is fertile and is not a fuel. It absorbs a neutron to become 233Pa which, appart from being a neutron poison, decays after about 26 days into 233U which is the fuel in a Thorium fuel cycle. So now if we compare with a U fuel cycle we can only do so with a reprocessing fuel cycle, not as is often done with a once through cycle which Th can't even d
Make Jello of it! (Score:2)
Maybe it's crazy, but would it be possible to inject something into the water to turn it into a solid or pseudo solid? Whether jello-like, plastic, or glue, something that keeps the water from leaving the containers and/or getting into the groundwater.
First thoughts that come to mind would be substances that solidify with time after having a chance to permeate or a combination of substances, one which permeates and the other which acts as a catalyst for solidifying.
Sure, you might need a lot of it, but it'
Liquid radiation suit? (Score:2)
I assume the weight issue makes using water or similar liquids impractical for a radiation suit? If 7cm of water cuts radiation by half, it seems to me, you could make a pretty effective radiation suit that way? Sure, it would be harder to move around, but better than taking a higher dose? Or I suppose they would rather people just work fast and get in and out quickly?
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Can't they mix this water into the ocean, diluting it to background levels? Surely the ocean has a certain amount of naturally occurring radioactive materials in it and I'm sure this wouldn't change it much.
Been there done that [youtube.com].
On top of the millions of bequarels they've dumped so far. "It's only a little drop in the ocean".
I hope you don't like seafood.
Distillation (Score:2)
Then can't they distill away the water, so that just the crap is left and unable to flow anywhere else?
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Obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com]
This is for a normal spent fuel pool (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And the headline is self-contradictory (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:And the headline is self-contradictory (Score:5, Insightful)
You are wasting your time I'm afraid. There are just too many people out there who cant imagine how anyone could come to a different perspective on controversial issues and how abuse of rhetoric can be polarising. If you can please take comfort in the fact that while I disagree with your point of view I can understand how someone with different facts, experiences and values could come to a different conclusion about nuclear power to the one I have. I appreciate your efforts to keep the discourse civil.
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Every one comes at every thing from their own point of view. They cannot help it, as they see the world from the direction of their own experience. I can respect that. I can't too far exceed my own experience, and I'm aware of that limitation. Though I try to take an objective view I am well aware that my experiences build a belief framework that limits the potential solutions I can imagine, and respect that others have other experiential frameworks to build their beliefs and solutions upon. I actually
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Not sure what you're getting at here, nor who you're responding to, as we've reached max threading depth.
Of course lack of situational awareness is only a small part of your communication problem.
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And the headline is self-contradictory. If there's a leak, then the container obiously doesn't hold.
Er, any normal reader knew damn well what it meant- it wasn't intended to mislead, and it didn't. You do realise that blatant pedantry is generally counter-productive towards one's case, since it looks like you have to resort to that rather than arguing the real issue.
:-P
That said, if we're playing that game, I'll point out that unless the tank emptied completely, then it's still holding *some* radioactive water... and it still has a leak. Ergo, it *is* a "tank holding radioactive water".
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Re:Distillation (Score:5, Informative)
The water itself is radioactive.
No it's not; this isn't tritium (T2O) being discussed, but normal water contaminated with Sr90. ALPS is supposed to separate the Sr. The remaining water has a modestly low level of tritium. Releasing tritium is no big deal; it may slightly harm seafood or maybe even kill it, but it will dilute quickly and is of no harm to humans who eat seafood. Sr90 on the other hand is a metal and while it's easily broken up into dust and carried around by currents it's heavier than water so collects in hot spots on the sea floor.
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90Sr in Fallout
Strontium-90 is not quite as likely as caesium-137 to be released as a part of a nuclear reactor accident because it is much less volatile, but is probably the most dangerous component of the radioactive fallout from a nuclear weapon.[1]
Sounds pretty fucking dangerous to me, and if you're saying heavy metals are not poisonous then again you are full of it, Or are you you going to tell me that nothing lives on the sea floor and it won't get passed up the food chain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wik [wikipedia.org]
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Sounds pretty fucking dangerous to me, and if you're saying heavy metals are not poisonous then again you are full of it, Or are you you going to tell me that nothing lives on the sea floor and it won't get passed up the food chain.
Strontium (the non-radioactive kind) is actually not rare in seawater; per Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]: "The mean strontium content of ocean water is 8 mg/L". There is enough that an unusual class of protozoa, the Acantharea [wikipedia.org], even uses Strontium Sulfate as the main constituent of its skeleton.
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Read a bit further because plain strontium is not the same as the isotope strontium-90
Effect on the human body
The human body absorbs strontium as if it were calcium. Due to the chemical similarity of the elements, the stable forms of strontium might not pose a significant health threat â" in fact, the levels found naturally may actually be beneficial (see below) â" but the radioactive 90Sr can lead to various bone disorders and diseases, including bone cancer. The strontium unit is used in measuring radioactivity from absorbed 90Sr.
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Re:Distillation (Score:4, Informative)
Water can not be radioactive. It's actually an incredibly good radiation insulator and that's exactly why they use it. The problem is the radioactive particulates in it. Fish eat, absorb those and then still, the fish is not radioactive, the problem is that when you eat the fish these materials get into your body. Funny enough, the radiations usually not going to cause you any health problems, the material itself is almost always heavy metals however. And those are very bad for you indeed.
Re:Distillation (Score:4, Informative)
Water can not be radioactive. It's actually an incredibly good radiation insulator and that's exactly why they use it. The problem is the radioactive particulates in it.
Depending on particle size, Reverse Osmosis, Activated Charcoal, and Ion exchange [forbes.com] are all somewhat successful, and using all three together does a very good job of removing even very small particles. Distillation also works well.
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Sorry, but water CAN be radioactive. That's not the problem here, but it's certainly possible. Half-life is, I believe, 12 1/2 years. (Check the Tritium half-life to be sure.)
OTOH, the radioactivity level of the water itself is probably negligible. It's the stuff that it carries that's the problem. Most of the really bad radioactives have already decayed, however. I doubt there's any radioactive iodine left. OTOH, I am definitely not an expert in this field. Maybe there is small (non-filterable) stu
Re:Distillation (Score:5, Interesting)
You're talking about Hanford [wikipedia.org]. Approximately one third of Hanford's waste storage tanks are known to have been or be leaking into the groundwater, having contaminated approximately 270 billion gallons or one billion cubic meters of aquifers. This contaminated groundwater is expected to reach the Columbia river in 7 to 45 years, and start contaminating everything along the river from Eastern Washington to Portland and the Pacific ocean shortly thereafter. The loss of real estate values along that river is a very real concern. Waterfront property is normally very valuable. Waterfront property on a radioactive river, less so.
Currently there is no practical plan to deal with this situation nor adequate budget to even stop it from getting worse. It is likely impossible to prevent this radioactive waste from reaching the Pacific. The Columbia river [wikipedia.org] is quite a considerable river, 4th largest in the US by volume and the largest draining into the Pacific. Though Hanford is the most highly contaminated nuclear site in the US - containing approximately 2/3rds of all US high-level waste, it still retains an operating nuclear power generating station [wikipedia.org] to this day. It uses a newer version of the type of reactor used at Fukushima, a General Electric Type 5 Boiling Water Reactor.
Over $30 billions (pdf) [oregon.gov] have been spent cleaning up Hanford already. 20 years into the initial 30 year plan only minor progress has been made. The vitrification plant, for example, is not expected to complete vitrification operations for another 34 years from now - and that may be optimistic, meaning we are further from the end now than when the work was begun. The estimate for the cost of the remaining cleanup is $112 billion [tri-cityherald.com] and is, given the nature of such things, likely to be at least three times even that.
Although the so-far estimated cost of $145 billion is very high it is important to remember than Hanford was a critical part of the Manhattan Project, essential for developing the technology and materials that made the US the first nuclear weapon capable global power at a critical cusp of international relations. The cost of not doing that might have been much higher than cleaning up or living with this mess will be.
Cleaning up Fukushima will cost far more than cleaning up Hanford. Cleaning up Chernobyl [wikipedia.org] will also be more costly, to the extent cleanup is possible at all. If you add up the cleanup costs of all three and the off-book costs of getting rid of the current stock of spent nuclear fuels you could probably outfit the entire world with alternative electrical energy solutions like geothermal, wind and solar for less. On this scale a manned Mars colony would be a trivial side project. Of more concern might be that cleaning up these messes entirely is quite simply not possible, even given the full weight of the national economies involved. It cannot be done. We have developed the power to create problems we cannot cure no matter how hard we try.
Re:Distillation (Score:4, Interesting)
This is completely off-topic and I expect it to be moderated that way and that's OK.
The costs of combating the ideas of Fascism, Global communism (or what was presented as such), Japanese imperialism, militarized Islam and other such notions offensive to personal liberty so *far* outweigh the costs in lives and treasure of these accidental excursions into nuclear physics as to be on an entirely different scale. It seems the pen is still mightier than the sword even when the sword is a MIRV [wikipedia.org].
What strange fools these mortals be.
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Water is never radioactive. In fact divers routinely swim in these pools for maintenance. They just need to keep a certain distance from the spent fuel.
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That only applies if you're talking about tritiated water (water containing tritium rather than hydrogen). If it's water contaminated with radioactive materials (like Strontium-90 in this case) distilling will remove the contaminant like it would anything else.
Re:Distillation (Score:5, Informative)
The water itself is not radioactive. Particles in the water are. Therefore, distillation is one of the methods that will work.
Other methods include RO, Ion Exchange, Activated Carbon filtration. But Water itself is not radio active.
Further, there are already methods of removal, (this is done every day all around the world), and its not particularly a difficult problem, other than the fact that the Fukushima site has an awful lot of water to deal with.
Re:Pastor Rick Warren's son commits suicide (Score:4, Interesting)
It sounds nice but what tends to happen is it settle to floor, get picked up by pants and tiny creatures concentrating it again, the eaten by fewer bigger creatures concentrating it more, and finally poisioning us we we go to eat fish.
Yes if you had some way to spread it over a very very large area of sea it would be fine probably, but you'd likely need to move it out to deep water with container ships, and then you'd have to do something with the contaminated ships. I suppose you might just scuttle them. Anyway just dump it in the ocean sounds simple but doing right ( if there is a right way ) is risky and expensive.
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Picked up by pants?
Nuclear concentration by clothing? Could make 'hot to trot' a reality.
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I care about ocean ecology to the point that it continues to be feed me and billions of others. Use it but don't abuse it. Natural resources are there for us; our use is there purpose. That means we do have to be careful with them, we do have moderate our use of them, but saying we should not use them is wrong.
Conservation is important, I think of the planet as humanities bank account. We get regular deposits in the form of sun light. We also get interest from the operation of the ecosystem, we have to
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But I thought nuclear energy is safe
s/$/r/
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Do you think Molasses is safe? Ever given a second of thought to the fear that your bottle of syrup might attack you?
But wait, a disaster COULD happen.
Just like with cotton balls, unicorn dust, and pixie wings.
Get your facts straight, the only result from the great Unicorn Dust Explosion [wikipedia.org] in Ireland back in the 1800's was a slight increase in the birth rate of Leprechans.
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It's happened before [wikipedia.org].
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When I was a kid in the 60s, the North End still had a kind of stale-candy smell on a hot summer day. I thought that was how all cities smelled in a heat wave, but later I learned it was from the Great Molasses Flood.
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Can't they mix this water into the ocean, diluting it to background levels? Surely the ocean has a certain amount of naturally occurring radioactive materials in it and I'm sure this wouldn't change it much.
I suspect that it depends on what flavor of radioactives you are working with. The worst-case scenario is that a substantial quantity of them are (like Strontium, which looks almost like Calcium) compounds that are readily water-soluble and readily absorbed by organisms in the water and concentrated up the food chain.
Best case scenario is that it's mostly larger silt-type particles that are largely insoluble and not bioavalable, which still isn't great but should at least end up hanging out on the bottom fo
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They didn't start anything up in reactor n.4. This is water from the day of the meltdown.
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According to http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/ [tepco.co.jp]... it's Daiichi.
I'm guessing they would know.
Yeah, because we can trust Tepco to tell the truth.
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There are other problems too. Some of the radioactive components bio accumulate. So that the waste is concentrated in the food chain.