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Comment Re:Cost analysis (Score -1, Troll) 444

You're always free to build your own power station to supply you with power when the wind doesn't blow.

You'll find that this is even more expensive to build and to run, than a powerstation that simply supplies you with power ALL THE TIME. The utility isn't stupid. They know what they have to do in order to provide the service you require. And the standby power you now require from the utility is a much more expensive service and much more technically demanding (thus more expensive) to provide, than the constant supply of power you formerly had. When you demand a more challenging, more expensive service, you must expect to pay a higher price for it.

What you did was a self-righteous, stupid investment. What you're doing is blaming the utility for your own stupidity.

Comment Is it going to work for 50 years or 150 years? (Score 1) 34

A house is something that has to work for very long times. You don't just put mechanical parts on a house that will have to work for such a long time. It's a house, not a car. And you wouldn't want to live in a house that needs regular maintenance of major parts of its structure, not to mention keeping everything of that sealed etc.

It's one thing to build a toy, it's another to build a house.

Comment Re:OMG (Score 2) 29

This has very little to do with Eyjafjallajökull. They called the red alert when the harmonic tremor that was being measured reached levels that in all previous cases (like Eyja in 2010 and Grimsvötn in 2011) indicated an eruption in progress, namely, large amount of magma moving through rock. This usually only happens when there is magma moving out of the ground somewhere aka an eruption in progress.

The big problem is, there was no such thing. Yet tremor hasn't died down at all. (This is from a recording station on Askja, which is a volcano a bit further away from the current action, but shows it just fine.)

There is a lot of magma on the move in the ground and by now there is very little reason left to believe it's just going to stay in the ground. Because it's just too darn much. An eruption on saturday would have been preferable to what we are seeing now.

Comment Re:I think this means (Score 2) 255

Cooling down a molten core to the point where it solidfies reduces emissions quite enormously, especially when the containment (such as a Mark I BWR containment), wasn't designed to stay fully sealed after a meltdown. Otherwise, when the hot molten core just sits there, more aerosols (maiinly Caesium) are created and eventually scattered in the environment.

When this containment was designed, back in 1958-1962, it was sufficient to ensure that there would be no catastrophic numbers of casualties after any potential reactor accident. (Something they did remarkably well, given their limited experience.) It was not designed to prevent contamination of the environment during accidents involving a core meltdown, unlike more modern designs or pressure water reactor containments, that just so happened to be large enough to stay sealed with a molten core inside, even though this wasn't a specifically set design goal back when the earliest of those were designed.

All of this could have been prevented, if there had been filtered containment vents that could have kept the containment otherwise sealed.

Comment Re:already done (Score 1) 133

If all those cities were "fine", 'unscathed" and "perfectly safe from even the largest waves" then how come there were 182 deaths in Namie, 85 deaths in Okuma and 35 deaths in Futaba? And why have all the coastal communities of Namie essentially been scrubbed from the coast? Why has the mayor of Futaba (previous population 7406) said, that 90% of its houses have been destroyed?

As for people dieing during the evacuation. Yes, there have been such reports. But those people died because the evacuation was botched beyond belief. Who would have thought that evacuating a hospital with lots of people who are severely ill, without providing food, drink or medical support could result in dead people? Well, the lancet says there are "lessons to be learnt". I'd say the only lesson to be learnt here is that radiation is completely harmless compared with the gross neglect of even basic human needs as soon as somebody screams "radiation everybody will die!".

Comment Re:already done (Score 2) 133

But
a) Nobody died. (Unlike due to the direct effects of the tsunami.)
b) In places like Ishinomaki, Kesenuma, Rikuzentakata or Ofunato the people are essentially in the same situation. People can't just go back, because they now realized that those places are too darn dangerous to live in, because of the tsunami hazard. If history provides any pattern there, the towns will be abandonned for several decades upon which people will start ignoring the danger again, rebuild former settlements and then suffer the next big tsunami. All very much on the same time-scale as for the evacuation zone around Fukushima Daiichi. With the difference that the next tsunami WILL come and WILL NOT be prevented, while nuclear power plants can simply be build properly to modern standards (i.e. designed to contain a meltdown, which General Electric said this containment wasn't designed to do all the way back to 1966, as you can read in the CR-6042 manual).

c) The number of people evacuated because of radiation is a fraction (10-20%) of the total number of people who lost their homes. Most of those will be free to return in the next few years. (There is no statistic that I'm aware of saying how many people's homes were destroyed in the area that was later declared off-limits. Extrapolating from the number of dead people in the area it ought to be about 10% or 50,000, but that could be wrong.)

Comment Re:already done (Score 2) 133

Go read WASH-1400, that one said 36 years before Fukushima Daiichi what would happen when a tsunami hits a nuclear power plant. The predicted result is easily comparable to what we have seen, because Japan (just like the USA) didn't bother to implement major upgrades that were demanded by law in France, Germany and Sweden. Among those are hydrogen recombiners that the Japanese demanded by law in 2012 and were bought in France where they have been implemented for decades. You may remember the hydrogen explosions? Those were predicted. The same countries also installed filtered containment vents. Which would, by themselves, have prevented uncontrolled venting into the reactor buildings, they would have filtered out 99.99% of the Cs and they also have hydrogen recombines by default. In Germany those were required in 1988, Japan followed in 2013. Japan managed to require all reactors to have at least 2 emergency generators for each reactor in 2002 (before that 3 emergency generators were sufficient for 2 reactors). By comparison, at the same time, Germany required at least 2 WORKING emergency generators for each reactor, even if one generator is out for maintenance and another breaks down due to some technical fault. In other words, they required at least 4 generators and even more, if some of them were put in a place were they might fail due to some other causes (like flooding or a plane crash).

There is no tsunami risk in Europe. But nuclear power plants must be protected against 10.000 year floods. Fukushima Daiichi (along with all the coastal cities) was protected against a rather small tsunami that hit Japan in 1960 and nobody bothered that there were larger tsunamis in 1933 and 1896 (and many more before that).

It's not about hindsight. It's a matter of a complete lack of disaster planning in Japan, which is why you had almost 20.000 dead and 400.000 lost homes (that latter figure is without the additional evacuations due to the reactor accident).

Comment Re:already done (Score 4, Interesting) 133

If your definition of "reasonable" is "one millionth" you'd be right, but also perfectly unreasonable. There is such a thing as natural radioactivity, it is everywhere. And if you demand that "artificial" radiation must be less than 1/10.000th of natural radioactivity in the worst contaminated areas to be "reasonable", then you suffer from a gross form hubris. Your claims about Iodine-129 neglect to mention that is has 1/1.000.000.000th of the activity of I-131. Even by your stupid definition, it's not a problem. This is further compounded by the fact that Iodine is highly mobile, most of all, it is water soluble. This means that it will be dispersed in the environment at a much greater rate than it will be concentrated in humans. In fact, it is not even detectable around Fukushima Daiichi.

You also neglect to say that the total radiotoxicity of all longlived fission isotopes is less than the radiotoxicity of the natural uranium before it went through the reactor. It is LESS than what was naturally there anyway. I know you don't care about such facts, lots of other people do.

Your body is full of potassium-40, carbon-14, thorium, uranium and their decay products. If you're so scared of radioactivity that you must demand Cs-137 to decay to one-millionth of the current concentrations before you feel safe, then go commit suicide. There is no place in the solar system that will satisfy your demands. You, sir, are a lunatic.

Comment Re:already done (Score 4, Informative) 133

It gets better, all the way back in 1975, the Wash-1400 report listed tsunamis as one of the potential ways to knock out the safety systems of a nuclear power plant, leading to the exact same outcome we have seen. All the way to the point of having to evacuate a few thousand square kilometers, given the BWR Mark I containment. (Actually, it was just one thousand, but the rest was off-shore.)

The main problem was that just about ALL the tsunami protection in Japan (both for cities and nuclear power plants) was based on the 1960 tsunami, that came all the way across the Pacific from Chile. The result was quite a disaster, but the worst part was the completely unprotected population and certainly not the nuclear power plants. Contamination is quite reversible, 18500 dead people not so much.

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