Japan Widens Evacuation Zone Around Fukushima 483
mdsolar writes "Japan has started the first evacuations of homes outside a government exclusion zone after the earthquake and tsunami crippled one of the country's nuclear power plants. 5100 people are being relocated to public housing, hotels and other facilities in nearby cities."
Nuke power (Score:3, Insightful)
If the Japanese can't do this shit safely, then who can?
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Anyone else apparently, that plant was due for replacement/shutdown many years ago.
Anyone else? Including those who ran the reactor in Chernobyl?
Re:Nuke power (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Nuke power (Score:5, Informative)
Chernobyl was new but read this:
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~pbawa/421/ETHICAL%20ISSUES%20CHERNOBYL.htm [purdue.edu]
And before you vilify the Soviet system for fraud, incompetence, corruption etc,; read up on the Diablo canyon reactor. It had serious quality issues as well. Such as the shock absorbers on the foundation which were intended to protect it from, IIRC, 7.3 magnitude earthquakes being installed in reverse. Quality issues abound in all construction even reactors. I don't even trust the Germans to do it right.
Diablo canyon and Chernobyl also points out that if a good reactor design can be made, building it to spec is still a problem.
Trivia tidbit: I do believe that the author of the Chernobyl memo is Uri Andropov who chose Gorbachev as his successor to the post of General Secretary of the CP of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev who instituted Glasnost and Perestroika, which eventually led to the peaceful downfall of the Soviet Union.
Re:Nuke power (Score:5, Insightful)
The Soviets sucked. But lets review the three power reactor accidents that have presented any potential or actual risk to the public and lets see how those accidents shook out:
1) Chernobyl: A soviet designed reactor with no containment that had a steam explosion because the operators were not trained for the experiment they were running, and they lost control of the reactor by disabling all the safety systems and doing things all the other reactors in the USSR said no to. No shock there that it had a steam explosion. (Operator error, design flaw)
2) Three Mile Island: A faulty pressure relief valve on the PWRs pressurizer and a bad design for the indicator, plus poor location of the indicators on the back of a panel, no release but core damage. (Operator error, design flaw)
3) Fukushima: a Tsunami induced beyond design basis accident, where the Units survived the earthquake and apparently the safety systems were working until the Tsunami took out the Diesel generators knocking all but the RCIC safety system out. (Beyond DBA)
Effects:
1) Chernobyl: Core Damage and exposure plus release plus fire. Worst case accident. Expected because the soviets just didnt give a fuck, they built a faulty reactor, had no containment and they blew it up with faulty procedures and an arrogant approach to Nuclear engineering. Big shocker to no one that they had a loss of containment accident and killed a lot of people trying to bring it under control. Classic Soviet Engineering Fuckup.
Actual Measurable Effects: Unit destroyed, lots of deaths of personnel involved in controlling the accident. Area contaminated, but effects have been much less over time than expected, tours are available of the area now. Worst case loss of control accident.
Cause: Experiment coupled with Operator Error/Arrogance. Soviet reactor design was unstable at low power, Night shift was untrained for the experiment that they were told to run. Plant tried to run experiment during the day, but was told to stop due to Brown Outs and passed this on to the junior night shift. Shift lost control of reactor, steam explosion took the lid off the uncontained reactor. Because Soviet reactors were designed to be refueled while running it had no containment and the rest is history. No one builds reactors like this except the Soviets, so this kind of accident can not occur with non-soviet designed reactors.
2) TMI: Core damage, no known release. It scared a lot of people at the time because it wasn't clear, at the time, what was wrong or what the effects were. Communication was poor and people understandably were panicked. No known release was measured, and a number of studies have looked into this. Increased rates of cancer were not detected, but its possible it did occur. Unfortunately, at the time the accident occurred the movie China Syndrome came out and this may have also had some impact on public perception of this accident.
Actual measurable effects: Core Damaged, Unit unusable, No deaths, no known direct health effects although there is some debate from residents on this point. Scientific studies so far have concluded that if there was any release (and there is no evidence of , it did not have any impact on public health and safety. The material than ended up the aux building did not contain solids at room temp, so any release was likely xenon (and maybe some argon or krypton), and possibly some radioactive iodine. Data at the time of the accident indicates that the release was less than 2 mrem, or 1/40th the natural dose for residents of a high altitude city. In short, not above background levels and no evidence of I-131 or C-137 in mammalian milk in the surrounding areas. So, the actual effects were scary sounding, but not anything that would have adverse impacts on health.
Cause: The Babcock and Wilcox valve indicated it was closed if the solenoid was de-energized, not when it was actually closed. It stuck open, and the indicators said it was closed. There were sensors on th
Re:Nuke power (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, in the grand scheme of things, it has not presented a harm to the general public that is greater than other risks: look at the poor folks in the spillways of the Mississippi. Or the coal ash spill from the coal-fired plant in Kingston, TN.
Three incidents like you describe above, over thirty-two years, is a pretty darned good safety record, with the 440+ commercial power reactors around the world. Why does nuclear have a bad rap? One possibility is it stems from fear [anengineerindc.com] since it all started with a few mushroom clouds, but whatever the reason, it seems awfully visceral.
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>I quibble with the "no evidence of any significant release of radiation" quote for Fukushima
I did say significant (not no release, I'm a Nuclear Engineer too!). :-)
So yes, there certainly should have been noble gas releases, and probably C-131 radioisotopes. Possibly others with cladding damage, but its hard to know all the facts at Fukushima right now (we sent people, and the Japanese have not been really that cooperative), including release so I agree that a release of some radiation occurred. We ca
Re:Nuke power (Score:5, Interesting)
This article by some nuclear engineers at NC State [blogspot.com] is an excellent, fact-based breakdown of what the effects are of the Fukushima accident, with known numbers to date.
Bottom line: Three cancers.
Three cases of cancer that would not otherwise have occurred, and this is using the (very conservative) linear-no-threshold assumption.
Others in this thread have been bleating about how bad nuclear power accidents have been. The following quote from the UN's final report on the Chernobyl accident (a summary can be found here [21stcentur...cetech.com] ) doesn't support their claims:
People's fear is very real and important. But it's not substantiated by facts.
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>I quibble with the "no evidence of any significant release of radiation" quote for Fukushima
I did say significant (not no release, I'm a Nuclear Engineer too!). :-)
So yes, there certainly should have been noble gas releases, and probably C-131 radioisotopes. Possibly others with cladding damage, but its hard to know all the facts at Fukushima right now (we sent people, and the Japanese have not been really that cooperative), including release so I agree that a release of some radiation occurred. We can messure that, but the amounts so far appear to present no threat to public health and safety, hence the use of the words "significant release of radiation". Thats why I mentioned the WHO quote, they seem like the best non-nuclear source, so it seems reasonable they probably aren't trying to spin it and there conclusion was no threat to health at this point.
As an aside, going back on GE BWR training I would have expected some release of nobles and C-131. Until we have cold shutdown and we can all study the events its all just inference at this point, so this could all change.
>Three incidents like you describe above, over thirty-two years, is a pretty darned good safety record, with the
> 440+ commercial power reactors around the world. Why does nuclear have a bad rap?
> One possibility is it stems from fear [anengineerindc.com] since it all started with a few mushroom clouds,
>but whatever the reason, it seems awfully visceral.
Yeah I agree. I think you have it right, mushroom clouds and nuclear weapons. That and general ignorance of how power reactors work coupled with a general misunderstanding of the health effects of ionizing radiation, and that we are all exposed to it all day long. As Arthur C. Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
I wonder if we still called them something else, like "atomic steam generator plants" instead of "Nuclear Power Reactors" if people would be less irrationally afraid of them.
Eh, and if people were perfectly rational we would hit the snooze button in the face of the absurdly small danger that terrorism represents and spend our money on something useful that will save lives, like choking prevention courses, or trying to teach people how not eat yourself to death. To bad people are stupid.
Nuclear suffers the double edged blade of stupid fears and rational fears. You are not being stupid if you decide you don't feel like living next to Fukushima right now. The area is irradiated
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Your facts are out of date, measurements have been done and data has been released. Not of the reactor, which is irrelevant to those not involved in the cleanup unless bad things happens again, but of the area around the power plant. Decent quantities of radiation (cesium-137) have been detected in some areas. Enough to essentially leave the areas uninhabitable without significant cleanup costs. I think I've read estimates of up to 200 square km being unsafely radioactive but don't quote me on that. Not ins
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Okay, you caught me, I don't really know about the actual management decisions and the engineering implementation here, just talkin' outa my ass I guess. Back in the sixties, I repaired televisions and RCA was pretty crap stuff, but suddenly (in the early seventies, IIRC) GE came out with some absolute, unrepairable shit. Stuff that was lucky to make it out of the warranty, unbelievable badness. We quickly learned to jack up the estimates for GE repairs to keep people from actually fixing them. If we found
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A fantastic summary, but I quibble with the "no evidence of any significant release of radiation" quote for Fukushima. Two months ago, I would have said it was impossible for a reactor in Japan to contaminate the drinking water in Tokyo, but that's exactly what happened. To the detriment of the industry (and I'm a nuclear engineer), there was a significant release of radiation.
Right. The number of casualties is small, but the area evacuated is large, and may be evacuated for decades.
For actuarial purposes, insurance for nuclear plants now has to be repriced. Total power reactor years worldwide is now about 14,000, with two major evacuation incidents. So an assumption of one evacuation of a 30km circle around the plant and acquisition of that real estate per 7000 reactor-years is appropriate for insurance purposes.
The insurance cost will vary with location. That's a big probl
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Define "official" in this context.
Doing a quick survey, I can't see anyone I'd call "official" estimating 500K+ deaths from Chernobyl.
Admittedly, Greenpeace came up with a very large number of "expected deaths". Not actual ones, mind you, but the number they expect to see someday.
Note, by the way, that even Greenpeace's estimate was almost an or
Re:Nuke power (Score:5, Insightful)
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So seriously, lets stop the fear mongering, four accidents of significance and only one - due to a terribly stupid design - resulted in actual threats to the public. Nuclear power is safe, and if people would just take the time to actually understand it they would know it.
It is statements such as this that contribute to the public suspicion of the nuclear industry IMO. Nuclear power is not "safe", it has risks like any other industrial scale power generation. The public knows there are risks, it knows that the nuclear industry has a history of trying to hide the risks, and it knows that human factors are often more significant than reactor design when safety is concerned.
At some point the industry needs to hold their hands up and say "yes we have been doing it wrong", and
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3) Fukushima: a Tsunami induced beyond design basis accident
People keep repeating that phrase "beyond design basis" as if it's some kind of positive thing.
All it means is that the designers got their design basis dead wrong as it didn't reflect the actual real-world conditions.
Since the designers in this case weren't some fly-by-night Soviet outfit but General Electric, who built a whole load of reactors based on the same flawed design basis, and neither the company nor the nuclear industry as a whole nor any of the international nuclear regulatory agencies called t
Re:Nuke power (Score:5, Informative)
>> primary containment appears to be intact but we won't know for some time.
>No. Both unit 2 and unit 1 containment and pressure vessel have leaks.
Right, primary containment is intact, which means that the core is still protected. Leaks from water lines are not loss of primary containment, and water leaks are not as hazardous as you have been led to believe.
>> WHO has stated that there is no evidence of any significant release of radiation.
>No. Material discharged from the plant from March 11 to early April was estimated between 370,000 and 630,000 terabecquerels and continues
> at 154 terabecquerels per day.
No, the WHO did in fact state that. You should visit their website, its a fact.
Currently measuring shows that I-131 has been detected in three prefectures, with values ranging from 1.5 Bq/m2 to 4.5 Bq/m2. Cs-137 was detected in eight prefectures, with values ranging from 3 Bq/m2 to 44 Bq/m2. Gamma dose rate for Fukushima prefecture was 1.7 Sv/h, in all other prefectures where sources where detected, reported gamma dose rates were below 0.1 Sv/h with a decreasing trend.
>>Measured increased amounts of radiocative caesium and iodine in the vicinity of the plant, but not at dangerous levels.
>No. It is at danerous levels - hence the exclusion zone.
No, the exclusion zone is not a measure of dangerous release, its to get people away in case there is a dangerous release.
> > No evidence that any uranium or plutonium has been released.
> Yes there is. The explosion in Unit 3 blew pieces of fuel rod up to a mile from the site. Uranium and plutonium was vapourised and detected both in the soil in Fukushima and as far away as California.
Nonsense, neither WHO nor IAEA support your claim here. As the party making the affirmative assertion has the burden of proof, if you have a reliable source for all these claims I would be happy to retract my statement. I can find no evidence to support your assertions.
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The evacuation was a precaution immediately after the emergency was declared because there might be a release. If you evacuate after a release you're probably screwed and already breathing in byproducts.
Re:Nuke power (Score:5, Informative)
or three mile island ?
"According to the American Nuclear Society, using the official radiation emission figures, "The average radiation dose to people living within ten miles of the plant was eight millirem, and no more than 100 millirem to any single individual. Eight millirem is about equal to a chest X-ray, and 100 millirem is about a third of the average background level of radiation received by US residents in a year.""
Accidents happen. Nobody died. Can we stop bringing up TMI as one of the poster children for why nuclear power is dangerous and deadly, because TMI is a horrible example for that purpose given how it pretty much proves the opposite.
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I agree, not talking about it is better than educating the public, because its fast, lazy, and wont lead to any misconceptions at all.
I didn't say don't talk about it. I said don't say that Three Mile Island is proof that nuclear power is unsafe, because it's not.
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Oh noes, it melted down. Further use of stigmatized words to convey images of something much worse than what actually happened. Yes, the core melted down. But the walls of the facility contained all nuclear fallout as well as the ensuing fires, and the reactor was brought back to stability with no injuries to the staff or the public. How is that anything other than safe?
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No, we can't.
Because your conclusion shows you have no clue at all. Neither about simple logic conclusions nor about what happend at the TMI incident.
To your logic: the fact that in a majour catastrophe nobody died, does not make the technology causing that catastrophe safe. The opposite is true: if the techno
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To your lack of knowledge: TMI was so close to go boom it is a miracle that it did not. Why don't you care to read up all the nice stories about it? Miracle I mean literally. Miracle as in: probably there was indeed a god saving that place.
That's nonsense. TMI had the same "boom" as Fukushima, except the hydrogen burn was inside the containment building, which held. After that, there wasn't a lot more with potential to breach containment, given that the plant still had power and cooling systems were still functional.
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No, they're talking about the "boom" of a meltdown gone critical, not the H2 "boom" that damages the buildings and ability to work to contain the disaster. The meltdown "boom" is a much vaster explosion, spewing radioactive material over a wide area. In most cases, an area filled with many thousands or millions of people, and upstream/upwind from large areas that get terribly poisoned. Like "Ukraine" or "Europe" or "the East Coast" or "the northeast quarter of Japan", etc.
If you're going to talk about "boom
Re:Nuke power (Score:4, Insightful)
The meltdown "boom" is a much vaster explosion, spewing radioactive material over a wide area.
Except that won't happen, and I don't know where you got that from. The molten fuel is extremely unlikely to have the correct geometry to go critical, since it needs to have a moderator present as well. The intact core is close to the maximally reactive configuration, and a molten core is unlikely to spontaneously assemble itself into a lattice of fuel + water. Criticality in a meltdown may be a concern for fast reactors, but these aren't fast reactors. Even then, it wouldn't be a massive blast like the hydrogen explosions - but the heat released could cause the containment to fail so it would be a problem, yes.
Re:Nuke power (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. I've actually got a Nuclear Engineer education and studied TMI, its an example of a contained accident. No release. TMI is an example that shows conclusively that the defense in depth used in nuclear reactors worked despite the mistakes made by the operators and despite the flaw in the BW PORV.
So yes, it is nonsense to use TMI as an example of how nuclear power is unsafe. TMI proved that even when everything failed, it was still possible to stop the accident.
Chernobyl, however, is a great example of how not to build and operate a reactor. That accident proves what happens when you dont have defense in depth, when you dont have good procedures, when you dont have containment, when you put poorly trained operators on the night shift and let your good operators go home to enjoy May Day. It also says you shouldnt experiment with big power reactors to find out what happens when things go wrong. That was classic communist thinking, screw the peasants its all for the greater good. Chernobyl is a textbook case of what can happen when you bypass all your procedures, disable your safety systems and build an unsafe reactor.
So if you want to use something as an example of how nuclear power can be done poorly and unsafely, use Chernobyl. If you want to make the argument that when everything goes wrong, nothing bad happens, sure bring up TMI.
And if you want to look ignorant, bring up TMI as an example of an accident that hurt people around actual Nuclear engineers and scientists.
Re:Nuke power (Score:5, Insightful)
> If you believe that, you are beyond hope.
I don't believe it, this is what I do for a living. I know what happened, I understand the BW PWR used, I studied the accident and I am a Nuclear Engineer. Please educate yourself and read the DOE and NRC studies, and maybe listen to some actual Nuclear Engineers and stop believing everything you read on the Internet.
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I didn't suggest that you should.
I will tell you that I do not work for the nuclear power industry, I work for the regulator and my job is to find things wrong with plants and to assume that bad things will happen. So I'm hardly a fan boy for nuclear.
But hey, the process is public and open and you can file a claim on any plant you want in the US with NRC, and they take those claims very seriously. So I just don't see how we can make the system more transparent, but if you have a beef the process is open,
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I'm sorry you feel that way. If you were part of all the public debates at the NRC you might feel differently. I know from personal experience the peer review that goes into every safety and security analysis, and the process is completely open to the public. So for what its worth, if you have an issue with nuclear, the NRC is an open agency, please file an allegation with the NRC and/or come to/dial into the public meetings and comment.
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>Then you did not read the papers released the last 10 years about it? Or did you?
I did, last year in fact. And Chernobyl.
And I'm not a fan boy for Nuclear, my job is to inspect plants and to think of ways they fail and how they can be made to fail. I'm hardly someone that believes what a nuclear plant operator says, I'm on the other side of the table questioning everything they say. Just because I'm not freaking out doesn't mean that I'm skeptical of the nuclear industry. And just because I'm measur
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the way i see the whole pro nuke anti nuke situation is this:
pro nuke: "these designs are as safe as they can be. there's defence in depth, so even if everything goes wrong, not all that much will go wrong"
anti nuke: " AAAAAAARRGGHHH!! ATOMS!!1!"
me: "defence in depth depends on how good the designer's imagination is".
the fact there was a station blackout is the main problem here. the second problem is the potential (and still unknown) damage caused to the vessels and containment structures by the freaki
Re:Nuke power (Score:5, Insightful)
To your logic: the fact that in a majour catastrophe nobody died, does not make the technology causing that catastrophe safe. The opposite is true: if the technology would be save the catastrophe would not have happend.
It wasn't a catastrophe. It was an accident. Nuclear power is not safe in the same definition that almost EVERYTHING we do is not safe. Are cars safe? Nearly 40,000 people die every year in car accidents, let alone the tens of thousands more that are severely injured. Are planes safe? Planes are the safest method of efficient long-range travel in existance, but 1,000 people still die every year. And there are thousands of aviation accidents that don't actually cause any harm... I think earlier you called those "catastrophes". There are thousands of aviation catastrophes every year, resulting in about 1,000 deaths per year.
Let's try some risk-benefit analysis. There are about 140,000,000 automobiles in the United States. Let's just estimate that means 140,000,000 people drive frequently given that most people who own a car drive every day and some households have only one car for several people while some households may have several cars for one person. 40,000 automobile-related deaths per year means that approximately 0.0003% of those served by the automobile industry die because of it each year. Nuclear power accounts for about 20% of all power generation in the United States. Given a population of 307,000,000, I think we can safely approximate that around 61,400,000 people are served by nuclear power in the United States. 3 deaths in the history of nuclear power in the United States (3 people died in an accident at the Nuclear Reactor Testing Station in Idaho Falls on January 3, 1961) means that less than 0.00000005% of people served by the nuclear power industry have ever died because of it. We see 45 deaths per year directly attributed to coal power which produces energy for 150,000,000 people giving us a death rate of 0.0000003% per year, let alone all the wild speculation by the environazis trying to attribute every lung-related death in coal power areas to the coal emissions and we see numbers claimed to be sometimes approaching 10,000 deaths per year. That's all bullshit, of course, but that's what people claim. The fact is that nobody can claim any more deaths in the United States due to nuclear power than those three that died during the technology's infancy, because there is no environmental impact with which to attribute random numbers to.
The media oversensationalizes every little thing that ever happens, and you have been sucked in. Everything we do is dangerous. I suggest you stay inside wrapped in a warm blanket for the rest of your life because that's the only way you'll ever protect yourself from injury. Be careful not to stub your toe on your bedroom door on the way to the kitchen.
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You are making the same mistak everyone else is doing here in the discussion.
Car accidents have nothing to do with power plants. My they be nuclear or solar.
Coal mining has nothing to do with power plants.
Be they coal plants or nuclear plants.
You whole posting makes no sense. But it is typical for the way how people in our society believe to make "logical conclusions".
Your risk-benefit analysis holds only so long until we have a really bad accident (or until the true numbers of death in Chernobyl are releas
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Coal mining has nothing to do with power plants.
Are you seriously suggesting that we ignore the source of fuel when evaluating methods of power generation for safety? A bit Machiavellian wouldn't you say?
Go mine some coal and then get back to us.
Re:Nuke power (Score:4, Insightful)
"Nobody died"
This is the tired old logic of the nuclear appologist.
Only count the deaths. Ignore the fact that some of the health effects like cancer and birth defects take years to become evident. And ignore the fact that the huge swaiths of land has become uninhabital and that the groundwater has become poisened.
Oh yes, then the idiotic chest x-ray comparison.
Chest x-ray is external radiation, but people living near Fukusima are in danger because of internal radiation (ingesting radioactive isotopes from air, dust, food, etc.)
Re:Nuke power (Score:4, Informative)
"Nobody died" This is the tired old logic of the nuclear appologist. Only count the deaths. Ignore the fact that some of the health effects like cancer and birth defects take years to become evident. And ignore the fact that the huge swaiths of land has become uninhabital and that the groundwater has become poisened. Oh yes, then the idiotic chest x-ray comparison. Chest x-ray is external radiation, but people living near Fukusima are in danger because of internal radiation (ingesting radioactive isotopes from air, dust, food, etc.)
How many years are we supposed to wait? Three Mile Island happened over 30 years ago and there has been no evidence of increased cancer rates as a result of that accident. And the only other accident that caused any injury in the history of nuclear power in the United States was in 1967 when somebody fucked up and improperly removed a control rod from the reactor, causing an explosion and the death of its three operators. That's it. Stop being blindfolded by the sensationalization and the stigmas related to the word "nuclear" and look at the facts.
How many years are we supposed to wait? (Score:4, Insightful)
Patience, friend, the catastrophe you seek will occur. The closest man's creations have come to achieving longevity measurable in geologic time is our creation of fissionable material. Those poisons will outlive the pyramids.
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Yes, even TMI. TMI was a contained accident that had no adverse impact on the health and safety of the public. So yes, even when things get totally cocked up it turns out its hard to have a Nuclear accident, with a western designed reactor, that actually causes harm to the public. So far that has not happened, including Fukushima.
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And I'm glad Chalk River is still on line. My wife needed the isotopes they make to help treat her cancer.
Their "spill" was 47 liters of heavy water. No damage, nobody harmed. If they stopped making radioisotopes, they'd kill tens of thousands of patients due to lack of treatment options. And it's not like they can stockpile those compounds. The half life of the useful ones are all pretty short.
There's this fragile thing called perspective. I don't know why so many people lose it when they hear the word "nuclear".
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Re:Nuke power (Score:4, Informative)
Heavy water is 11% more dense, so 1ml of it weighs 1.1g (hence the name).
Not that it matters much - that's what, 4 liters extra?
Re:Perspective is a funny thing . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously? You're comparing having to move your house to saving my wife's life, and the lives of the other people saved by those radioisotopes? Jeez, I'm so very sorry for the terrible inconvenience. Let me get right on that perspective changing.
Re:Nuke power (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone else apparently, that plant was due for replacement/shutdown many years ago.
Every time there's a nuke plant disaster, some people argue that the particular situation is a special case that can be safely ignored. Undoubtedly, the same arguments will pop up the next time there's a major accident, sabotage or attack (which will undoubtedly be yet another special case).
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Welcome to slashdot.
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Exactly. I'm not "scared" of nuclear power, I'm an engineer and I understand the concepts of risk and failure mode effects analysis. The problem is primarily management failures in most of these high-profile accidents, as summarized by the poster above. There is no way to eliminate those on long enough time scales because human beings make mistakes. The problem with nuclear power is that the catastrophe scenario is very, very bad, and the timescale to react is very short. The latest update from Fukushima is
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Except they didn't shut it down or replace it. Just like everyone else. Including the US, where practically any time our 104 plants is due for replacement/shutdown, instead it just magically gets relicensed.
So no, nobody else can either.
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The Earthquake was apparently not the cause of the Fukushima accident, the safety systems and pumps were working after the Earthquake and the control rods were in. The Tsunami apparently is the cause, we know it took out the diesels and you absolutely have to have those with an older design that doesnt use passive cooling. Without that you cant do anything about the decay heat (well, you can with portable units, but the Japanese choose not to have those) and you get the current problem. The Japanese also
Re:Nuke power (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously it is impossible, which is why we have yearly meltdowns and hundreds of huge exclusion zones around the wo...
Wait a second. We don't. It seems that, unlke oil or coal, the total number of major disasters is way lower on the nuke side.
It's too bad we can't actually build the newer, safer designs. People might protest. It reminds me of the protests when the Cassini probe was launched, all because it had a plutonium RTG on it.
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How many oil plant and coal plant explosions did we have in recent years? ... just wondering.
According to you they seem to be far more dangerous than nuclear plants
angel'o'sphere
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This are not power plants.
How do you dare to compare a nuclear power plants safety with 3rd worlds mining accidents?
Are you completely nuts?
angel'o'sphere
P.S. how many ppl died in oil spills? And again: what has that to do with a power plant and its safety?
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I don't know.
But our GP makes wild accusations ... I only ask if he can point out a singel one ;D
And if there was one: how many residents in the surrounding 20km area where in danger?
angel'o'sphere
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No I don't want coal accidents.
As I pointed out in several other posts: there is no relation to nuclear power in coal accidents.
It is a so called "straw man" comparison.
Yes, coal is used to generate energy.
However: now we could compare coal mining with iron mining or gold mining or for gods sake uranium mining. Now we where in business. Comparing different mining activities and their direct impact on the workers and the people living in the surroundings ... that makes sense.
Comparing one industrial like ene
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Intriguing. Coal kills.
Oh well. Not too different from self-driving cars. The first self-driving car that even injures someone will be a media circus. Yet I guess we're ok with human drivers: http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx [dot.gov].
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Re:Nuke power (Score:4, Insightful)
How many oil plant and coal plant explosions did we have in recent years?
You don't need explosions for those to harm people. Air pollution, mining incidents, global warming... if all the consequences of coal were piled into a single, per-decade event it would be an appalling accident, far worse than Fukushima.
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Sure, that is true (If we exclude Chernobyl).
Uh what? A single typical coal plant puts out more nuclear waste than Chernobyl every year. Granted, there are less of the unusual particles; most of what is emitted is thorium, and then there is a substantial amount of uranium, a small portion of which is fissile. If you were to somehow capture it all and burn it in a nuclear reactor it would produce more power than the coal. Because it is more widely distributed it does not kill people so quickly; it is impossible to say how many of today's cancer deaths
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Once you start spreading the net you will need to consider coal mining too... and we aren't talking about mining, be it coal, oil or uranium.
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Uranium mining is fairly benign, it's done mostly in open-air quarries. Underground mining is not economic for Uranium mining alone, so it's usually done only when there are significant reserves of other resources (silver or copper ores, etc.) alongside.
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Coal pants also release Thorium and Uranium which is a byproduct of coal composition, and is the largest source of radioactive release worldwide. Coal plants produce radiative waste and dump it into the air all day long, Nuclear Power plants do not.
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> Oil and coal plants don't explode that much, no.
Thats splitting the hair, coal plants and oil plants absolutely have explosions and people die all the time. Coal dust is terrifyingly explosive, just google around a little and you'll see that coal dust explosions are unfortunately very common. Usually only a few people die, but plants themselves have been leveed such as the Kleen Energy Systems gas plant in 2010 that was almost destroyed.
You should expect any combustible fuel plant to have explosion h
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I agree nuclear power can be safer, and the impact with nuclear is in the accidents and that its the cutting of the safety corners that causes them. No question about that, but those accidents are very rare. When you take Chernobyl out of the picture (it was a horrible design, no western country does what they did), you have two accidents:
1) TMI - and people can quibble, but the data so far shows that there does not appear to be any health impacts. And lots of lessons were learned and applied from TMI, i
Re:Nuke power (Score:5, Insightful)
We can't build the newer, safer designes for two reasons. The first is that the nuclear industry, by which I mean both the operators and the regulators, have utterly failed to be honest and diligent. By this I mean that they generally do their best to try to paint a happy face on any problem that may come up, rather than saying "here's what's bad about this, and here's what we're doing about it." Consequently, each time something genuinely bad happens, public trust is further undermined. And they do their best to find the cheapest possible solution to any problem, rather than actually trying to solve it, because if they had to actually solve it, it might be cheaper to simply shut down the plant.
The root of this problem is that nuclear, like solar, is not actually economically competitive with carbon sources. We'd like to stop using carbon sources of energy, but it's difficult because it's cheaper (partially because we never count the cost of the externalities). The difference between nuclear and solar is that in the case of nuclear, there's a temptation to cheap out on safety so as to make it more economically feasible, or to simply not account for externalities, like the cost of exclusion zones when a serious accident like the ones at Chernobyl and Fukushima happens.
So the point is not that nuclear is inherently unsafe, or inherently a bad idea, but rather that the economics of nuclear power tend to increase risk, not decrease it, and that what is being risked is an outcome like the ones in Fukushima and Chernobyl.
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Nuclear energy is quite cheap once the plant is up and running they can be run indefinitely with proper maintenance. Cost wouldn't be an issue if we required the coal and oil industries to pay a fee for the pollution they produce as a byproduct of production.
Re:Nuke power (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuclear energy is quite cheap once the plant is up and running they can be run indefinitely with proper maintenance.
Fukushima Dai-ichi's energy was cheap until 3/11/2011 and it was properly maintained as much as any of them. Also, the Titanic was a great ship that provided excellent transportation until halfway across the Atlantic.
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"Also, the Titanic was a great ship that provided excellent transportation until halfway across the Atlantic."
But, we didn't stop sailing because of the Titanic.
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The same is true for wind, water and solar plants, or more even for sea wave power plants.
angel'o'sphere
Re:Nuke power (Score:4, Insightful)
The way for solar is not photovoltaic (which only works if there is sun/daylight) but thermal. It is easy to store enough heat over daytime to continue producing energy over night.
Wind and Solar are only "expensive" in terms of construction costs.
If we had started with them like 40 years ago, they would run them on maintenance costs: which means they cost close to zero.
Regarding reliability: you know, you have a hugh grid. There is always sun or wind somewhere on the grid. Right now you are depending on oil/coal or what ever from foreign countries. With wind you would only rely on your country and/or your neighbours.
angel'o'sphere
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But upfront costs for hydro, even under excellent circumstances, are breaking the bank in a lot of places. Part of this is due to reg
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So lets look at this mathematically, current US power requirements are over 3,700,000 megawatts.
According to the Department of Energy, Office of Utility Technologies, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy & Electric Power Research Institute, to produce 1,000 megawatts of electrical capacity from solar requires approximately 11,000 acres of photovoltaic solar cells. So, the amount of land you need to produce all power needed by the US, via solar, is approximately 40,700,000 acres or about five times th
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Of course, the "way lower" number of nuclear plants may have something to do with that. But on you also have to consider the lack of evacuations around a coal plant in the event of disasters - and I don't know of a single coal plant that has a sarcophagus over it, or a vast area around it where people are forbidden to live.
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Good catch. Mostly that's because its toxic materials are either blown into the atmosphere or end up in large reservoirs on site, which have a habit of breaking.
I suppose that's mostly because we're ignorant of the hazards of coal plant output. I hear the health effects are quite drastic, let alone living downstream in the event of a fly ash spill.
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You should not believe everything you hear. There is no fly ash anymore in a modern plant since 15 - 20 years (in EU especially, not sure about USA, the last discussion with a /. er from there revealed that they "should" have even stricter limitations but seem not to be enforced).
I don't really know what you mean with a s
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Surprise, surprise, there are no nuclear plants operating commercially that were designed within the last 15 to 20 years. It's all old reactor designs without passive safety. Thanks to the insane selective fear of physics that some people have, it's far too expensive (in the short term) to test and build the new reactors.
Re:Nuke power (Score:4, Informative)
You should not believe everything you hear. There is no fly ash anymore in a modern plant since 15 - 20 years (in EU especially, not sure about USA, the last discussion with a /. er from there revealed that they "should" have even stricter limitations but seem not to be enforced).
I personally know a guy who was paid to climb stacks here in the states and you can find out-of-spec plants as fast as you can pay people to climb them.
Anyway, regarding fly ash: it is separated in a way that most of it can be used as building material, e.g. for roads or as hard plaster in buildings. Only a very small amount gets deposited.
We did actually have a case with some sheet rock from china sweating radioactives and toxics, as you may recall; it was made from fly ash. A great deal of fly ash seems to be made into concrete, which seems like a decent way to entomb radioactives if it's sufficiently uniform, except that the suckers who are working with the stuff are going to breathe a certain amount of it past the sides of their respirators, assuming they're even in the first world where they get to use them. Here in the USA you can track increased radioactives downwind of pretty much any coal plant. I would guess that it's worse in China. The jet stream brings a crapload of Chinese pollution here. There are now days where there's more Chinese pollution in Los Angeles than there is of the local kind.
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I was in highschool at the time and some girl was trying to get people to sign a petition to prevent the Cassini probe from launching in one of my classes. I told her I wouldn't sign it and when she asked why I basically explained how it was statistically impossible for it to hit the earth during the slingshot maneuver and even if it did, and the containment of the plutonium failed in a worst case scenario, the increased nuclear exposure would be so small as the be statistically insignificant, and since we
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Gamera.
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Yeah, do keep in mind that I speaking about reactors, not other uses of fissile material. Windscale was a military pile core used for bomb production, not a power reactor. So apples and oranges, but if you want to include all nuclear accidents, that is a much longer list.
Windscale also had no containment (unlike TMI), the core caught on fire and there was a a plume from the fire (although the filters appear to have contained most of the byproducts, a smart addition). There was no plume or core fire at TM
Slashdot on nukes? (Score:4, Funny)
Hey, this is Slashdot, nukes can do no wrong! Clearly this must be propaganda from the bleeding heart eviro-nuts who don't hold the same opinions as me!
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Nobody here says that, at least not that I've seen. But a bunch of us do point out that under normal circumstances and ones in which nuclear reactors are supposed to be engineered to handle, things like this don't happen. If you've been paying attention, this wouldn't have been much of an issue had the reactor been properly designed, it's beyond my comprehension as to why they did not have a proper contingency plan for tsunami, given the plant's location and the general likelihood of such a disaster. Had th
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under normal circumstances and ones in which nuclear reactors are supposed to be engineered to handle, things like this don't happen
Well, thank goodness! For a while there, I thought we had a major disaster on our hands.
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Fact is: they had planned for a Tsunami.
Only not for such a big one.
And: they did not even do it properly, instead of putting the emergency power into a truly save spot they had them standing outside on the field. The cheapest solution.
Imho it can't be so hard to make an air tight building with lets say a 30 yards high chimney and air take ins and put the emergency power diesel generators into it. However, if they do that, they surely mess it up as well and it will break exactly in the moment where it is ne
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I can only assume you're reading a different Slashdot, because there have been a large number of anti-nuke comments on every Fukushima story.
Re:Slashdot on nukes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Slashdot on nukes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Uhh, no. I think you're confusing slashdot with Fox News. Easy mistake to make.
Seems to me like you can't deal with the fact there might be people of different opinions on slashdot, and want to use that to demean anyone you disagree with. Like the GP said, basically, but worse.
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Oh, do f*** off. I'm very moderately pro-nuke but your attitude is astounding and you are the idiot if that is how you write off the opinions of other human beings in either direction.
There are rational and irrational reasons to support and not to support nukes: we're not Mr Spock from Star Trek so both have a legitimate part to play in discussions.
Rgds
Damon
TEPCO has ruined nuclear power for decades (Score:5, Insightful)
Much of this is TEPCO's fault, and specifically the fault of their CEO, Masataka Shimizu. A few weeks after the hydrogen explosions, it came out that the CEO had ruled that only he could authorize any release of radioactive material, including venting hydrogen to the atmosphere to avoid an explosion.
When that decision needed to be made, the CEO was not present when wanted. [reuters.com] When the earthquake occurred, he happened to be in another part of Japan and had trouble getting to TEPCO HQ. But there was no backup plan if the CEO was unavailable. Nobody took over and made the decision. (In the US, policy is that the on-site plant manager can make that decision.)
The CEO wasn't seen in public for weeks after the disaster. He was rumored to have fled the country, that he'd committed suicide, or that he was in a hospital. The Prime Minister of Japan personally went over to TEPCO headquarters to demand answers and action. Even that didn't help, and his office had to directly take over management of the disaster.
Masataka Shimizu is still CEO of TEPCO.
Japan used to have a tradition of seppuku in such situations.
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Japaneese Slavutych? (Score:3)
I wonder if the next logical step will follow the Chernobyl pattern.
After the Chernobyl disaster, a common effort by all soviet republic to give relief to victims of the disaster resulted in building a new city from scratch. Slavutych [wikipedia.org] is the city of people from the Chernobyl zone. Employees of the power plant, veterans of liquidation of the disaster, foresters, guards and scientists maintaining the zone of exclusion live in a city 50km from Pripyat, and these currently employed in the zone are going the 60km to work by a train every morning. The town, population 25,000 is divided into 8 districts, each with unique style and character given by a chosen soviet republic that lead building it. The design was specifically intended to give people new hope, a consolation and compensation for what they lost. The plan mostly worked: the standard of living is one of best in Ukraine, and there is outstanding number of children in the town, making its average age the lowest in the country.
Now I wonder how would the counterpart in Japan look like, if Japan chooses a similar solution. A modern town built in a year or less from scratch, designed with keeping spirits up in mind, done by the Japaneese may be very interesting...
Re:Japaneese Slavutych? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I wonder how would the counterpart in Japan look like, if Japan chooses a similar solution.
The problem is, they're not exactly swimming in land in Japan. (They're swimming in radioactivity.) They'd have to build it on the side of a mountain [nydailynews.com] or something. Seriously though, the best option is to expatriate as rapidly as possible. Spend some of their money while it's worth something to secure some land for their citizens in some other nation and send them packing. Whole towns are now flooded at high tide since the 'quake [sfgate.com]. Japan is facing a chronic land shortage.
All this comes off as insensitive I'm sure, and I'm sorry, but it doesn't make sense to build anything in Japan any more. I'd be talking real seriously with Brazil. They already have lots of Japanese and surely they could benefit from lots more. The Japanese are very serious about protecting the environment in their own country [greenpeace.org.uk], so it might actually improve their environmental conditions to import them all.
High radioactivity before the tsunami (Score:3)
It seems that the quake itself damaged the #1 reactor, well before the tsunami took out the power system:
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110515p2g00m0dm007000c.html [mainichi.jp]
Re:As long as ..... (Score:4, Funny)
The turtles will take care of that.
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Whoosh!!!
And the correct answer is... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Contaminated Groundwater (Score:4, Informative)
The IAEA has stated regarding possible ground water contamination:
"As of 10 May, the restriction on the consumption of drinking water relating to I-131 - which had been applied since 1 April as a precautionary measure for one remaining location (the village of Iitate in Fukushima prefecture), and only for infants - was lifted."