Japan Doubles Fukushima Radiation Leak Estimate 251
DrBoumBoum writes "The severity of the Fukishima disaster continues to go up, from incident level 4 to level 5 to level 7, and now to 20% of total Chernobyl radioactive spill. The story is not over yet as the plant keeps on leaking radioactive material and may still do so for a long time."
Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
Me irradiate you long time.
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Nuclear Hologram. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Fools. The lot of them. Trying to hide the real nature of this accident has undermined nuclear power technology greatly.
Yeah, 'cause nuclear power has always been such a good idea. Right? I mean the fucking inevitableirresponsible behavior from profit-driven plant operators has never been a significant problem. Right?
Re:Nuclear Hologram. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's only inevitable when you cut down on regulatory authority to satisfy the whack job libertarian lobby. All forms of energy have possible downsides to them, and some of them can be catastrophic in nature, hardly seems fair to single out the nuclear energy industry when the oil industry has more or less led us to the brink of disaster and wants to keep leading into the abyss.
Re:Nuclear Hologram. (Score:4, Insightful)
All forms of energy have possible downsides to them, and some of them can be catastrophic in nature, hardly seems fair to single out the nuclear energy
Well few other energy sources make an area completely unlivable for decades or centuries when they fail.
Oil/coal have operational pollution issues, but they don't have catastrophic failure issues. Yes the Gulf Oil spill was a sort of catastrophic event, but even oil is eaten by microbes. The downsides are limited to a decade or so...and life continues there even during this time. Not great but not nearly on the scale of a nuclear accident.
If humans are involved in design, construction or operation, failures will happen. With nuclear, failure is not an option. 100,000+ people in Japan are permanently homeless. At least it's a foreshadowing for when the oceans rise and 10s of millions of people need to be relocated.
Re:Nuclear Hologram. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sea level rise from global warming is expected to flood some densely populated areas. Increased temperatures will make some currently hospitable areas inhospitable, and turn land presently viable for agriculture worthless. These changes are likely to be irreversible for thousands of years at the very least, possibly indefinitely, and the problems occur globally, not just within the closest few kilometers of the power plants.
There is very little doubt that the cost of adapting to the consequences of our greenhouse gas emissions will vastly exceed even the worst outcome of nuclear accidents. Yes, that includes Chernobyl. You can't declare the entire world an exclusion zone when it's the global climate you're messing up.
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For the most part we don't need nuclear power. For electricity generation provided by nuclear power many places can use geothermal instead. Particularly Japan. It's cheaper, doesn't require foreign fuels or technologies, doesn't leave a mess afterward, the plants don't have to be decommissioned - and they don't have the potential for their lives to be extended long beyond their safe operating life due to political and fiscal exigencies because they don't become unsafe over time. The spent fuel doesn't
Re:Nuclear Hologram. (Score:4, Interesting)
Hell, if you really wanna split hairs, the US? F-tons of weapons grade material laying around that HAS to be stored, or used, not to mention is aging. Which means the enclosures around them are going to crack eventually. Those material need to be used till the levels go down, and becomes a simpler task to store. But hey, I already know theres no changing your mind. Too much kool-aid has been drank on your part.
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Geothermal releases a fair amount of CO2 and another contaminants with varying values depending of the quality of the steam coming from the wells. Some of that CO2 get processed and sold for industrial uses, but you can't process it at 100%.
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The geothermal CO2 would have been released anyway due to the vulcanic activity. So the CO2 balance is zero. There are other issues with geothermal energy, which are more severe for Japan: It seems to make the region more prone to earthquakes. The geothermal tests around Basel (Switzerland) have been stopped after the seismic activity increased [geoscienceworld.org].
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Sea level rise from global warming is expected to flood some densely populated areas.
You are correct. I still stand by my point that coal/oil this is an operational issue outcome not one of failure. Sure we didn't do anything about the problem until almost too late, but that doesn't mean the problem was because those fuel sources 'failed' like a nuclear accident.
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100,000+ people in Japan are permanently homeless.
Really?
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If humans are involved in design, construction or operation, failures will happen. With nuclear, failure is not an option.
Indeed, failure is not an option. Close down your local hydro electric dam [wikipedia.org] today! (Better get all the other energy production means while you're at it.
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Oil/coal have operational pollution issues, but they don't have catastrophic failure issues. Yes the Gulf Oil spill was a sort of catastrophic event, but even oil is eaten by microbes. The downsides are limited to a decade or so...and life continues there even during this time. Not great but not nearly on the scale of a nuclear accident.
I disagree. The Gulf Oil spill was at least as bad as Fukishima. Not as bad as Chernobyl perhaps, since it didn't have quite as dramatic an impact on human lives, but the damage to sea life is enormous, and it will take a long time to recover from that.
I'm as much against fission power as the next guy, but it doesn't do anyone any good to overlook the significant dangers of the oil and coal industries. We need to get rid of them all, eventually.
For example, the German decision to get rid of nuclear power pl
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1) IS "eaten" by microbes (well it's converted into energy and used), small plants and (I've read one paper claiming ...) even by small animals
I'd like to see a source supporting this claim. Please understand, I quite strongly agree with you in general, but this one seems a little weird, and it's the first time I've ever heard it. If true, providing a reliable source would greatly strengthen your argument at large, and I think that would be a good thing.
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I'd like to see a source supporting this claim.
Biologically induced nuclear reactions are nothing new. Here is the link [wikipedia.org] that you asked about :-)
Re:Cliche but nuclear is far safer than anything e (Score:5, Informative)
You make a good case, and you probaby would like this book by Bernard L. Cohen that says much the same:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/BOOK.html [pitt.edu]
Also, at some point, even with meltdowns, we can just site new nuclear plants where the old one melted down. So, Fukushima is now a good place to site more plants, as is Chernobyl, given the evacuations and the grounds are already contaminated. We could also produce synthetic fuels in those areas and ship them elsewhere. And we could build lots of robots to do the work.
Thorium reactors are even safer and we have much more thorium (thousands of years) than uranium and plutonium (hundred years?) for reactors.. But ironically it is said that thorium technology was not developed in the 1940s and 1950s precisely because it was safer and you could not make bombs from it.
With all that said, I'm still rooting for stuff like solar roadways, maglev wind, or the Rossi/Focardi eCat.
http://www.solarroadways.com/ [solarroadways.com]
http://www.maglevwindturbine.com/ [maglevwindturbine.com]
http://pesn.com/2011/05/31/9501837_Cold-Fusion_Number-1_Claims_NASA_Chief/ [pesn.com]
Even various forms of hot fusion are looking promising.
Although solar thermal could have done the job from the 1970s and on. Renewables IMHO have been cheaper than fossil fuels when you consider the externalities like pollution, health impacts, risks, defense costs, and so on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power [wikipedia.org]
One can argue about the externalities from different nuclear options (such as who pays for the permanent evacuation around Fukushima or follow on effects like loss of agriculture or other economic problems in the area). If we do see a nuclear resurgance, it is going to look very different than today's plants (or should).
Conventional nuclear tends to be fairly centralized which has various political implications in a democracy. Yes there ideas like Hyperion, but they still probably require big central plants to make them and reprocess them. Mainstream nuclear in general requires a higher level of transparency then our society seems capable of on a sustained basis so far. Fukushima is just one more example of that lack of transparency or foresight.
Still, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, as if our society ran off of cheap thorium power, our politics might be better and less short-term if it assumed abundance instead of scarcity.
The good news is, we have lots of energy options, and the human imagination continues to invent more of them:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR40.txt [juliansimon.com]
Re:Cliche but nuclear is far safer than anything e (Score:4, Interesting)
You make some good points here but I think your arguments would be much stronger if you discuss:
a) why the nuclear industry has consistently downplayed the severity of the incident at every turn (meltdowns more severe than 'expected', more radiation released than 'expected' - why aren't they honest and releasing worst case figures?
b) why the industry keeps talking about 'design flaws' instead of acknowledging irresponsible cost/risk management practices
c) discuss the social and economic impact of displacing 100,000 people and how this factors into the cost of nuclear
The way the vast majority of nuclear engineers and supporters ignore the negatives and focusing solely on the positives gives me the impression that the industry has a far too narrow focus on certain technical issues and are blissfully unaware of the real and perceived impacts of nuclear technology on the economy and society generally. Before and even after this incident I was a supporter of nuclear energy. However, the industries response to this disaster has pretty much convinced me the industry is incapable of running a nuclear enterprise responsibly.
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Since tourism to Japan has dropped around 62% and tourism around Fukushima prefecture is for all practical matters non existent even if most dangerously contaminated area goes around a polygon of 10 x 50 km,500 km of 377.835 km of Japan's surface, it does make sense that they downplayed the risk in the weeks after disaster. Personally, I believe that the most intelligent course of action would have been to speak about the worst case scenario in the following week after the earthquake when tourism was dead a
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I would argue that they have a very good handle on the real impacts of nuclear energy, and are still proponents of it because despite all of those things you mentioned, nuclea
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from wind power ? about a dozen (let's avoid high towers when an earthquake hits)
from solar power ? 4 (again, don't be on rooftops maintaining or installing solar panels during earthquakes)
from nuclear power ? 0 (*one* got mild burns and *may* get sick in 20-30 years)
In the interests of strict accuracy that would be no deaths caused by radiation (so far at least). There was one as a direct result of the earthquake and two from the tsunami. (Even so, compared with other places on the coast that would make it a relatively safe place to be.)
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I'm struggling to work out if you post is sheer comedic genius or sheer ignorance. If you are serious then it's little wonder that the fate of the nuclear industry is doomed with supporters such as yourself. If not, Bravo sir!!
Either way, I encourage you to post more.
Re:Nuclear Hologram. (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually no, as a Libertarian I don't think you get neuclear power at all. These things only get built with subsides and loan grantees, that we don't support. The free market does not build these.
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The problem with modern libertarianism is there are no real repercussions for this kind of behavior. IF they were to take all the board members of Tokyo Electric Power Co. out to a rice patty and shoot them in their heads then maybe other power companies might think twice before getting sloppy. Really the damage they've caused warrants it.
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If they had same this wouldn't have necessary since by their own volition they would have committed sepukko. Their short sightedness is astounding, instead of spending a few million dollars protecting a highly profitable power plant they risked everything and lost all.
Re:Nuclear Hologram. (Score:4, Interesting)
Japan has no whack job libertarian lobby.
They have Toyama Koichi [youtube.com] who tries to overthrow the government by running in the elections, smile doctor Mack Akasa [youtube.com], oh and Yuya Uchida [youtube.com] with his love ando peacu movemento. I think it's safe to say they have enough whack job politicians to be sure that some get elected, just like any other country.
There's more videos on youtube if you do a little searching on the political broadcasts for the elections, but most of 'm aren't translated.
Have fun
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who tries to overthrow the government by running in the elections
Well we certainly would not want candidates with opposing view points participating in elections, that would be inconvenient.
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As for TFA...well...what did anyone expect?
The truth... immediately.
If you look that evening as a press conference was being
made, the prime minister is talking about the quake, about
the tsunami... everything is fine.
Then he starts about the nuke plant and is just blatantly
lying his ass off. I posted about it here and on my Facebook.
If anyone is good at microexpressions and visual accessing
cues, watch the very first press conference.
They knew... THAT DAY... that it was worse than they were
disclosing.
So, to answer what did anyone expect? MORE OF THE T
Re:Nuclear Hologram. (Score:4, Interesting)
As for TFA...well...what did anyone expect? Wasn't that like the WORST tsunami and earthquake recorded there in like 100 years? You can only design structures that will last to a reasonable degree. I mean does anyone think if we had a quake the size of the great San Francisco quake close to one of our reactors shit wouldn't get broke? Hell what do you think the damage would be if a tsunami that size hit chemical row in the gulf?
It's a matter of risk management. In 1953, Netherland had a huge flood. After that, we started upgrading our coastal defenses, with the goal that a flood of that scale could only occur once in 10,000 years. 10,000 years is a pretty long time. On a human scale, it basically translates to "never", but as you know, you can never have 100% security, so we have to accept that the rare freak storm/high tide combination that occurs maybe once every interglacial period, might cause a flood. Everything on our coast is designed with this in mind.
In Japan, not so. A few years ago the IAEA gave Japan a warning that several of their coastal reactors were not safe enough. Fukishima was one of them. It may have been the worst earthquake/tsunami of the century, but centuries are not rare. If you expect your nuclear plants to operate for several decades, then you need to design them to withstand even the rare once-in-a-century freak earthquake+tsunami. They didn't.
Know what the dangers are, know what risks you're willing to face, and design for it.
20% of chernobyl's radiation. (Score:5, Insightful)
To anybody with even a remote understanding of nuclear physics that number means absolutely nothing. What matters, especially for long term effect, is the form of radiation. Which the article of course doesn't mention.
Re:20% of chernobyl's radiation. (Score:5, Funny)
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Godzilla
And, of course, Mothra.
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I wish there were more posts like this outside of Slashdot. I remember being in Tokyo at the time it happened and seeing CNN's "worse than Hiroshima" headline. Strangely and somewhat disappointingly I still only have one head and two eyes.
Hopefully this will also put some of the accusations of lying to rest too. When they know something they release the info, and besides which you can't cover up radiation.
Re:20% of chernobyl's radiation. (Score:5, Insightful)
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To anybody with even a ..... ah fuck it.
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Why would they lie when there is no way they can cover up the radiation? International scientists at the site take their own independent readings, and of course outside the plant anyone with a Geiger counter can check local radiation levels. Some of the equipment being used was loaned by other countries (robots, for example) and they sent engineers to assist with their operation, so any conspiracy would have to force them to lie too.
On top of that other countries, particularly the US, take regular air sampl
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What matters is the isotopes which emit the radiation. This not only determines the form of radiation, but also the energy, the lifetime, and whether and where it accumulates in the human body.
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If it's level 7, I think they mean the bad kind.
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I once had a level ten paper cut, but somehow I survived.
In other words, these levels aren't very meaningful. Knowing what amounts of what isotopes where would actually tell us something.
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Yawn, let me know when it hits 11.
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> What matters, especially for long term effect, is the form of radiation. Which the article of course doesn't mention.
Umm, iodine and cesium.
They're always the main isotopes emitted in a nuclear accident. Besides they're the only ones Tepco give information on.
There's no info about the rubble that got blown out by the explosions, but I assume that that isn't counted as part of the 770,000 figure
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There's a huge gulf between iodine and cesium. If it's mostly iodine and a trace of cesium, it's gone in days. If it's mostly cesium, it's years.
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The forest near Chernobyl that much of the aerosolized fuel/graphite rained down on was dead within days and will be uninhabitable/unapproachable for centuries.
Radiation levels on the solid artificial surfaces in the area are no longer immediately harmful. As soon as you even approach the roadside and get near exposed soil or plants they peg generic rad me
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Actions consisting mostly of denying.
Detailed analysis of released nucleides (Score:2)
It is in the attachment from this press release from TEPCO:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11060707-e.html [tepco.co.jp]
Improvement plan for the exact nuclide analysis at the site of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station under instruction of NISA (Continued report 4)
The most surprising thing is that they found traces of Te-129 with an half life of 70 minutes in some samples from sea water not in the immediate vicinity of the NPS.
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The gaming industry is very lucky this year (Score:2)
A few studios are already planning the next major release for certain hot titles.
Fallout 4: New Japan. Welcome to the Tokyo wasteland!
Modern Warfare 3: Assassination of the No.1 terrorist in history by US SEALs in a foreign central urban area
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Or better yet, combine the two...
Osamazilla, rising from his burial in the radioactive sea to demolish Tokyo.
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Now that I think of it, why don't they do a Fallout in Asia? The closest they've come to that was Operation Anchorage and that was still in the North America.
"But but but" blah blah. (Score:2, Insightful)
and yet, gee, another time the thing got escalated into an even more perilous situation.
yes, come, fuck around with shitty excuses AGAIN. i wonder what level of peril will be the level you stop doing that.
Re:"But but but" blah blah. (Score:4, Insightful)
What I am most angry about is that all the promises of "cheap" go right out the window with the observed accident rate and costs. None of the numerous promises about reactor safety even remotely resemble the truth. To me the whole nuclear industry is a scheme to transfer huge amounts of money into certain pockets.
That they cause a lot of deaths and a completely unsolved long-term waste storage problem, which will increase cost even further (but for future generation and who cares about them) is just the icing on the cake.
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The conflation of two aspects of the NIMBY crowd, "No new nuclear reactors," and "Nothing capable of refining weapons-grade material (i.e. it's a bomb omg!)," have made the cost of operating old, inefficient reactor designs prohibitively expensive. Breeder reactors that don't melt down and process nearly all the input material several times (resulting in a much smaller amount of waste that, while highly radioactive, is naturally radioactive for a far shorter period of time, in the span of decades) are not
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While I am for thorium reactors, I'm not deluded enough to blame the anti-nuclear crowd for the lack of upgrades that reactors are receiving. Fukushima was supposed to be shut down 10 years ago, but they keep extending the life of the reactor. Your bullshit argument only illustrates that there are nuclear nuts who make excuses for the old reactors still running, and that there are anti-nuclear nuts who ignore the newer reactors to say all nuclear is bad.
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You forget that the biggest reason that fukushima was still running is because of NIMBY concerns in Japan not wanting new reactors built. The money was there for replacing it 10 years ago, but it was politically inconvenient and tepco couldn't get the permits. Based on a normal construction time it would have been replaced with a newer, safer design and we wouldn't be talking about this if it wasn't for the anti-nuclear nutjobs.
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Given that this event exceeded the risk standards in place even today, any new reactors would have suffered the same fate. The topside cooling water storage would have helped, but that's no guarantee of success given the magnitude.
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Most of the new reactor designs include fail-safes that don't rely on constant cooling for months to stop the reaction. Most can stop it within 2 days. the majority are even gravity based. One in particular involves a gravity based system that if something goes wrong triggers on its own and shoves graphite rods down into the reactor, stopping the reaction. I'd call that a pretty large guarantee of success. The facility wouldn't even have to be built as well as the original.
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Most of the new reactor designs include fail-safes that don't rely on constant cooling for months to stop the reaction.
I get your point and that's somewhat what I tried to say. However it's also about the same as "Trust us, it won't fail because we've got the latest safety measures in place." Which is *exactly* what they said about the original nuclear plant. Another unforeseen disaster will trump those safety features too.
Nothing else has these types of issues. Nothing.
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You forget that the biggest reason that fukushima was still running is because of NIMBY concerns in Japan not wanting new reactors built. The money was there for replacing it 10 years ago, but it was politically inconvenient and tepco couldn't get the permits. Based on a normal construction time it would have been replaced with a newer, safer design and we wouldn't be talking about this if it wasn't for the anti-nuclear nutjobs.
I suspect TEPCO's, the IAEA's and governments track record with the truth and compliance comes into the equation (imo).
TEPCO failed to meet it's obligations regarding maintenance of pumps and their word that it will be done was accepted despite being caught falsifying records on more than one occasion. [reuters.com]
Why did they get the green light to keep operating let alone extend the life of reactors operated by them that should have been decommissioned?
The risk of the generators failing due to a tsunami were ide
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UTTER BULLSHIT... there is no NIMBY in japan... Plant kept running and got a 10 years extention permit just before the Quake just because it was still good enough to make money, same goes with Hamaoka.
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I have always wondered why we can use Nuclear power on our aircraft carriers and submarines which operate in small contained environments without any reported catastrophes.
Operational procedures, reactor and sub recertification and an Admirial (who is a hero to me) who recognised the absolute danger of these devices and engineered the safest program possible.
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You mean, like the K-19 [wikipedia.org] and K-431 [wikipedia.org] never happened?
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Little known? You mean "most well known thing ever", right?
It's been known since day one that the sarcophagus was designed to be a temporary structure - one of the corners is using the damaged reactor building as a load bearing structure, for example. And it was never designed to be hermetically sealed.
The subsequent talk about raising money for a permanent solution has been going on since the late 80s.
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What level of peril?
Sir Lancelot: We were in the nick of time. You were in great peril.
Sir Galahad: I don't think I was.
Sir Lancelot: Yes, you were. You were in terrible peril.
Sir Galahad: Look, let me go back in there and face the peril.
Sir Lancelot: No, it's too perilous.
Sir Galahad: Look, it's my duty as a knight to sample as much peril as I can.
Sir Lancelot: No, we've got to find the Holy Grail. Come on.
Sir Galahad: Oh, let me have just a little bit of peril?
Sir Lancelot: No. It's unhealthy.
Sir Galahad:
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Show us deaths and / or injuries.
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Show us deaths and / or injuries.
Well since varying types of cancers from the ingested isotopes take 5 years plus to gestate we will have to wait that long before we can even begin to get some bearing on the amount of casualties caused by the accident. There are some frightening estimates of the premature death toll emerging. The data that emerged from Chernobyl was the death toll clearly trending up until the funding for gathering the data was cut.
Japan was just very lucky that the wind was blowing off shore when the accident occurred ot
Re:"But but but" blah blah. (Score:4, Insightful)
Is people losing their homes, farms and businesses to a nuclear exclusion zone for the next 300 years not bad enough?
FuckupShima: Twice the glow fo the same money! (Score:3)
These people give engineers everywhere a bad name. Incompetent and pathological liars. Incredible.
Mean while near Tokyo (Score:3)
"A group of Tokyo parents filed a request Tuesday asking the metropolitan government to change the way it determines radiation levels in the capital after their own study found relatively high levels of contamination around Koto Ward."
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110608a6.html [japantimes.co.jp]
5.77 microsieverts per hour of radiation measured near Tokyo at ground level
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9a0Q1v93SA [youtube.com]
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The 1.6 microsievert/hour level in Fukushima Prefecture is significant, but the 0.18 in Tokyo is nothing to be concerned about. It's interesting that they're concerned about 1 milisievert/year when the background level averages 2 (3 in the U.S.).
Nuclear reactions are still occuring at Fukushima (Score:4, Informative)
As Time Magazine blogger Eben Harrell pointed out on March 30th:
Arnie Gunderson says as of June 3rd:
Another recent post points out:
The situation at Fukushima is not stable and in fact the danger is increasing. The stopgap cooling by injecting tons of water into the reactors and fuel rod storage is creating a massive burden of highly radioactive water that is a storage and disposal nightmare. There has been some limited success in providing recirculation cooling to the spent rod pool for unit 1, but that has a modest effect on the radioactive water situation.
The plan to reduce radioactivity in existing water and recirculate it for cooling is still in process. It is not clear if the capacity of this system will be able to keep up with current cooling needs, much less deal with the backlog. If the reactors and fuel storage are generating new radioactive material, the cleanup system is even less likely to be adequate.
If there is re-criticality the cleanup becomes that much harder. There is also the possibility of more fires/explosions because of radioactive decay heat sources. Continued earthquakes or typhoons could trigger other large release of radioactive material into the general environment.
The plant is leaking highly radioactive water right now and this problem is being swept under the rug. There will be a permanent exclusion zone at the plant site. Even worse, the ocean region will have long lasting radiation contamination that will cripple the seafood industry for a large area of the Japanese coast. Things are a lot worse then anyone is willing to admit.
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Just to be clear, in a light water reactor, you need water between fuel rods to have fission. Neutrons have to be slowed down ("moderated") by interacting with the water molecules before they are of an energy that can effectively fission the U-235.
A solid pool of melted LWR fuel cannot become critical.
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Just to be clear, in a light water reactor, you need water between fuel rods to have fission. Neutrons have to be slowed down ("moderated") by interacting with the water molecules before they are of an energy that can effectively fission the U-235.
A solid pool of melted LWR fuel cannot become critical.
While fission probability decreases as neutron energy (and speed) increases, it is not zero. Therefore it is not impossible for fast neutrons to cause fission, just much less likely. The melted fuel may be be
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Sounds like it's past time to add boron to the cooling water.
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I think it has surpassed Chernobyl in terms of potential danger and is on a par in terms of actualised danger. The question is what the tipping point is to make Chernobyl the second worst reactor accident.
The amount of expertise and trained personnel required to keep the reactors under control is not an endless tap. These people will eventually fatigue and continue to put there lives on the line for a management that were too incompetent to run a rea
Meltdowns are impossible? (Score:2)
According to this documentary [youtu.be], US officials wanted reactors built in such a way they could contain a full meltdown. GE and Westinghouse lobbied hard and got their way by adding more cooling backups instead.
This means these reactors were built under the premise that a loss of cooling and therefore a full meltdown is "impossible", then Fukushima happened...
So now we have 3 reactors with several tons of radioactive fuel melted at the bottom of their containment vessels. I believe the presence of Iodine indicat
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What you want is a Pebble Bed reactor. "A pebble-bed reactor thus can have all of its supporting machinery fail, and the reactor will not crack, melt, explode or spew hazardous wastes. It simply goes up to a designed "idle" temperature, and stays there. In that state, the reactor vessel radiates heat, but the vessel and fuel spheres remain intact and undamaged. The machinery can be repaired or the fuel can be removed. These safety features were tested (and filmed) with the German AVR reactor. All the contr
Re:Meltdowns are impossible? (Score:5, Informative)
That German AVR reactor is also the most heabily beta-contaminated reactor site on the planet. And it contaminated both the soil and groundwater, and better yet in the form or radioactive dust.
Melting down is not the only possible problem...
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Hence the "other issues." But the contamination only occurs when you open up the closed system.
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Pebble bed reactors are not as ideal as claimed, and Germany gave up on the program considering the array of problems [wikipedia.org]. Perhaps some may have solutions, but fundamentally, it is still a solid fueled reactor with the associated problems. Solid fueled reactors can not efficiently burn up the fuel due to structural damage, resulting in long-lived actinides, fission products, and unburned fuel to be disposed of, with no possibility of recycling or access to the valuable fission products. (Such as medical isot
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"A pebble-bed reactor thus can have all of its supporting machinery fail, and the reactor will not crack, melt, explode or spew hazardous wastes. It simply goes up to a designed "idle" temperature, and stays there. In that state, the reactor vessel radiates heat, but the vessel and fuel spheres remain intact and undamaged.
I dunno about that - this report [eskom.co.za] suggests that although the fuel might not melt, the fuel spheres can still be damaged by heat spikes during normal operation and should water leak in (like, from the primary steam circuit that you'd use to generate power), you might get a big oldschool Chernobyl-style graphite-steam reaction.
Which would be kinda bad, wouldn't it? Especially since PBRs seem to be designed without gastight containment.
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But that only occurs if you open up the closed system.
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It is quite possible to contain a meltdown IF the floor of the containment is designed to spread and separate the molten fuel if the worst happens. That makes sure the fuel goes sub-critical. A bed of borax for the fuel to fall into wouldn't hurt either.
Balance of Coverage (Score:2, Interesting)
1. From the IAEA's preliminary report [iaea.org] (pdf):
To date no health effects have been reported in any person as a result of radiation exposure from the nuclear accident.
2. From Wikipedia's page on the 2011 tsunami [wikipedia.org]:
The Japanese National Police Agency has confirmed 15,365 deaths, 5,363 injured, and 8,206 people missing
Just sayin'.
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Just sayin'.
And do tsunami waves keep accumulating in crops and fish with a half-life of 30 years?
Just sayin' too.
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i guess that will double the deaths to, um, where's my calculator... zero
I'll take that as an admission you are only counting deaths from radiation sickness. Deaths which would occur within the first few hours, days, weeks or months of exposure.
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No, let's include all deaths directly linked to radiation exposure from nuclear generation *in all of history*.
Let's add the total death toll for ALL nuclear accidents EVER. Well that would be ... 86 (64 from chernobyl, which was mostly the result of politicians not telling workers what they were doing at the site, resulting in people walking into a uranium cloud which was still chain-reacting. Granted the accident was bad, but a lot of these deaths were perfectly preventable with minimal precautions). This
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The story is far from over, stay tuned for the next 100 admissions of "well, see it's a bit worse than we thought [read: admitted]".
and yet so far we have ONE confirmed victim, and he died of bad heart condition not the radiation ....
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Always add an additoanl 40% to 60% more than what any government proclaims.
well add to projected costs and subtract from projected benefits anyway.