Fukushima Actually "Much Worse" Than So Far Disclosed, Say Experts 274
PuceBaboon writes "The BBC is reporting that experts are casting doubt on the veracity of statements from both the Tokyo Electric Power Company and the Japanese government regarding the seriousness of the problems at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Not only are the constant leaks releasing radioactivity into the ocean (and thus into the food chain), but now there are also worries that the spent fuel rod storage pools may be even more unstable than first thought. An external consultant warns, 'The Japanese have a problem asking for help. It is a big mistake; they badly need it.'"
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Multiply any radiation claims by 10x (Score:5, Interesting)
Rule of thumb (Score:5, Insightful)
Any "bad" news from government should be assumed to be much worse, and any "good" news from government should be assumed to be not nearly as good. That's just common sense when dealing with an organization that takes money from you by force, promising to spend it on things which benefit you, and then turns around and spends billions each year on self-promotion.
Re:Rule of thumb (Score:5, Insightful)
s/government/big corporation.
Re:Rule of thumb (Score:5, Insightful)
s/government/big corporation.
Mod AC up. If anything, this incident shows that corporations are _at least_ as bad as the state when it comes to managing nuclear power. Nuclear may be scientifically safe and sound, but the lumbering bureaucracy (public or private) required to actually build and operate a plant guarantee that this type of disaster will keep happening for as long as this technology is in use.
Re:Rule of thumb (Score:5, Insightful)
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You say on paper... But on which paper is the solution to the problem of nuclear waste material? Or the problem of finite raw materials? On paper, Sir, it's renewable energies.
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Basically, "on paper" means nothing. Oh, nuclear energy is great, except when we actually do it, there are always problems - the lil'' externalities, like mechanical limits, human error, the "free market", human failings, etc. etc. etc. Other stuff that is great "on paper" - hyperloop, libertariansim, religion, one device for everything...
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But on which paper is the solution to the problem of nuclear waste material? Or the problem of finite raw materials? On paper, Sir, it's renewable energies.
We won't run out of uranium on any timescale that matters. Like the Sun, out uranium is material leftover from a supernova long ago. Both will run out eventually, neither on a timescale that matters to humanity.
We only keep spent nuclear fuel because it's valuable. As nasty industrial waste goes, there's so little of it that it shouldn't matter ... on paper. We do insanely stupid things, just crazily handle this stuff in a way that makes it more dangerous by far than it needed to be. Leave spent fuel i
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Not sure I follow - current worldwide uranium demand (all flavors) is only ~70 kT/y. Known extractable reserves are about 40 MT, so over 500 years at current rates. However, every decade I've been alive people have been warning that we only had enough oil for 20-30 years, yet proven oil reserves grow every decade. Technology grows faster than consumption, and there are gigatons of uranium in seawater.
But we could already meet our energy needs with solar if we every needed to - low tech, solar-thermal (no
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Yes, but nuclear power provided only 12.3% of global electricity in 2011 - so if we went 100% nuclear those 500 years would be reduced to just a bit over 50, with the remainder easily being eaten by our ever-increasing energy consumption. And yes, if we develop commercial seawater extraction technology then we get much more fuel, but probably not cheaply. More importantly since fuel is a negligible cost in the amortized operation of a nuclear reactor - if that's enough to buy us another few thousands year
Re:Rule of thumb (Score:5, Insightful)
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Better would be to use it in a fast neutron reactor [wikipedia.org], at which point the so-called waste becomes fuel.
(Current reactors only used about 1% of the available energy. We can certainly improve on the current storage arrangements, but burying it permanently would be very wasteful.)
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In practice, we as a species don't seem to be able to create and sustain the requisite human and material support structures for truly safe nuclear power.
It has nothing to do with the species. I am perfectly capable of creating and sustaining a safe nuclear power station. There are others out there like me. We can (and will) get together and form our own nation which does this effectively and safely. Others will go extinct. When fire was invented, I guarantee only 20-30% of hominins back then had what it took (mentally, genetically) to safely use fire. I bet after the first few tribes burned themselves and their whole forest to the ground there were people l
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When fire was invented, I guarantee only 20-30% of hominins back then had what it took (mentally, genetically) to safely use fire. [emphasis added]
If you think you can make such guarantees, then you're the last person I'd want designing a nuclear plant.
Re:Just for reference... (Score:5, Informative)
Can someone give an estimate of how much more or less radiation is being introduced by the Fukushima plant than say... the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs?
This is a very good question and as a nuclear layman, it's difficult for me to get a handle on an exact answer. IANA health physicist, just a guy with Wikipedia and Google. But given that, I'll try to give some baselines from what I can see on the net.
First, in terms of "radiation", it seems like we're mostly talking about release of radioactive isotopes, rather than the initial prompt radiation of a nuclear explosion itself. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs ( as, eg, this blog describes [nuclearsecrecy.com]) were airbursts, so relatively radiologically "clean" - they did a lot of initial damage from blast, heat and gamma radiation, but didn't leave nearly as many "dirty" isotopes in the way of fallout. This is compared with, eg, a surface shot like Castle Bravo [nuclearsecrecy.com] which was a huge dirty contamination event.
So when we're talking about "comparing" Fukushima with Hiroshima, we're talking purely about the isotopes, not the explosive power. Which is not really a straight comparison. But given that, Fukushima (or any other nuclear power station) is and/or has the potential to be much dirtier than a bomb (at least an airburst), because there's more nuclear material stored onsite. You'd want a nuclear engineer to give the precise bequerel ratings of all the isotope mixes in the fuel composition, but for a back-of-the-envelope estimate: Little Boy had 64kg of uranium fuel [wikipedia.org] - Fukushima had 1,760,000 kg of fuel [slashdot.org] on the entire site.
So all else being equal, which of course it's not because we're not talking weapons-grade uranium and I'm sure power rods have lots of other alloys in them, Daichi has 27,500 times as much raw radioactive fuel as the Hiroshima bomb. Impressive, no?
Now most of that fuel probably won't be released, as not all the reactors were damaged, and the health impact of the various isotopes varies wildly based on the half-life of the isotope, its heaviness (ability to be transported far from the site), whether it can be ingested in air or water, how long it stays in the body, what the affinity is for various body parts, and what kind of radiation it releases - alpha, beta or gamma. Alpha particles are the biggest, so do the most damage, but also the easiest to block - I believe outside the body they're fairly harmless, blocked by cloth or skin. But inside the body, they can do more harm. So you really do need a health physicist to work out all the equations here.
However, the buzz on the net has always centered around three main radioactive isotope families: iodine-131, caesium-134 and -137, and strontium-90.
Iodine has a half-life measured in days to weeks so it was always going to be the initial problem. Theoretically, if all the fission occurred at the first meltdown, there shouldn't be any left. In practice it seems like some short-halflife isotopes are still being detected, which suggests spontaneous fission may still be occurring in the melted cores. Iodine goes for the thyroid and its effect is thyroid cancers, particularly in children. This is starting to show up [rt.com] but there's arguments over what the baseline rate is and how much is due to testing rather than fallout.
In terms of initial (not ongoing) iodine release, Fukushima was 2.5 times bigger than Hiroshima [asahi.com].
Most of the Fukushima-Hiroshima comparisions focus around the caesium isotopes, as these are long-lived (several years) and the body trea
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And what if it does? What is the alternative? Coal? That kills thousands of people every year.
Re:Rule of thumb (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear may be scientifically safe and sound, but the lumbering bureaucracy (public or private) required to actually build and operate a plant guarantee that this type of disaster will keep happening for as long as this technology is in use.
Yeah, this technology should have been completely replaced by now. We have two political problems here: first they won't permit the replacement technology to be used commercially, and second, they declared a State monopoly on the nuclear insurance market, ensuring the corporate owners would never have to worry about liability.
If the insurance were underwritten according to risk and the safer technology allowed, the last of the light water reactors would be coming down in the coming decade. Instead we're stuck with, essentially, 1950's technology and concomitant risks.
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How can it be that governments, simultaneously, exaggerate and understate bad news?
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The better rule of thumb would be that governments exaggerate news such that the exaggeration leads to an increase in their power.
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They exaggerate bad new when taxes need to be raised, or corporate donors need government contracts, they understate bad news when compensation claims are likely (military experiments, privatized companies mess up bad).
Re:Rule of thumb (Score:4, Insightful)
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This is Japanese government, not just any government. They are culturally averse to asking for help. Almost any other government in their place would be screaming for aid left right and center.
Re:Multiply any radiation claims by 10x (Score:5, Informative)
18 children already have thyroid cancer, 25 more waiting to be confirmed. [nhk.or.jp] For reference the usual incidence rate is one is a few hundred thousand, and these children are from a group of about 300,000 being monitored so the normal rate would be about 2-3 a year.
It's pretty bad.
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And what would the rate be if we examined all kids that thoroughly?
Re:Multiply any radiation claims by 10x (Score:5, Informative)
The same. Thyroid cancer has some hard to ignore symptoms and eventually spreads and kills you if untreated. I suppose if there were zero more detections for the next couple of decades we could write it off to early detection, but somehow I doubt that is very likely.
Re:Multiply any radiation claims by 10x (Score:4, Informative)
Early stages are very easy to miss.
I know, I am basically waiting for it due to other thyroid problems.
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Sure, but it doesn't matter. The numbers are too high to be accounted for simply by early detection.
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Thyroid cancer has some hard to ignore symptoms and eventually spreads and kills you if untreated.
No, advanced cases of it do. Small growths on your thyroid do not.
I suppose if there were zero more detections for the next couple of decades we could write it off to early detection
No, because they're going to be early detecting for probably the entire lives of these children.
People don't get how observation bias works. If one took a control population and examined that group just as aggressively, one would see more cases of thyroid cancer as well.
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I dont believe cancer generally develops that fast, and would highly suspect an agenda from any organization that tries to claim it does-- particularly when the estimates for radiation exposure even for the 3 workers most seriously exposed are just on the fringe of "elevated risk of cancer".
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It happens fairly quickly in children. Besides, what other explanation is there? Are you saying that doctors are lying about this and will perform surgery and chemotherapy followed by lifelong medication because...?
Chernobyl is estimated to have caused at least 6000 extra cases of thyroid cancer, beyond the normal background level. I don't see how any can seriously deny the probable link any more.
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It happens fairly quickly in children. Besides, what other explanation is there?
That maybe children dont regularly get checked for thyroid cancer, but that it is nevertheless present in a given population, and theyre catching the ones that were already there?
Re:Multiply any radiation claims by 10x (Score:5, Informative)
You would know if you had thyroid cancer. The symptoms are not something you can ignore, and eventually you would die. I think it's safe to say there are not many unexplained deaths due to undiagnosed thyroid cancer.
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the normal rate would be one child with thyroid cancer in 300,000. not 2-3 as you say. it says "The incidence rate of thyroid cancer in children is said to be one in hundreds of thousands".
the thyroid cancer rate is therefore 43x normal. given that they underestimate and underdetect, the cautious factor is 100x not 10x.
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How many children would die if there was no power?
How many children would have died from coal burning related illnesses?
How many children would not have been born because their parents died due to either of the above?
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How many children would die if there was no power?
How many children would have died from coal burning related illnesses?
How many children would not have been born because their parents died due to either of the above?
About 10% of all children die before the age of five in societies with little or no power compared to about 0.5% in countries with power, so that's about 2000 additional deaths per year per 100,000 children under five.
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It's pretty bad.
If I had a choice of what cancer I would have it would be thyroid. It's one of the most treatable cancers with an over 90% survival rate, the 10% fatalities usually affecting those who have sought treatment far too late.
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Personally, I'd prefer not to have cancer.
Pride Always Sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet nobody cares about your pride except you
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Re:Pride Always Sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like the soviets were after chernobyl..From the locals at the plant doing the 'safety' test, to just after the initial accident, to the delays in evacuations, to the kremlin's international response..
Pride is ok, but it's gotta be rational.. There's no reason to feel prideful when you fuck up. Now, I could see the argument for 'honor' (It's our mess, we should be the ones to clean it up), but for something like this, if you need help, you should ask. Governments with strong ideological bias often have trouble accepting that the laws of physics don't care about political borders.
level 1 to level 3 (Score:2)
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If this is a three, what's a 7? Hiroshima reloaded?
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After reading the article, it's clear that they mean that this leak by itself is a Level 3 incident. Not "Fukushima" is a Level 3 incident.
Re:level 1 to level 3 (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:level 1 to level 3 (Score:4, Insightful)
The initial blast is pretty dramatic, and certainly spreads whatever nuclear fuel isn't converted into energy all over the place; but for them to release as much radiation, and cause as much contamination, as a defective nuclear generator they'd have to be so large that they wouldn't fit on anything short of heroically large transport aircraft.
Re:level 1 to level 3 (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Factsheets/English/ines.pdf [iaea.org]
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It means at least one of the 'level 3' conditions has been met. [wikipedia.org]
Most likely:
Severe contamination in an area not expected by design, with a low probability of significant public exposure.
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A weak attempt to measure what can't sensibly be measured. Think defcon, but with kickback levels working in reverse (i.e. the more severe, the less money).
Different than Deepwater Horizon (Score:2)
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If you are BP you can dump your waste on your neighbors property all you like. You can keep him tied up in court forever.
Polluting public property should be a criminal act not a civil issue. With public property the government could also sue.
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It's like this (Score:5, Informative)
Example - the locals in our apartment building told us if there was a fire to order a pizza before calling the fire dept. and tell the fd to follow the pizza delivery guy - they now the neighborhoods much better than the authorities.
Other example - our R & D center had a super-efficient furnace that was supposed to burn trash at 900. The furnace operators decided on their own to run at lower temps so the equipment would 'last longer'...that coked up the 2nd combustion chamber. One day someone tossed a 5 gal. container of cutting oil into the trash, and when they tried to burn it, the whole thing exploded, sending thousands of confidential documents out across the neighborhood. Everyone had to run out and pick them up. The community gave our company an award for being so good at the cleanup. No mention of the explosion.
Yet another example - to be counted as a highway fatality in Japan, you have to die in the first 12 hours. This isn't how other countries tally such stats, leaving Japan to appear to be much safer.
Final example - fire drills in the company were typically over-organized. We were instructed to gather at a pre-detemined location with our assigned fire monitor, and then leave the building in order. We told them that in our country, we simply get the hell out...
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So this is how the awakening begins... (Score:2)
Fear Mongering (Score:2, Informative)
See the articles (latest link included) by El Reg's Lewis Page :
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/21/omg_new_crisis_disaster_at_fukushima_oh_wait_its_nothing_again/
Re:Fear Mongering (Score:5, Informative)
See the articles (latest link included) by El Reg's Lewis Page :
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/21/omg_new_crisis_disaster_at_fukushima_oh_wait_its_nothing_again/
Great - he's the same twunt that claimed that no radiation could possibly survive past the fence enclosing Fukushima - at about the same time the first explosion happened.
His reaction was to say, "Oops, seems a bit worse than I thought", right? No, of course not. Even though there's corium blown a mile and a half from the reactors. Even though there were multiple melt-downs. Even though on-site experts with experience in nuke plants claim they don't know exactly what's going on (unlike omniscient Lewis fucking Page). Even though arguably the most dangerous steps still lie ahead - removal of spent fuel from its pool in the now-reinforced reactor 4 building.
So no, he's a blight on El Reg and I, for one, shall not be reading what his bullshit apologist rantings have to say; I'll remain here in reality and hope for the best with the spent fuel and radioactive water storage.
And let's not forget that reactor 4, where the spent fuel pool boiled / leaked dry, was not in operation at the time of the 'quake / tsunami.
News from reality [reuters.com], instead of from Page's ridiculous pro-nuclear, nothing-can-possibly-go-wrong, ignore-those-explosions ranting:
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A sibling to your post mentioned that he picks facts which support his message as if he's some sort of nuclear industry shill. I don't believe that, Page writes deliberately controversial articles just so there will be a flame war in the comments which bumps his articles view count.
He's not st
too bad actually (Score:3, Insightful)
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Strontium-90 is also notorious for behaving a lot like calcium in the human body and other biological systems. While a useful industrial material, because it is bioaccumulative [wikipedia.org] it is also more dangerous than its status as a mere beta emitter implies.
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How do you filter a water soluble?
If you can do that you've solved the fresh water problem, world wide.
Wat (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not disputing that the situation is serious, given that even TEPCO agreed to up the incident level.
But this entire article reads like a piece of tabloid trash:
"It's really bad!" says a famous anti-nuclear activist (aka an "independent consultant").
"It's even worse!" says the same activist/consultant.
"It could be bad; we don't know. We should be prepared, though," says a former regulatory official.
"Holy crap, if that first guy's assumptions are right, then we're in deep shit!" says an oceanographer.
"I didn't even tell you the worst part!" continues the first guy. "This completely unrelated thing might possibly be happening and then we're dooooooomed!!"
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He seems [wikipedia.org] fairly serious and level headed, like he actually understands the issues and came to an informed decision that we are probably better off moving away from nuclear power. Clearly many governments trust him, including the very pro-nuclear French.
Of course ad hominem attacks are easy and since everyone has an opinion, especially people who are experts on a particular subject, you can brand them an "anti-whatever activist". Has he ever protested? He wrote some books with very boring titles that don't a
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address the points he makes directly
I think the GP did address the, erm... "points", which all amount to "it's bad, they're lying, it's getting much worse," etc.
This is BBC fear-mongering. There isn't one new substantiated fact in the whole story. Its 100% pure US Grade A hyperbole. That the hyperbole coincidentally aligns with the worldview of BBC anti-anything-bigger-than-a-hobby-farm readers doesn't make this story or the fact-free activists/experts they quote any more credible.
And Mycle Schneider is an activist. He isn't "something" o
"expert" is a kook (Score:5, Interesting)
Mycle Schneider only has honorary, not the actual education, and has been a WISE(an anti-nuclear group) activist in France for 30+ years. He is the person who gets consult jobs from the government when they want to appear as showing both sides.
Two versions of his Wikipedia page:
http://i.imgur.com/y2dxdFo.png
http://i.imgur.com/XUS0duU.png
Oak Ridge Troll (Score:2)
We showed you how to fix this with Thorium in the early 1970s.
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Oh for mod points right now. And a great big "Fuck you very much," to the Nixon administration for derailing the thorium reactor program just to enrich a crony in California. And massively screwing up health care in this country with a sweetheart deal for Kaiser (more cronyism for CA). And the escalation of the "war on drugs." I used to think Nixon maybe wasn't so bad. I have learned.
If government is good for ONE THING... (Score:2)
nuke it (Score:2)
I wouldn't trust TEPCO with a backyard grill (Score:2)
those guys are woefully uninformed liars who have proven over and over they just don't get it. it's really time to cut the Japanese authorities out of it, except for writing checks, and bring in the RANET team of the IAEA to overhaul the whole containment/cleanup effort. it's really two years too late.
No water processing plant (Score:5, Informative)
It's been years since the event, and Fukushima still doesn't have a radioactive water processing plant. [wmsym.org] The US has dealt with this problem before, both at 3 Mile Island and some Superfund sites. Water itself doesn't become radioactive (except for tritium, which has a 12 year half life); as with fallout, the radioactives are mostly solids in the water, and can be removed and converted to smaller amounts of solid waste.
With a processing plant, they could reuse the cooling water, instead of building more and more storage tanks.
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wow, a pool about 34 ft in diameter, 4 feet deep, nope, no one can filter that much water
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400 tonnes of water is 400000 liters. From the link in the GP, the two treatment plants (at a Superfund site that used to process thorium into lantern mantles) process 60.5 million liters of water a year, for an average of 165000 liters a day. Building treatment plants with 400000 liter/day capacity doesn't seem like that much of a stretch.
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Building treatment plants with 400000 liter/day capacity doesn't seem like that much of a stretch.
Just for reference, if all this water is radiating as strongly as the stuff that recently leaked, you will die for sure if you work within a foot of any of it for a week. And if you work within a foot of it for a day, you'll get very sick. If you work within a foot of it for an hour, you'll get as much radiation as an airline worker gets in 20 years or a Fukushima nuclear worker is allowed in five years. Looking at the map, the tanks are stacked maybe a couple meters apart. You won't want to be walking betw
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Apples to apples? Hanford Site cleans 1.4 billion gallons [energy.gov] of groundwater a year, which is about 14.5 million liters a day. I'm sure you'll object that the levels of contamination are lower (though there's a lot of nasty stuff there), and yes, it's quite possible that nothing exists exactly like what is needed at Fukushima, in large part because the other massive radioactive material cleanups were different sorts of situations. However, the quote was , "You can't filter that much. Nobody can." A statement of
Don't demand perfection in defiance of reality (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason there are so many water tanks to begin with is the perfunctionary insistence that "no radiation must be released into nature". The problem is: It's too late. Any of the releases that are reported as if it were a disaster completely pale in comparison to what happened in the days after March 11th 2011.
The water from the reactor is being filtered and cleaned of Caesium and Strontium. The process is good, but not perfect. But since absolute perfection is being demanded, none of the water is allowed to be released into the environment. Hence it must be stored in thousands of tanks, safely, which is as impossible a task as the ludicrous targets for radioactivity in the water.
Those tanks are necessarily makeshift in nature. The tanks cannot be individually monitored 24/7 by a limited number of people on the ground whose time in the contaminated area around the nuclear power plant is further limited by the maximum radiation dose of 20mSv per year. Yet, the government, the media and of course the usual activist groups demand the impossible. Each for their own petty reasons.
How about asking people in Fukushima Daiichi to do the possible instead of the impossible? Clean up the water as much as possible and release it into the sea. Yes, there will be some Tritium and trace amount of residual Cs and Sr - it will be a very small fraction to what was released into the sea in 2011. This would allow the people there to concentrate on actually making sure that the core equipment is running and the site as a whole is making progress to being in a better more workable state - instead of setting up new water tanks every day and worrying about leaks.
It is a marvel all of its own that workers there were at all able to keep up with setting up all those water tanks. But you should keep in mind that this isn't actually what they should be doing. They should have concentrated to bringing the plant back into a stable stead state. This will include allowing for some minor emissions of radioactive water. Provided that this is done in a controlled and closely monitored manner, this does not pose any problem that even approaches the scale of rainwater washing Caesium from the countryside into the sea (thus being part of natural decontamination processes). It will be diluted to levels that will not be harmful to the population.
Dilution is a temporary solution to pollution. And I'm not saying this should be anything more than a temporary emergency measure. I'm very surely not advocating this to be a general way to dispose of radioactive waste. But given the circumstances, it is the most reasonable solution. You should remember that the old way of diluting pollutants was not in itself false. It was just the case that it done by everyone in ever increasing scale, to the point where dilution was perfectly meaningless. But as a temporary, local, emergency measure - instead of a permanent, global and general way of doing things - it is perfectly viable.
Nobody demanded that no oil must leak from the Cosmo Oil Refinery [youtube.com] either and for some reason nobody demands that water below that refinery conforms to drinking water standards either, nobody asks wether any of the oil that contaminated the ground there will seep into the sea (it did and it will continue to do so) - while they do demand that the water below Fukushima Daiichi must not exceed limits for driniking water safety.
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Well, if you put it that way, we don't want to demand perfection in defiance of reality. But let's start by figuring out what "reality" is.
Remember, we're talking about a situation that TEPCO claims doesn't exist -- leaking of contaminated waters. But one of the constant features of this story has been unpleasant surprises. That's bound to happen in most disasters, after all a disaster pretty much by definition is a situation you hadn't planned adequately for. But the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe stands
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Good point about TEPCO's financing, but you're missing my main point, which isn't just that we keep hearing bad news about Fukushima, but that we keep hearing news about things that weren't supposed to be happening that actually were. This implies a certain disconnect with reality.
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They should have concentrated to bringing the plant back into a stable stead state.
That's actually what they're trying to do. The problem is that there is no stable steady state for a melted core. Keeping it below 100 degrees C requires constant active cooling with lots of water. Above 100 degrees and things get a lot worse - smoke and fire. But it's not like it's "shut down" right now. It's just sleeping.
Nuclear fission has no real "off" button. Fuel rods are like slow-burning candles that you can burn fast or let smoulder, but you can't extinguish completely. Once you've lit one up, it
this would be why (Score:3)
I always chuckle when the technology crowd here at slashdot and the people leaning right on the political spectrum always seem to pump up nuclear power as the solution to our energy needs.
Sure, in theory with the proper safeguards it could be ok.. but as Yogi Berra said:
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice there is.."
And the cost for mistakes is so high and long lasting.
What worries me is... (Score:3)
Re:Nuke it (Score:4, Funny)
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If you knew my digestive system, you would KNOW that yes, me eating 10 bananas is on par with Fukushima. It's just a biohazard disaster, not an atomic one.
Re:Cue the XKCD cartoon apologists (Score:4, Insightful)
.... now! "Fukushima is just the same as eating ten bananas, see? I saw it on xkcd!"
Radiation exists in the environment. Fukushima being worse than they're disclosing is, generally speaking, a very localized problem. There's lots of radioactive stuff in the "food chain", and only nebulous comments about potential "health concerns" in the article.
The oceans are big, and the radioactive tanks there are small. Its the radioactive equivalent of homeopathy, when you look at things on the global scale.
So, XKCD (although I don't recall the comic you're talking about ) would be absolutely correct if they're mocking the overhyped concern about the food chain.
Re:Cue the XKCD cartoon apologists (Score:5, Informative)
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Yes, the pacific Ocean is very large, but it also takes a very long time to to mix evenly.. "(hundreds or thousand+ years.)" [wikipedia.org] Thus a large portion of the contamination will remain in the surface layer for generations to come. These relatively hot isotopes also tend to bio-concentrate/bio-accumulate [iaea.org] up the food chain.
Recommendation.. "Eat low on the food chain" [blogspot.com] and avoid Meat products, especially those that were caught, or were fed fish meal products [ens-newswire.com] from the Pacific ocean.
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Bullshit. You're off by a couple orders of magnitude, and XKCD says just as much.
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I'm sure the Obama administration will continue to state a glass of milk has more radiation in it than what is escaping from Japan. Oh yes, and that nobody has died from nuclear poisoning. Then he will take off his jacket and bring out a napkin in each hand to wipe the imaginary sweat from his face and say we need more nuclear power to fight global warming. (While sending coal to the rest of the world and subsidizing their coal plants.)
After all this hard work, maybe take Air Force One for a spin to Hawaii. Well, not Hawaii, that is closer to the radiation.
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Nice rant. Have any actual evidence, Mr. AC?
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Those hydrogen explosions outside of the containment structures vaporised plutonium? How the heck did that plutonium get there, and why would it be vaporized, while, say, the structure itself wasn't vaporized? How do you know that significant (say >10% by weight) of released plutonium got vaporised? Doesn't vaporised plutonium, like, condense at room temperature as you'd expect any other room temperature solid to behave? Does it subsequently sublimate if it has small particle size? I mean, man, what the
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Nuclear power is unsafe!
Absolutely it is. It just happens to be safer than the current alternatives, and a lot safer than going back to the stone age and doing without power.
Anyone who really cares about safety (or indeed the environment) should be focussed on one thing only: eliminating coal as a source of energy. Until that happens, all of this scaremongering is just a distraction.
Re:removing the radioactive rods (Score:4, Informative)
dumb question..... but why aren't they removing the radioactive rods or whatever from that particular site and storing them else where? or is it a giant melted mess?
Actually a very good question. And the answer is: yes, removing the fuel rods and making them safe in permanent storage is a very sensible thing to want, and TEPCO is planning to start doing this this November [reuters.com].
The bad news, as I understand it, and the reason why they haven't done this obvious thing until now, is that moving fuel rods is very dangerous since you don't want to get two rods too close to each other otherwise you get a criticality event (a small fission reaction). While radioisotopes can give you cancer or make you very sick, a criticality could kill you in days. And while the rods in the fuel pools aren't melted like the cores are, they have been badly shaken by the earthquake, tsunami and explosions, and they've been drenched in corrosive seawater for two years. I'm guessing that could mean that they're likely to be jammed in their framework, maybe shaken loose, possibly with their cladding decayed, some of them in pool 4 may already have burned, and all this will make handling them a very difficult and dangerous manual process.