Fukishima Springs Water Leak 163
sl4shd0rk writes "The Japanese Fukishima crisis took a turn for the worse this week as it was found a barrier built to contain contaminated water has been breached; a leak defined by 20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium. This is yet another problem on top of a spate of errors plaguing the 2011 nuclear disaster site. Nuclear regulatory official Shinji Kinjo has cited Tokyo Electric Power Company as having a 'weak sense of crisis' as well as hinted at previous bunglings by TEPCO as the reason one cannot 'just leave it up to Tepco alone.' If Nuclear energy is ever to move forward, these types of disasters need to be eliminated."
" these types of disasters need to be eliminated." (Score:2, Insightful)
Industry doesn't make mistakes, it makes profit. Risk is for the beancounters to calculate and recalculate after the fact.
WTF is a 'becquerels?' (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we just start measuring radiation in Rads now? Sure would make things simpler to explain...
becquerels == ORads (Outbound Radiation)
sieverts == IRads (Inbound Radiation) or ARads (Absorbed Radiation)
Or just "Rads" as a general term, i.e. "the leak is dumping 20-30 billion Rads into the ecosystem / Nobody can absorb that many Rads and survive! / Background radiation at 2,500 Rads, sir."
Using terms that the layman can hardly spell, let alone understand, isn't helping to raise awareness. Kinda the opposite.
Re:Should be Fukushima not Fukishima (Score:4, Insightful)
Spelling counts
Punctuation, not so much.
Tepco is suicidal or insanely stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
In principle, I think nuclear power is a perfectly sound idea that can be implemented safely and reliably.
But that's in principle. In practice somehow it turns out to be managed by complete morons that even after getting involved in the center of a huge scandal, still manage to show amazing incompetence and disregard for public safety, even when they know perfectly fine that the whole world is paying attention to them, and is already extremely distrustful.
And this state of affairs doesn't do their own industry any good. It's precisely crap like this what results in the replacement of nuclear with coal.
Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?' (Score:5, Insightful)
Ionizing radiating is a complex subject, thus it has a complex set of measurements that mean specific things.
Dumbing it down doesn't do anyone any good.
Re:So, worst case... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?' (Score:5, Insightful)
They use the becquerel in the news because it gives much larger units than the curie. It's not as nice a headline if they said Fukishima had released 1100 curies of radiation.
Becquerel is the standard SI unit; the BBC would generally use those unless the non-standard unit is widely used. Although quoting GBq or TBq rather than the big scary numbers would be best IMHO.
I don't understand the secrecy (Score:5, Insightful)
Hiding the truth does nothing to help them look good, and in the long term adds to their list of mistakes. But if at this point they come clean with every bit of data people not only would know how far to run (and where not to fish) but a world full of engineers and physicists might contribute something helpful. For example, if they reveal that radioactive and water soluble product X is being produced some guy in the physics department in Argentina might say, "Hey if you put some cheap water soluble Y into the coolant it will not only precipitate product X out of the water solution but it will then absorb neutrons resulting in other stable isotopes of one of the atoms in chemical Y." This might be little known knowledge that the guy learned 20 years ago when he accidentally gummed up the university's reactor 20 years ago.
Also open information allows for people to write better case studies on how(and where) not to build a reactor.
It is just too bad if all this open information makes a few people look bad.
O horns of dilemma on which we are impaled! (Score:5, Insightful)
If only there were some options other than nuclear fission and burning brown coal in an open pit!
Oh, wait, there are.
Here in reality, decentralized heterogenous power production would be inherently better for human culture and society, since it has less tendency to create economic disparities [businessinsider.com] large enough to engender wholesale regulatory capture [wikipedia.org] or militarization of power production [g4s.us], has fewer military vulnerabilities [cfr.org], and employs more working people gainfully (instead of funneling money to banksters), and would potentially allow a less expensive grid to carry more total power [csicop.org].
Solar, wind, hydro, and most importantly carbon-neutral biomass energy plants spotted all over the country on a true "smart grid" is the way to go. Solve dozens of social and economic problems while eliminating the pollution caused by burning petroleum.
Incidentally, I'm not the first to figure this out. Nikola Tesla talked about the idiocy of burning limited resources in 1915, before we compounded the problem by building terrestrial fission plants.
Re:OK, Einstein (Score:5, Insightful)