Fukishima Springs Water Leak 163
sl4shd0rk writes "The Japanese Fukishima crisis took a turn for the worse this week as it was found a barrier built to contain contaminated water has been breached; a leak defined by 20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium. This is yet another problem on top of a spate of errors plaguing the 2011 nuclear disaster site. Nuclear regulatory official Shinji Kinjo has cited Tokyo Electric Power Company as having a 'weak sense of crisis' as well as hinted at previous bunglings by TEPCO as the reason one cannot 'just leave it up to Tepco alone.' If Nuclear energy is ever to move forward, these types of disasters need to be eliminated."
"Fukushima Springs Water" (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
"I'd buy that for a doller!"
Step right up! [orau.org]. A time-tested restorer of vitality.
Re: (Score:2)
I was gonna say, is Fukushima Springs some new resort or day spa? Hope they fix the water leak so people can use the bathroom while they're waiting for their bird poop facial. [foxnews.com]
Re:"Fukushima Springs Water" (Score:4, Funny)
is Fukushima Springs some new resort or day spa?
It's a hot springs. Come in and let the steamy hot water melt away all your stress!
Re: (Score:2)
"I'd buy that for a doller!"
That was my first thought too. Lots of potential for advertising! - "Fukushima Springs Water - bring out your inner super hero!"
" these types of disasters need to be eliminated." (Score:2, Insightful)
Industry doesn't make mistakes, it makes profit. Risk is for the beancounters to calculate and recalculate after the fact.
Re: (Score:2)
I was thinking almost the same. Is it possible that the use the leak as a cheaper alternative to gathering/cleaning/storing of those materials?
I wouldn't be surprised. Japanese people proved to be disciplined, ethical and good while their companies (e.g. Tepco) proved to be irresponsible, corrupt and liar.
WTF is a 'becquerels?' (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we just start measuring radiation in Rads now? Sure would make things simpler to explain...
becquerels == ORads (Outbound Radiation)
sieverts == IRads (Inbound Radiation) or ARads (Absorbed Radiation)
Or just "Rads" as a general term, i.e. "the leak is dumping 20-30 billion Rads into the ecosystem / Nobody can absorb that many Rads and survive! / Background radiation at 2,500 Rads, sir."
Using terms that the layman can hardly spell, let alone understand, isn't helping to raise awareness. Kinda the opposite.
Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?' (Score:4, Funny)
It's French! How do you think it got this outrageous accent?
Re: (Score:1)
It's French! How do you think it got this outrageous accent?
Hmm, that would explain the smell...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
They use the becquerel in the news because it gives much larger units than the curie. It's not as nice a headline if they said Fukishima had released 1100 curies of radiation. PS you can't measure contamination (becquerels) as radiation (sieverts) they are two different but related animals.
Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?' (Score:5, Insightful)
They use the becquerel in the news because it gives much larger units than the curie. It's not as nice a headline if they said Fukishima had released 1100 curies of radiation.
Becquerel is the standard SI unit; the BBC would generally use those unless the non-standard unit is widely used. Although quoting GBq or TBq rather than the big scary numbers would be best IMHO.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?' (Score:5, Interesting)
Using terms that the layman can hardly spell, let alone understand, isn't helping to raise awareness. Kinda the opposite.
Actually, the Becquerel is probably the easiest measure of radiation to understand: It's simply one decay per second.
No arbitrary scale factors based on grams of some rare element that most people have never even seen, and no complicated biological models. Just decays per second.
Re: (Score:2)
It's an easy technical measure, but horrible for expressing meaning. I read up on the definition of a becquerel, and while I get it, I still have no basis of understanding what 20-30 billion becquerels means.
Plus, even in the explanation page, it seems that the becquerel is usually expressed with per-volume or per-weight measure. So using the unit by itself is useless to the lay person. How many becquerels to the banana?
It sounds to me someone used this unit with the express intent of making it sound big an
Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?' (Score:4, Informative)
Plus, even in the explanation page, it seems that the becquerel is usually expressed with per-volume or per-weight measure.
For radiation release events like this, it's simply the overall amount released for the whole event. You don't need per volume or weight.
The per volume amount will eventually depend on how much the contamination gets diluted, but that's location dependent and probably unknown right now.
It sounds to me someone used this unit with the express intent of making it sound big and scary, and that's disingenuous even if accurate.
More likely, they used it because it's a standard SI unit, unlike the curie. Using curies would be more like quoting distances in furlongs because you think that meters sound "too scary" due to the bigger numbers.
Re: (Score:2)
For radiation release events like this, it's simply the overall amount released for the whole event. You don't need per volume or weight.
Yes you do. If that leak was a cubic meter of water or a cubic kilometer has a massive impact on the relevance and effects of the leak. Without that information you simply cannot gauge anything relevant from a risk point of view.
Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?' (Score:4, Informative)
>
The anti nukes seem to love bigging up the true technical measures by splitting them into smaller units (i.e. turning 1Sv into 1000 mSv). Exaggeration without actually exaggerating anything. It's rather clever actually.
You're reaching a little here; you have a point with the trillion Bq thing but doses are usually quoted in mSv, because it's a convenient size. 1mSv is the recommend maximum annual dose for members of the public, for example. I don't see quoting doses in mSv as any more unusual than an engineer giving a length as 1200mm.
Re: (Score:2)
Also, we should stop using this complicated "ASCII"; good old binary is much simpler.
Sometimes layers of abstraction are necessary to make sense of things. How much exactly is 1 beq, in terms of health effects? This is where "complicated biological models" are a lot more useful.
Re: (Score:2)
How much exactly is 1 beq, in terms of health effects? This is where "complicated biological models" are a lot more useful.
Only if you have a proposed exposure mode, which in this case is all future speculation, and which will inevitably be based on politics as much as on science. The raw number of decays, OTOH, is a relatively precise quantity.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Uh, ASCII is a binary encoding.
Re: (Score:2)
So you're saying becquerel means radiation-hertz?
Re: (Score:2)
But how do you measure seconds?
(And to follow up that: how do you measure distance?)
I click to the stopwatch function on my Timex and press start.
Re: (Score:2)
Because safety.
Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?' (Score:5, Insightful)
Ionizing radiating is a complex subject, thus it has a complex set of measurements that mean specific things.
Dumbing it down doesn't do anyone any good.
Re: (Score:2)
Ionizing radiating is a complex subject, thus it has a complex set of measurements that mean specific things.
Dumbing it down doesn't do anyone any good.
Talking above people's heads doesn't either.
Re:WTF is a 'becquerels?' (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
The chemical form of these release also matter. That changes completely how they will come back in the food chain later down the road.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Given how diluted the tritium leak is (being dumped into the ocean), I'm not concerned.
Re: (Score:2)
The bad is I don't see how water with tritium in it won't also have other stuff in it....
Re: (Score:2)
A list of some scientific studies on the effects of tritium, with references, in case there is any doubt regarding Triated water's effect on living beings.
Tritium is biologically mutagenic *because* it's a low energy emitter. This characteristic makes readily absorbed by surrounding cells. The available evidence from studies conducted journal a list of effects. From those works;
Tritium can be inhaled, ingested, or absorbed through skin. Eating food containing 3H can be even more damaging than drinking
Re: (Score:2)
And note the lots of "may
Re: (Score:2)
I never asserted that it was harmless. .... I am sure i have read more recent ones, including more recent work on threshold models that involved nuclear plant workers.
Not saying that you did, just presenting the info I have. If you have access to more recent studies let me know what they are so I can check them out.
Re: (Score:2)
I like this idea, because we can then begin developing products like Rad-X and Radaway.
Alternate Solution (Score:2)
Given that it's Japan, how about expressing it in units of Gojira. Or possibly monkey barrels.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with sieverts is that it doesn't differentiate between types of exposure. You have to get down to effective dose to know the effect of a given level of radiation on specific organs, and you have to know the type of radioactive material and how it can get inside the body to do that. So far no-one has invented a device that can make that kind of determination automatically, so it is very difficult to set an acceptable limit for exposure and background levels which is safe since you can't just whip
Re: (Score:2)
Also 99.99% of people have turned off their logical part of the brain at the first mention of the work nuclear anyway.
Now for some better considerations. There is no indication of how dilute this is, and its likely quite dilute. Its tritium which is very low energy beta emitter and only poses a risk when ingested. In fact it could well
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Three supersized happy meals of plutonium?
Re: (Score:2)
I dig it!
Brings a new meaning to the phrase, "Hey, Mr. tally man, tally me banana..."
Should be Fukushima not Fukishima (Score:1)
Spelling counts
Re:Should be Fukushima not Fukishima (Score:4, Insightful)
Spelling counts
Punctuation, not so much.
Re: (Score:1)
Romanji isn't an exact science and the rules for it has changed many times.
Regardless, neither Fukushima nor Fikishima is correct but slashdot doesn't really support the correct spelling.
Re: (Score:1)
Romaji. Not romanji. Romaji.
Tepco is suicidal or insanely stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
In principle, I think nuclear power is a perfectly sound idea that can be implemented safely and reliably.
But that's in principle. In practice somehow it turns out to be managed by complete morons that even after getting involved in the center of a huge scandal, still manage to show amazing incompetence and disregard for public safety, even when they know perfectly fine that the whole world is paying attention to them, and is already extremely distrustful.
And this state of affairs doesn't do their own industry any good. It's precisely crap like this what results in the replacement of nuclear with coal.
Re: (Score:2)
Welcome to the real world.
Re: (Score:2)
tl;dr Your two choices are balance and destruction.
Centralise it all, and you'll end up with one massive monolithic corrupt power structure.
Leave it to the market, and each entity will abuse every other in the quest for profit.
Stringently regulate a marketplace in the interests of the country, and everyone except the megalomaniacs and the stupid Is happy.
Re: (Score:2)
People, as properly represented by the government.
(And, no, not all governments throughout history have failed to represent the people, before someone gets on their youthful high horse.)
Re: (Score:1)
Can it be because nuclear energy is not economically and ecologically viable?
If it were, it'd not need enormous amounts of spending, negative economic balance on every fracken scale and require concentrated efforts for the next 5.000 - 10.000 years.
Captcha: saving
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Nuclear energy is the most ecologically viable option in existence. The problems with not being able to build shiny, reliable new ones is a governmental and societal problem, not a nuclear one.
Or do you think pumping radioactive coal ash in the air is more ecologically viable?
Re: (Score:2)
As this accident demonstrates, nuclear radiation from a failed plant can't be contained very well.
As for ecologically viable? Please, renewables are far and away more ecologically sound. Not quite ready for grid scale yet, but just because nuclear has better 'operational' characteristics doesn't make it 'good' since it will fail at some point. And there's all that waste lying around in spent fuel ponds we still haven't figured out wha
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Bury it in Yucatan.
I suppose that there are plenty of pyramids available there in which to store it, but don't you don't think that the Mexican drug cartels might dig it up and sell it to The Terrorists?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
But we have figured out what to do with it. Bury it in Yucatan. However, once again, government and society have gotten in the way.
The nuclear industry is getting pretty irritated about this. They (and their electric ratepayers) have paid into a disposal fund for decades. That money was supposed to be used to dispose of their waste. But if they decommission their plant, they get stuck with the disposal bill and have to store the materials on site for decades.
Re: (Score:2)
A microgram of ingested pu-239 is fatal. It's irrelevant how much escaped since it is an analogue of iron and in the ocean iron is readily taken up by biological processes and will end up in the foodchain. As for doing its job it failed exactly as predicted when it remaine
Re: (Score:1)
No, I think stacking spent fuel rods on roofs, in leaky casks and in underground caves lying in seismically-unstable area is the way to go.
After all, leaving stacks of deadly poison metals lying around (and increasing their number every year) is most ecologically viable option in existence. Solar, geothermal, wind, ocean wave, etc. are all liberal hippy plots to get us to be jobless, hummus-eating, pot-smoking slackers.
O horns of dilemma on which we are impaled! (Score:5, Insightful)
If only there were some options other than nuclear fission and burning brown coal in an open pit!
Oh, wait, there are.
Here in reality, decentralized heterogenous power production would be inherently better for human culture and society, since it has less tendency to create economic disparities [businessinsider.com] large enough to engender wholesale regulatory capture [wikipedia.org] or militarization of power production [g4s.us], has fewer military vulnerabilities [cfr.org], and employs more working people gainfully (instead of funneling money to banksters), and would potentially allow a less expensive grid to carry more total power [csicop.org].
Solar, wind, hydro, and most importantly carbon-neutral biomass energy plants spotted all over the country on a true "smart grid" is the way to go. Solve dozens of social and economic problems while eliminating the pollution caused by burning petroleum.
Incidentally, I'm not the first to figure this out. Nikola Tesla talked about the idiocy of burning limited resources in 1915, before we compounded the problem by building terrestrial fission plants.
Re: (Score:2)
But that's in principle. In practice somehow it turns out to be managed by complete morons that even after getting involved in the center of a huge scandal, still manage to show amazing incompetence and disregard for public safety
Remember that you're looking at the worst example in today's nuclear industry - don't ask me how TEPCO manages to be such a bunch of incompetent morons, but France, the UK, China, India, and (these days) Russia for example have nuclear power pretty well licked, safety-wise. No maj
Units!! (Score:4, Interesting)
20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium
OK. This is embarrassing. At least use proper units.
500-1000 Ci of tritium (or Curies).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU#Tritium_emissions [wikipedia.org]
http://www.nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/readingroom/factsheets/tritium.cfm [nuclearsafety.gc.ca]
and here is more sensetionalist article, but with some numbers to compare,
http://www.ccnr.org/tritium_1.html [ccnr.org]
COMMENTS ON THE DUMPING OF 3500 CURIES OF TRITIUM INTO THE OTTAWA RIVER FROM THE NPD NUCLEAR POWER REACTOR ON JULY 19 1981
CANDU reactors emit more tritium than the so called massive spill above at Fukushima. Tritium is not very dangerous, especially in water. Even when exposed to tritium, your body has a biological half-life of only about two weeks - you pee it out along with water. Radiological halflife is 12 years so you get the idea.
Today most CANDU start to capture tritium instead of venting it, and then selling it.
Anyway, the story is not a very big story. There is a lot of worse things that could be leaked, like mercury. And mercury tends to poison things for much longer than a few years - just look at the state of oceans today and cry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
It already did (Score:2)
Fukushima is an old BWR, nuclear energy has moved quite a lot since then.
So, worst case... (Score:2)
This is going to add about 0.01% to the world's tritium supply. Which tritium supply represents a very small fraction of the radioactivity we are exposed to daily.
99.9% of which addition will decay away to nothing within the century.
I am singularly unimpressed by the panic.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Wow. 20-40 TRILLION becquerels... (Score:4, Informative)
...actually means nothing to most readers not in the field. So, some comparisons:
Radioactivity from potassium in an average human body: 4000 Bq.
Radioactivity from potassium in entire human population of Earth: ~30 trillion Bq.
Radioactivity from one kilogram of radium: 37 trillion Bq.
Radioactivity released during Three Mile Island event: 481 thousand trillion Bq.
Radioactivity released during Chernobyl event: 5.2 million trillion Bq.
I'm thinking not to panic just yet.
Re: (Score:2)
I think only strawmen are panicking so far?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
It's an appropriate unit of measurement, and also your analogy is off:
Yes, Bq is a unit of rate of decay. So measuring a release in Bq is saying "this is the rate of radiation the stuff is emitting", and that's what you need to know to know if you're getting a dangerous dose over your lifetime. If they said "atoms" or "kg" of material, it would tell you nothing useful by itself. 1 kg of U-238 is virtually harmless because it is so long lived, so it is infrequently emitting radiation, while 1 kg of Co-6
Re: (Score:2)
No, I'm pretty sure it's the right measurement.
One becquerel is one decay per second -- or, to put it another way, the activity of a quantity of radioactive material sufficient to produce one decay per second. While it may not be perfectly proper from a unit-analysis perspective, reporting quantities of radioactive material in becquerels is widely accepted, and quite unambiguous.
So, the original article, and my list of comparisons, are using Bq as a measure of activity -- from the potassium in one human bod
Re: (Score:2)
Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were events. They spanned a period of time. Was the 481 thousand trillion Bq you have listed an instantaneous rate, or
Re: (Score:2)
So, have you got some pictures from all the times you helped clean up coal slurry spills [wikipedia.org]?
How much radioactive water is leaking? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
I don't understand the secrecy (Score:5, Insightful)
Hiding the truth does nothing to help them look good, and in the long term adds to their list of mistakes. But if at this point they come clean with every bit of data people not only would know how far to run (and where not to fish) but a world full of engineers and physicists might contribute something helpful. For example, if they reveal that radioactive and water soluble product X is being produced some guy in the physics department in Argentina might say, "Hey if you put some cheap water soluble Y into the coolant it will not only precipitate product X out of the water solution but it will then absorb neutrons resulting in other stable isotopes of one of the atoms in chemical Y." This might be little known knowledge that the guy learned 20 years ago when he accidentally gummed up the university's reactor 20 years ago.
Also open information allows for people to write better case studies on how(and where) not to build a reactor.
It is just too bad if all this open information makes a few people look bad.
Re: (Score:2)
Hiding the truth does nothing to help them look good, and in the long term adds to their list of mistakes
The truth is that in many cases they don't really know what is going on. So they can either say "don't worry, everything is fine" (and rightly be accused of spinning), or they can say "this is what we think is happening" (and be unjustly -- but inevitably -- accused of lying when it turns out to be something different).
The third option, where they come out and say "we honestly don't know what's going on down there", is probably the most problematic for them, as it would result in responses like "well if yo
I don't understand if 20 trillion is a lot. (Score:2)
Sensationalizing puds (Score:3)
Becquerels ... REALLY?
What you did was found the smallest unit possible to try and describe the scary damage this has done. Why the fuck didn't you just use the atomic weight of the entire plant, thats about as useful and meaningful.
You're using an flow rate as a measure of volume ... and ignoring the whole time variable. You really don't have any idea what these things are you're converting about, do you?
You guys at slashdot are a bunch of douche bags without Taco around. No wonder he left.
Most people are to dumb and irresponsible ... (Score:2)
Most people - I'd say way over 80%, perhaps even 90 or 95% - are simply to dumb and irresponsible to handle anything but the simplest of technology. To dumb to handle knives, cars or guns, to dumb to handle computers, to dumb to handle regular modern garbage correctly, let alone nuclear waste.
With computers the problems and trouble these people can cause is relatively limited, cars and guns not quite so but still in boundaries (allthoug these are quite big when looking at the problems with guns in the US or
Re: (Score:2)
I'd rather see nuclear energy than reliance on oil, but humans have managed to fuck it up on many occasions.
Everything can be made 100% safe in theory, and any disaster can be optmally managed in theory, but in practice every system is designed and implemented by humans, and this must be taken into account at every stage of, well, everything.
Nuclear power must be managed carefully in the interests of the people, IOW strong independent oversight to the exclusion of both unaccountable stagnation (Chernobyl) a
Re:OK, Einstein (Score:4, Informative)
Everything can be made 100% safe in theory
Theories are nice, but reality is a bit more problematic.
While nuclear risks can be mitigated somewhat as can risks from other sources of power, the problem is what happens when they do fail. Every single other source of power is able to be cleaned up while walking the site in a matter of days. Nuclear makes quite a large area uninhabitable for decades.
Re: (Score:2)
You can build a 100% safe plant... And with safe i'm talking about the surroundings....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor#Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor [wikipedia.org]
Worst case with these would be that the plant would be unusable and would have to be rebuilt, but the surroundings would still be safe from contamination.
And other types of power-plants can be quite problematic too:
Coal - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill [wikipedia.org]
Hydro-power - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Thorium Nuclear - Molten Salt. Not built yet. Sure we have prototypes that have worked for a few years, but molten salts are extremely corrosive. We don't yet have the metals that can keep it self contained and sealed for a plant lifetime. It's a chemical/mechanical problem so likely not impossible but it isn't available yet. Once that's solved, I like the concept - and unlike most people against something I'm more than willing to fund it's research because it doe
Re:OK, Einstein (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Main problem we have with nuclear power today is that when we developed the technology is was to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, not only to supply the population with cheap power.
If we where to actually do a redesign and start from scratch today we can come up with much better things, but things that have not been proven on the same commercial scale as the current ones.
Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor [wikipedia.org]
And never take Chernobyl as an example that nuclear power is unsafe... It w
Re: (Score:2)
The whole point is that some activity can only be judged "safe" in the context that it is performed by fallible humans. You can't say, "This is safe because it would be safe if things were mostly done right."
IOW, no system should be engineered for which gross fuck-up by a few people can cause Chernobyl levels of disaster. The social hierarchy and technical measures were badly implemented, here as with Tepco - just worse in Chernobyl's case.
Re: (Score:2)
You can't say, "This is safe because it would be safe if things were mostly done right."
No, but i can say that if you have multiple trained people i could rely on them to handle the situation in the correct way.. Then of course you should design the system in such a way that you will never run into very strange situations (K.I.S.S method).. It should be similar to Do X, if fail press button to shutdown. And the shutdown should be designed in a way so it's impossible to fail, or at least only cause local (internal) damage.
The Chernobyl incident where many of people not having a clue. They did n
Re: (Score:2)
Aye, I'm not disagreeing with MSR design, but a failsafe design would be *necessary* - just having competent personnel is not sufficient. Even Chernobyl had a good number of competent personnel, but not coordinated, not in charge, and/or not with the right priorities.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan.
Re: (Score:2)
Heavy! ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Which were probably manufactured in Mexico or the US.
Re: (Score:2)
The Toyota Corolla is manufactured in California, just to add on to my post.
Re: (Score:1)
The American electronics industry from Bell Labs to HP was absolutely awesome.
Then short-termism happened, where everyone at the top did just enough to make themselves and their kids rich.
Re: (Score:2)
Scott Becquerel was awesome in Quantum Leap, shame he had to sully his name with Enterprise.
You idiot, that wasn't his name! It was Scott *Blacula* [wikipedia.org].
Sheesh.
Re: (Score:2)
japan knows better than anyone that a little radiation never hurt anyone
If the radiation is from tritium, they are probably right. Tritium decays by beta emission, into He3, which is not radioactive. The emitted electron is less than 6kV. It does not bio-accumulate in preference to normal hydrogen. The half life is twelve years. I don't know what else is in the leaked water, but the tritium is not that dangerous.
Re: (Score:3)
According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]: The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission states that in normal operation in 2003, 56 pressurized water reactors released 40,600 curies (1.50 PBq) of tritium. So the 40 TBq in this leak, is about as much tritium as US nukes release every 10 days during normal operation. This all sounds a bit overblown.