I am told that properly prepared raw horsemeat tastes very like high-grade tuna. We were going to go there anyway after the Japanese fished out the last tuna, but now maybe we'll be eating horse sushi sooner, while perhaps tuna stocks can recover (with a bit of extra heavy metal and the odd beta particle emitter).

How many people evacuated due to wind, solar, oil, coal power accidents?

How many hundreds of square kilometers of land declared no-go zones due to wind, solar, oil, coal power accidents (yeah, I know about the pennsylvania coal fire).

Give it a rest. Fukushima is an indictment of for-profit management of nuclear power. The profits are private, the risks are a socialized externality.

Mentioned in TFA but not the summary, is the idea that these could be deployed to work on the plastic fragments floating around in the pacific gyre. Don't know if the scope is feasible, but it's fairly original and more scalable than any other approach I've heard of.

Also, they've developed an articulating hull to deal with drag of a long tail--it's rather original. They're up front about not yet knowing howing it'll behave when the tail accumulates a full load of oil. That's why they're raising money for the next version (#6).

The reason the public lumps all nuclear power technologies into the same hopper is that they are all run by the same corrupt management culture. Management cuts safety margins, defers upgrades, miscategorizes more frequent natural disasters as once in 1000 years, all the while paying themselves performance bonuses for having improved operating margins. Then the "nobody could have foreseen" event happens, and we the taxpayers have to spend 10s to 100s of billions cleaning up the mess. If the nuclear industry had to post an insurance bond against their future screwups there would be no nuclear industry.

This isn't a technology problem, it's a regulatory and human problem.

Nice straw man and projection, dude (or dudette). But you're projecting a no-nuke agenda. What I do have is a no-regulatory-capture agenda. I have this quaint notion that regardless of industry if you deliberately shave your safety margins to the point of causing a BP Macondo or other disasters of that scale, you should go to jail for a significant portion of your life. Without the fear of jail these disasters will continue to happen, at least in the US. I imagine in China some folks got bulletized.

The Fukushima meltdown didn't have to happen: Japan Nuclear Disaster Caps Decades of Faked Reports, Accidents. I've read other reports of non-functioning standby diesels in US-based boiling water reactors. Do you really think it's any better here or whereever you live?

The current business as usual culture where you can gut safety margins in favor of profits, and collect and keep huge cash bonuses during the years that go by until the blowup happens, make nuclear power untenable. Nuclear energy accidents destroy land for centuries. By contrast even the gulf of mexico will mostly recover in my lifetime, though I won't be eating any food from the gulf for a decade.

And yes, I cheerfully acknowlege that scary fusion reactor that's irradiating me multiple frequencies every day. I'll walk on the shady side of the street.

I think we're mostly in agreement as far as what is happening on the ground at Fukushima. There are genuinely different degrees of meltdown, that somewhat map to the higher numbers of the 1-7 scale.

What I am trying to address is the non-sensical prattle about how it can't/won't be as bad as Chernobyl because there's no graphite and the reactor didn't explode. Hydrogen explosions from oxidized zirconium (and oxidized uranium at the next "bad shit happens" temperature threshold) will work just fine to create a radioactive particle plume, that may be smaller or larger than Chernobyl's.

People have this idea that if the molten reactor core isn't visibly red hot from above that "it's not a chernobyl" and therefore can be put out of mind. That's right, it's not a chernobyl. It's something different, it's not over yet, it is still a critical situation getting worse every day, and it could end up worse than chernobyl.

Maybe they were distracted cause of 10,000+ people killed, 300,000+ homeless in freezing temps, no power anywhere, fires burning, streets blocked 5 miles inland, yadayadayada.

BTW, onsite radiation is measured in the 100s of millisieverts/hr. You want to by the guy manning that hose? Also, the volume of water put out by a high pressure firehose compared with what is needed to cool 3 reactors and refill 4 reactors' spent fuel ponds is kind of like trying to fill your backyard swimming pool by pissing in it. Drink lots of beer.

The point is that a clueless don't worry be happy posting from a very-non expert was picked up and broadcast over the web 30,000 times in one day, while being misrepresented as coming from an MIT nuclear scientist. This guy had literally zero history of posting on the subject or credentials in the space, yet his first-time posting got promoted very energetically.

This link:

Bad Oehmen: Confirmation Bias, Sources & Astroturfing

Describes the curious case of how a reassuring first time web post ("Why I am not worried about Japans nuclear reactors") from a guy working on a liason project at MIT in a non-nuclear engineering or physicist role somehow got reposted 30,000 times in one day.

Just something to keep in mind when you see crap like "If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then". Hey clueless, the cores haven't melted. Yet. They are losing their heat removal capacity over time as less and less water surrounds them. When they do get hot enough, they will melt their containers, and we will have a chernobyl-style release. Not exactly the same as chernobyl, because there's no graphite to burn. Instead the particulate radioactive isotopes and actinides (and plutonium, yay!) will be propelled into the atmosphere via hydrogren explosions. There's also a hell of a lot more uranium and plutonium on site since some clever laddie beancounter got the used fuel rods containment pools located above the reactors.

Fukushima hasn't completely melted down, yet. If it doesn't it will because we (the planet) threw everything we have at it.

Actually, it was astroturfing. Or at least the extremely rapid promotion of an article written by a non-nuclear scientist who happened to be working on a liason project with MIT in no nuclear engineering capacity, was coordinated by a siemens astroturf group.

Described here: bad-oehmen-confirmation-bias-sources-astroturfing/

You do realize that the reactor containers for reactors 2 and 3 are now assumed to have been breached? And that the reactors are boiling off approximately 100 gallons of water per minute, and as they get hotter a cascade effect occurs?

Guess what? These "safe" reactors of yours require external active pumping of water, non-stop. It takes months to shut down the reactors to the point they don't require external cooling. When that cooling isn't available they get hotter. At 2100 degrees C the zirconium cladding of the fuel rods starts oxidizing water (the coolant), producing hydrogen gas. Boom. That's already happened 3 times the past two days. When the reactor reaches 4000 degrees the uranium fuel starts melting then aerosolizing, mixing with the hydrogen gas that goes BOOM and flowing upwards as a heated gas. Oh, and reactor 4 is fueled by a mixture or plutonium and uranium. Aerosolized plutonium is very deadly. One of the most toxic substances known.

Then there's the "spent" fuel rods sitting in pools of water. Pools of water that also need replenishment to cool the rods for the next few months. Those rods have been boiling off their coolant too (pool temp last measured at 84 degrees C). The parts of the rods exposed to air due to coolant loss have been, you guessed it, oxidizing the water and catching fire. Twice, in the last 24 hours.

This ain't getting better folks, and denial is a river in egypt.

Think about it, nuclear energy can likely be cleaner than the alternatives, but the same culture of shaving the safety margins to increase profitability that brought us BP's Macondo blowout, and PG&E's gas pipeline explosion exists in the nuclear industry. Until we solve the issues of regulatory capture and temporal externalities (take a risk now that won't burn you for likely 10 years, collect bonuses for next 5), it is idiotic to bring online more destroyers of land.

Dude, the entire public float of GOOG is insufficient to gain control of the company. I forget whether it is simply non-voting shares or whether they allocated a 10% total net vote to the float, but either way, it ain't happening.