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.
Obligatory xkcd radiation chart (Score:5, Informative)
Helpful radiation chart [xkcd.com] for those of us who don't have a clue whether 100 millisieverts is a tiny dose or enough to create a Godzilla monster.
In short, it's definitely into the "You might want to step-up your planned schedule on those cancer screenings" territory.
Re:Obligatory xkcd radiation chart (Score:5, Insightful)
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I assumed they meant per hour.
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Look! We fixed one of the any problems! Suceess!
"United States government engineers sent to help with the crisis in Japan are warning that the troubled nuclear plant there is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely, [nytimes.com] and that in some cases are expected to increase as a result of the very measures being taken to keep the plant stable, according to a confidential assessment prepared by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission."
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.
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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.
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]
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You make an excellent point. But the flip side of that coin is, lawyers must die. Even after supposed reform, lawyers add considerable and needless expense to much of everything we see and touch in our daily lives. In aviation alone, lawyers not only make things up to 4x as expensive as need by, they also slow technology adoption which makes everyone safer. So until such time we start actively killing lawyers by the bushel, caps are unfortunately the next closet option available.
If you have ideas which do n
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.
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"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."
no.
just no.
[citation]
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf67.html [world-nuclear.org]
" It is commonly asserted that nuclear power stations are not covered by insurance, and that insurance companies don't want to know about them either for first-party insurance of the plant itself or third-party liability for accidents. This is incorrect, and the misconception was addressed as follows in 2006 by a broker who had been responsible for a nuclear insurance pool: "it is wrong [to believe] that insurers will not touch nuclear power stations. In fact, wherever they are available to private sector insurers, Western-designed nuclear installations are sought-after business because of their high engineering and risk management standards. This has been the case for fifty years." He elaborated: "My comment refers very much to the world scene and is not contentious. Apart from Three Mile Island, the claim experience has been very good. Chernobyl was not insured. Significantly, because Chernobyl was of a design that would not have been an acceptable risk at the time, notably the lack of a containment structure, the accident had no impact on premium rates for Western plants.
"The structure of insurance of nuclear installations is different from ordinary industrial risks. It involves international conventions, national legislation channeling liability to the operators, and pooling of insurance capacity in more than twenty countries. The national nuclear insurance pool approach was particularly developed in the UK in 1956 as a way of marshalling insurance capacity for the possibility of [serious accidents]. Other national pools that followed were modeled on the UK pool - now known as Nuclear Risk Insurers Limited, and based in London.""
"Do you have some kind of citation for that? I'm pretty sure they do not."
Look up the Pri
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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?
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It's still vastly less of a concern than the ongoing relief effort for the tsunami. But you're spot on (I guess even a stopped clock is right occasionally): the lasting worldwide damage here is to the discussion about nuclear power. With the price of fossil fuels going up and people concerned about CO2, that's a discussion that needs to be had rationally. Little chance of that now.
Solar thermal plants [wikipedia.org] (not photoelectric) are still a good idea for a great many places, however, so maybe we're not totally d
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Well you missed the point. Perhaps I wasn't clear: nuclear power could be safer if the owners invested more into safety, but as long as taxpayers here and in Japan are on the hook for the majority of damages, the ultra-wealthy sociopathic owning class assholes have no incentive to invest in safety. They profit, we pay.
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seriously considering building its solar pants in orbit
Even if we could edit our posts, I think I'd leave that typo - there's a SF story in there somewhere.
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How much are you offering for this?
I already survived the rain from Chernobyl, lets add another one to the score.
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Well if you survived Chernobyl rain, you should be ready for a dip in the cooling pool. I mean, they are totally equivalent, right?
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.
Re:Obligatory xkcd radiation chart (Score:4, Informative)
Nothing is perfectly safe.
Measuring across the entire lifetime, nuclear is still the safest form of power generation we have. The only other one that comes close is Hydro.
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.
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It wasn't the anti nuke crowd that killed nuclear power, it was the greed and shortsightedness of management, and the overzealous insensitivity of the pro nuclear crowd, who basically have been telling everyone to shut the hell up and stop whining. Give me one example of the anti nuke idiots actually accomplishing anything, and I'll retract my statement. But the anti-nuke idiots had nothing to do with the GE Three resigning over safety issues with the same model core that is in several Fukushima reactors. Y
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I assumed they meant per hour.
Why?
Seriously, I am reasonably expert on radiation safety (I've worked as a medical physicist and spent a good deal of my professional career around radiation sources of one kind or another) and I have no clue what anyone could possibly mean when they say "rates exceed 100 mSv". It's like saying, "the spacecraft was traveling in excess of 30 km when it impacted." If it was impact on the Moon that might mean "30 km/s", if it was impact on Earth it might mean "30 km/hr".
The only thing such statements certai
Japan's ocean radiation is 7.5 million times limit (Score:3)
Japan's ocean radiation hits 7.5 million times legal limit
TOKYO â" The operator of Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear plant said Tuesday that it had found radioactive iodine at 7.5 million times the legal limit in a seawater sample taken near the facility, and government officials imposed a new health limit for radioactivity in fish.
The reading of iodine-131 was recorded Saturday, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said. Another sample taken Monday found the level to be 5 million times the legal limit. The Monda
Glow-in-the-Dark Sushi! (Score:2)
Eat it now, before it cooks itself...
Re:Japan's ocean radiation is 7.5 million times li (Score:4, Funny)
Not a problem, we'll just throw the fish in jail and we'll be good to go.
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Excuse me, but I'm an NBC executive and was wondering if you might be interested in having your "Fish Jail" idea developed into a sitcom for our Thursday night lineup. Please...we're desperate...call me.
Re:Japan's ocean radiation is 7.5 million times li (Score:3)
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[wikipedia]
The dose equivalent is a measure of biological effect for whole body irradiation. The dose equivalent is equal to the product of the absorbed dose and the Quality Factor.
The Quality Factor (Q) depends on the type of radiation:
X-ray, Gamma ray, or beta radiation: Q = 1
alpha particles: Q = 20
neutrons of unknown energy
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Inverse square law, no?
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My car is really fast. It goes over 500 meters!!!
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Just outside the door levels are high; 200 meters away, levels are dropping off by inverse cube law.
This would be true if there was only a point source of radiation. But for a month now radionuclide particulate has issued from the reactors and is scattered around the countryside. There have been high levels of radiation measured on the ground many miles from the reactor.
Also, if the law in question were inverse SQUARE, not cube. (WIth something approximating a line source and being close to it compared to
Re:Obligatory xkcd radiation chart (Score:5, Funny)
Hi,
I am glad I have Slashdot posters here who can help me determine the risk of radiation leaks from Japan. I take such advice as seriously as I do the sex tips I frequently see posted on Slashdot.
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The key to the chart
"(However, keep in mind that I am not a radiation expert, and this chart is intended for general public informational use only.)"
So, yes, please make your judgements based on a web comic.
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OTOH, it's pretty accurate and he provides all the references.
So if you are concerned, read the references. I learned about this crap years ago ni the ilitary. I did have to learn to convert from my historic mothod(rems/rads) to the SI method.
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It isn't a comic though, it is a chart prepared in the style of a particular web comic.
(Your entire context is sort of strange to me, very few laypeople are going to have enough understanding of the sources and dynamics of the contaminants to "judge" the situation, and the very limited surveys and information available would make it very difficult for them to be precise, not to mention the fact that the situation is not stable (they do seem to be gaining more control though, which is at least better than th
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radiation levels in Australia have fallen
Oh man, I wish I had known this before I invested heavily in dune buggies and shoulderpads.
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It just happened so yeah, it's going to have higher levels than Chernobyl. Almost by definition, the more radioactive byproducts have short half-lives. If all of that radiation were from radioactive iodine, for example (and the majority probably is), the levels will drop to current Chernobyl levels in about a month. In two months the levels would be safe enough to work there basically indefinitely while keeping below a 100 Sv exposure limit. Of course, there's almost certainly some longer lived isotopes
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But the good news is that the Leak is Patched using 1500 litres of sodium silicate.
solium silicate is also commonly known as a band-aid.
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Or about a factor of a thousand less than Chernobyl 2-3 weeks after its meltdown.
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What he means is that inhaled or swallowed radiation is more dangerous than the stuff you're just exposed to. Depending upon the type of particles, some of them can't penetrate paper, whereas others require meters of thick concrete to block. While the latter isn't going to make much of a difference in the short term, you're not going to get much damage out of the former. But, even with the latter, if you've inhaled it, those particles, at least some, are likely to stick around for a while.
One of the main r
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Presumably as opposed to meters of thin concrete?
Water has a tenth-thickness of 36" for gammas, much less for neutrons, and basically stops alphas and betas cold.
Steel has a tenth-thickness of 4" for gammas.
Lead 2".
You won't generally need meters of protection from anything unless you're storing an active nuclear power plant in your backyard.
Units (Score:5, Insightful)
100 millisieverts? Per hour? Per day? Per century? Thanks, Slashdot, for giving us a useless number.
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Per Library of Congress*. That's the default on Slashdot, when no other units are given.
*Yes, you were expecting time rather than bytes, so remember to cast the type before assignment.
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I assumed the Library of Congress unit of time referred to the time it would take a million monkeys on a million typewriters to replicate it by chance, the LoCUoT.
What's the sense of adopting a standard unit if we can only use it for a single type of measurement? I've already modified my oven dial to the Library of Congress unit of energy, the LoCUoE.
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Per picosecond.
Re:Units (Score:5, Funny)
Per furlong.
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I believe you meant per fortnight, good sir. As everybody knows, a furlong is 110 fathoms.
From the Han Solo school of thought (Score:3)
It is in Parsecs
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100 millisieverts? Per hour? Per day? Per century? Thanks, Slashdot, for giving us a useless number.
I assumed it meant that the meter had recorded a *cumulative* amount of 100 mSv before it fizzled out. I have a counter on my desk that I've had running since this disaster occurred. In that time, it's accumulated 0.013 mSv with the background here.
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Leak to ocean stopped. Leak from reactor, not. (Score:5, Informative)
The leak that was stopped was from a drain pit to the ocean. The reactor itself is still leaking highly radioactive water. They're running out of places to put it.and are frantically building tanks and ponds.
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The leak that was stopped was from a drain pit to the ocean. The reactor itself is still leaking highly radioactive water. They're running out of places to put it.and are frantically building tanks and ponds.
This and... did they actually managed to stop the water leaking into the soil? Or is just a case of "out of the media sight, out of mind"?
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]
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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.
Keep in mind that everything is decaying over time and there's still some isotopes in the few day range which are still decaying. Much of this will remain hot for centuries, but merely waiting does ease the problem. They can also clean up the problem (vacuum, wash, whatever, the radioactive contamination, vitrify it or otherwise stabilize it, and bury it).
And they're beyond issues of criticality. What fuel has melted is now both diluted (since it mixed up with metal, concrete, etc) and "poisoned" by elem
Re:100 mS is no joke (Score:4, Informative)
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.
No. To use the inevitable car analogy:
A scientist says: "Car accidents can happen to anyone who is in an automobile. However, studies have shown that car crashes are an insignificant cause of death for those who drive less than 1000 miles per year.
An editor summarizes: "Minimum one-year driving linked to increased car crash risk: 1000 miles".
You read: "If you drive 1000 miles you'll probably die".
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Radiation poisoning happens at 400 mS. Your analogy fails. 100 mS is the minimum level at which we KNOW cancer rates go up significantly. They probably rise at lower radiation doses as well.
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exactly. Everyone needs to remember that there is a base percentage chance of cancer already, around 20% i think, and these exposures are upping this percentage to 21%. Even if my statement is oversimplified and incorrect, it is not as incorrect as those saying that 100mSv / hr will kill you in exactly one hour.
The other confusion I keep hearing is that this will increase existing chances ... I have a family history of colon cancer, so I watch it closely. Radiation exposure is an independent risk, it doesnt
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If you hang around an area with 100 mS per hour for an hour, you'll receive a dose likely to cause cancer.
Well, you'll receive a dose that has been statistically shown to increase your chances of getting cancer, which is not quite the same thing as likely.
There was a handful of articles floating around last week that the plant company was looking to hire semi-skilled 'Jumpers' to do the kinds of jobs you're talking about. They'll pay you a ridiculous amount of money ($2500-5000) to get trained in on a simple task like refueling a generator or patching a damaged cable, then you jump in, get the work done as fas
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What a way to make a living. And it's a nice chunk of change...IF you don't end up being the 1/100 or 1/1000 that develops some kind of nasty cancer early and dies slowly and horribly...or is forced to spend hundreds of k on medical bills.
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No, not a dose likely to cause cancer. A dose that has a measurable effect on increasing your lifelong chances of getting cancer. The base chance of a random person, with no extra-ordinary risk factors, getting cancer is somewhere around 46%. It's assumed that any exposure to radiation increases this, but with radiation doses less than 100mSv, the increase chance of getting cancer is so small it can't be measured/detected. (and I'm pretty sure, though don't remember exactly, that the first level of incr
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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.
Not quite. There's a difference between an increased chance of cancer (something like a 5% increased chance of getting cancer in the next 30 years) and being "likely to cause cancer". Similarly, 400 mSv marks the beginning of some symptoms of radiation poisoning - itchy skin being the primary symptom.
As exposure moves
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It's not "likely", it's "measurably likely". As in, there is a small but measurable increase in the probability that you will one day get cancer.
100 mSv/hr is not a trivial amount of radiation. It's not Godzilla or Chernobyl, but it's substantial. As you point out, a few hours at 100 mSv/hr will cause radiation poisoning, and a few more hours will kill you.
Who? (Score:3)
I'd like a machine that can travel at 100 mS per hour.
I think they call it a Tardis. It's just not a very good one.
the fishermen just don't "get it" (Score:3)
(emphasis mine)
They are being totally selfish and turning a blind eye to what the government has been trying to tell them. They have many millions more gallons of water than they can store. Some of it has to be dumped. They could dump some less contaminated water from the storage pond to make room for much more dangerous water that has to be removed from the reactors, OR they could stop using the pond and just dump that highly radioactive water from the reactors straight into the ocean, which would be much worse for the fishing industry over the next several years. No one else has a better idea, unless these fishermen care to stop by with some buckets?
They're upset at what's happening, and are lashing out and treating it like they're the deliberate targets of a random malicious decision. It's the best option available at this time. I don't even know if a technology exists to remove radiation from water, I'm assuming it either doesn't exist or is too slow to be practical otherwise they wouldn't be using storage ponds in the first place.
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I don't even know if a technology exists to remove radiation from water, I'm assuming it either doesn't exist or is too slow to be practical otherwise they wouldn't be using storage ponds in the first place.
The technology does exist to remove the radioactive particles from the water, but the water treatment plant at Fukushima is offline as a result of the damage and lack of electricity. The only option at this point is to store as much contaminated water as possible until the treatment plant can be reactivated. Furthermore, if the primary contaminant is Iodine-131, they simply need to quarantine the water long enough for the Iodine to decay at which point the water can be safely discharged into the sea witho
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I can see their point. If elevated radiation is detected in their catch, nobody will touch it with a ten foot pole. They will have no livelihood, and that is a terrifying prospect for anybody.
Fusion Power Time? (Score:2)
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When I look up and see the Moon, I see a large amount of energy that soon could be within Humanities reach.
That's the sun. Daylight. An interesting concept. You might try it some time.
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Yep, we'll have fusion power in 50 years. Just like they said 50 years ago.
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wait, what??? the helium goes to the moon? that is why balloons float? what attracts this He? is the moon a big magnet for this stuff ? :)
This is all meaningless (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if they get the hydrogen under control, the amount of water, the damage to the secondary containment, the likely damage to primary containment, the contamination of the site, it's not just that Fukushima Daiichi will never operate again. Daiichi will be entombed and left to decay for at least a decade, probably longer, much longer. All six reactors are lost, 5&6 are just not going to be operated because it is too hot to work there 8 hours a day.
While they wait for decay to lower levels enough for machines to clean things up, there will be continuing groundwater and soil contamination. They will have to build a new seawall and interceptor wells to limit (not prevent) contamination of the local sea. The local population won't be allowed within 12km, and they won't WANT to be within 20km or more. Agriculture will likely be ruined, having to wait for years to once again export their products. It's the Cesium isotopes that will cause the worst problems, and cause the lasting effects, and they are not able to contain this yet. Hopefully #3 won't blow a Plutonium cloud that, even if it were minimal, would poison the area for the forseeable future. There is no assurance that this will not happen.
This is already inevitable, and there will be no real discussion, because TEPCO cannot admit to the inevitable outcome yet. To do so is to admit defeat, lose all face, and watch them become a single-yen stock.
And somehow Japan needs to replace the generating capacity. Quickly.
Overall this situation is redefining 'worst-case'. It may have been simpler to have a couple of core melts and just pour concrete and sand over the whole damned thing. Now we've gotten broken containment, multiple vectors, and inadequate resources. Oh, and the Japanese way of self-reliance to the point of failure. Works for the residents and their migration, doesn't work for engineering problems.
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Overall this situation is redefining 'worst-case'. It may have been simpler to have a couple of core melts and just pour concrete and sand over the whole damned thing. Now we've gotten broken containment, multiple vectors, and inadequate resources. Oh, and the Japanese way of self-reliance to the point of failure. Works for the residents and their migration, doesn't work for engineering problems./quote.
No, there's still quite a ways to go before you get near "worst case". One bad scenario is failing to cool the fuel to the point that it combusts, putting ash heavy with radioactive material into the air. (Also bad is an explosive failure of the primary containment, but that's very unlikely these days.) Uncontained radioactive materials at the reactor site and in the ocean is one thing. Radioactive materials in the ground water is worse. Radioactive materials in the atmosphere in large quantities is very bad.
Re:This is all meaningless (Score:4, Informative)
First, the cesium issue is that it is longer-lived than iodine isotopes. It also tends to accumulate in bones. While iodine is fairly well defended against, cesium is more difficult...
The plutonium issue is precisely what everyone else seems to be glossing over. The #3 reactor is the only source of plutonium at Daiichi, and there is some minimal contamination detected immediately next to the reactor. The fear of some experts is that they may yet lose containment of #3, that the fuel may pool and eat through the floor of secondary containment, and then it's in the ground and groundwater. Clearly, they expect to be able to keep this fuel cool enough that it won't truly melt, but we've been assured more than few times that that isn't a problem, and it is now assumed by several experienced engineers to have already happened to a small extent. TEPCO is not your reliable source for info on this either. Most of this is under the heading of 'prepare for the worst'.
But #1 is again building pressure, and hydrogen. This is good, because containment is working well enough to build pressure. this is bad because an explosion will cause a lot of problems... They are trying to displace the hydrogen with nitrogen last I heard, though where the hydrogen goes I haven't looked into.
If #3 containment fails due to explosion or fuel fire, that would release plutonium, and likely as a cloud. The current expectation is that a #3 containment failure would be a meltdown, down through the floor, and plutonium would be a ground contaminant. I am not encouraged by that.
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Iodine is somewhat defended against with potassium iodide; enough so that almost nothing is absorbed by the thyroid; what remains decays in ~48 hours anyway.
Cesium doesn't have a strong affinity for bone - it distributes fairly evenly throughout the body, with slightly higher concentrations in the muscles, and is treated by the body similarly to potassium. As a result, cesium is normally excreted via urine, though much more slowly than iodine. Prussian blue binds with cesium, which reduces the time until
The bad news (Score:5, Interesting)
Workers are pumping nitrogen into one of the reactors at Japan's damaged nuclear plant in an attempt to prevent an explosion caused by dangerously overheated fuel rods.
Officials at TEPCO, which operates the Fukushima plant, said a dangerous hydrogen buildup is taking place at its number-one reactor. Japan's NHK television quoted officials saying hydrogen is accumulating inside the reactor's containment vessel - an indication that the reactor's core has been damaged.
Crisis at Japan Nuclear Plant Shifts to New Blast Risk [voanews.com]
Chemistry 201: Why Is Fukushima So Gassy? [nytimes.com]
But there are reasons...that Fukushima is particularly vulnerable.
One is its recent use of seawater to cool the reactors's fuel rods and cores. In addition to the oxygen in water molecules, cold seawater can hold a great deal of dissolved oxygen gas. But warm water cannot; so as the seawater was heated in the reactor, the dissolved oxygen emerged and gathered in the empty space above the water.
(Ordinary reactor cooling water has had the oxygen removed from it by plant operators to reduce the possibility of rust.)
In addition, gamma radiation from the nuclear fuel in the reactor would continuously produce small amounts of hydrogen and oxygen by breaking up water molecules --- and the normal method of recombining these elements into water at such plants in a controlled fashion is no longer available.
Plants of the Fukushima variety usually have catalytic converters that accomplish that at the point where steam has run through the turbine and is condensed back into water for another trip through the reactor. But that path has been closed since the plant lost power at the moment of the March 11 earthquake.
Hydrogen can also emerge from the zirconium metal used as fuel cladding. One of the lessons of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 near Harrisburg, Pa., is that when the cladding comes into contact with steam rather than water, it goes through a reaction that is akin to rusting; it picks up oxygen from the water molecule and gives off hydrogen.
This only happens at high temperatures, but uncertainty reigns at the moment about temperatures in the Fukushima reactor cores. With some cooling channels blocked, they are likely to have hot spots.
By design, boiling water reactors like these have far more zirconium metal in them than pressurized water reactors do. They boil water directly in the core, covering the fuel assemblies with a water/steam mixture rather than keeping them immersed in water. The water has to be directed to each individual fuel assembly and therefore each sits in its own zirconium box.
All of that zirconium is available for an oxidation reaction with steam in which the metal absorbs oxygen from water and turns to a powdery rust, releasing hydrogen.
Rendered useless (Score:2)
Radiation monitors designed for people working at a site that has chronic exposure risk, maybe. Personal radiation monitors for acute exposure can handle well above 100 mSv/hr. Radiation monitors in general can measure above 100 Sv/hr, 3 orders of magnitude higher than what they're talking about. It's not that the levels of radiation are "immeasurable", as the article incorrectly states. It's just that they apparently don't have equipment on hand sufficient to measure it.
Um, so they built a pipe that goes to the ocean (Score:3)
And connects to a drain at the bottom of a pit underneath a nuclear reactor. And this is to help when they wax the floors? This is to clean up after barbecues? This drain is used when the have the weekly trim everyones hair day underneath the reactors? Considering these buildings are supposed to be nearly hermetically sealed, why the snot do the plans call for a pipe that goes out the the friggin ocean?
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Considering these buildings [the reactor buildings] are supposed to be nearly hermetically sealed, why the snot do the plans call for a pipe that goes out [to] the friggin ocean?
Your mistake was believing the bullshit some people have been spouting that the reactor buildings were a third layer of containment after the ziroconium clad fuel rods and the containment vessel. Here is excerpt from an article from earlier in the crisis called Containment vessel failure unlikely [japantimes.co.jp]:
The containment vessel is the last line of defense for containing lethal radioactive materials, and significant damage would pose grave safety concerns.
Drains and tunnels actually make sense. When a reactor is functioning properly, almost all of the radioactivity is contained within the zirconium clad fuel rods. The water circulating around the rods that acts
Bioaccumulative effects (Score:4, Informative)
What I don't see enough discussion about is the bioaccumulative effect.
For catch-up: fat-soluble toxins can accumulate in the bodies of organisms such that at every step of the food chain, the concentration is multiplied. It's not just a single species accreting the toxin, but what happens when its predators are eating from this concentrated source. Any links up the food chain up to the apex predator are going to have a multiplied effect, which is why a seemingly insignificant amount of mercury pollution versus the ocean's volume has made tuna consumption a point of caution.
We are seeing radiation levels that could be a bit of a concern and the Fukushima situation is still not under control. And are some of the compounds it's emitting bioaccumulative? Yes, Cesium 137 for example, and that has a half-life of 30 years. And the first thing you should do is move your consumption as far down the food chain as possible. Even if you don't plan to go vegan, learn Indian cooking or a low-meat cuisine, because the less animal product you're consuming, the better.
Sources:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11482657 [nih.gov]
http://www.marietta.edu/~biol/102/2bioma95.html [marietta.edu]
http://science.jrank.org/pages/854/Bioaccumulation.html [jrank.org]
http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-rainwater-radiation-181-times-above-us-drinking-water-standard-2011-4 [businessinsider.com]
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Bioaccumulation doesn't really apply - radioactive isotopes aren't fat-soluble toxins.
Radioactive isotopes are water-soluble - often highly so.
Of the main contenders from a nuclear plant:
Iodine: Is excreted via urine (like any other mineral). Not a real candidate for any meaningful analog of bioaccumulation, as its half life is so short. It still causes damage while in the body, but it'll generally only be the first or second ingester that is affected; after that, Iodine will have broken down.
Cesium: A
Re:"Leak Plugged" ? Yea right. (Score:5, Informative)
There is an estimated 50,000 tons of water still on site that will need to be disposed of one way or the other. About 500 tons are pumped into reactor pressure vessels for cooling every day. Some recent information on this is reported here by NHK: Workers face challenge of water storage [nhk.or.jp]
To put 50,000 tons of water in perspective, a super tanker will carry about 172,000,000 gallons of oil. 50,000 tons of water is ~12,000,000 gallons. One super tanker could carry all the water on site plus and also receive all new water pumped into the reactors for the next 1332 days. No, I don't need the plausibility of this explained to me; this is an attempt to provide some scale to the problem.
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To put 50,000 tons of water in perspective...
50,000 tons of water is a 36×36×36 cube of water (1 tonne of water has volume 1000 litres = 1 m^3).
This is 20 large swimming pools worth of water (20× 25×50×2).
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11,000 tons of radioactive water
I keep hearing this figure on the news, but nobody has ever bothered to say how radiaoactive this water was. I mean, if I put a miligram of Uranium into the Atlantic, did I just produce 323,600,000 cubic kilometres of radioactive water?
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Also, they operate at high pressures to keep the water liquid past the normal 100C boiling point. In a BWR, pressure is 75 atmospheres, in a PWR it's 160. To get those pressures from depth of water and hold with an 'open top' (read: loss of containment at the top), you'd need a stack of water 750 meters high; double for a PWR. At lengths like that, you generate a lot of 'dirty' water, it saps a ton of efficiency from the reactor (warming-up a kilometer-long tube of water?), and it's more likely that a crack
Checklist for your idea .. (Score:2)
Your idea's good points are:
[x]It would be easier to prevent dissipation of radioactive gases.
[x]Terrorists would have a harder time hitting a reactor.
Your idea's bad points are:
[x]It would cost extra money to prepare the building site.
[x]It would cost extra money to build the reactor.
[x]It would be harder to access the reactor if an earthquake damaged the site.
[x]It does not prevent leakage of radioactive materials to the ground water.
[x]It does not fully prevent the risk of an explosion and fracture of co
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I don't know, but I'm heading to Yokohama Sushi at 8th and New Hampshire in Lawrence, Kansas for dinner tonight, and I'm bringing my geiger counter.
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The yellowcake is a lie!
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