Japan Fukushima nuclear thread

[Globs]

thinfourth2 said:

Remind me again how many people a year die in

Coal mining
Oil and Gas exploration and extraction
Falling off wind turbines

Why? This is a thread about the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

It's not about coal mining, or oil and gas, or crappy wind turbines that don't work anyway.
Coal, oil and gas have not contaminated thousands of acres of prime farming land like they did at Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Why don't you try a post on topic now instead of trying to big up nuclear by the dubious claim that it hasn't killed enough people yet?

[Globs]

thinfourth2 said:

You cannot look at the tens of people killed by nuclear power while ignoring the hundreds killed by other methods of power production

Tens? Rubbish.

Why don't you try a post on topic now instead of trying to big up nuclear by the dubious claim that it hasn't killed enough people yet?

[Globs]

thinfourth2 said:

How many people died because of Fukushima?

I have no idea of how many people died because of the nuclear incident and its knock on effects and neither do you.

thinfourth2 said:

Of course we shall conveniently ignore the actual deaths from the tidal wave.

I'm not ignoring the deaths from the tidal wave, however convenient. That was a tragic loss of life that should not be bandied about with disrespect. They have nothing to do with this thread so STFU unless you can say something respectful about those victims. FFS, look at yourself in the mirror sometime.

thinfourth2 said:

If you think that nuclear power is dangerous i suggest your ability to evaluate risk is compromised

Of course it's dangerous, only a foolhardy retard would consider it safe. FFS why do you think each reactor is surrounded by safety equipment, multiple cooling systems, failsafes, backup generators, battery backups, inspections, agencies etc?
All nuclear reactors are inherently dangerous, it is only careful design, maintenance and constant vigilance that brings that danger down to an acceptable risk. If you think they are not dangerous I suggest your ability to evaluate risk is compromised and you should not be anywhere that industry.

If your aim is to paint the nuclear industry in a happy, safe light you are failing badly and strongly reinforcing the stereotypical view that the industry likes to deny everything and anything that goes wrong, and when it does go wrong of claiming it doesn't matter. When the industry refuses to admit to, and learn from mistakes this makes people trust it LESS, not more.

The midst of discussion of over 8000 km contaminated with the radioactive contents of three reactors and several full scale major nuclear meltdown disasters in progress is a funny time to claim nuclear power is not dangerous.

So why don't you try a post on topic now? (hint, about the Fukushima nuclear disaster, that subject you have studiously avoided).

[Globs]

thinfourth2 said:

Globs said:

So why don't you try a post on topic now? (hint, about the Fukushima nuclear disaster, that subject you have studiously avoided).

Okay what do you think we should do

I think we should discuss the Fukushima nuclear plant. That's what the thread is for.

[Globs]

thinfourth2 said:

Globs said:

I think we should discuss the Fukushima nuclear plant. That's what the thread is for.

bad stuff happened and the japs will do anything to save face

We will learn from it

Also the media loves to paint nuclear as hyper dangerous but pays very little attention to other industries

Have you any idea how many folk died in farming in the UK?

As you don't want to discuss the plant I'm puzzled why you should post here.
If you have a particular agenda, why not start your own thread about it, there's a good chap.

llewop said:

Globs said:

The midst of discussion of over 8000 km contaminated with the radioactive contents of three reactors

since you've mentioned it again - and have commenting on risk perception - perhaps you could share your perception of the level of risk assocated with that level of surface contamination? say: for someone staying there for a year?

While I'm sure you'd be happy to allow (other people) to live in areas like this, many better educated people than yourself feel that it poses a danger to life and health.

If you disagree I'm sure land prices there are sufficiently low for you to now swoop in and buy up some prime farming land that you will be very happy with. I expect the Japanese landowners would welcome you with open arms too, and hold you up as an example to us all.

Good luck and let us know how you get on.

[Globs]

llewop said:

the level of contamination for that 8000km2 that you mention was 30,000 Bq/m2. - pick a number or even an abstract concept of what you consider safe/dangerous/risky how ever you care to define it: are you suggesting someone staying there would be in danger of their life? now? soon? sometime? ever?

I certainly bow to those that are better educated and informed than myself...my perception of the risks and consequences of the accident are based on the collective opinion of some exceedingly well educated and well informed people - whats yours based on? knee-jerk outrage?

The classification of Fukushima as an INES Level 7 disaster states:

"Major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended countermeasures."

so effectively it's people like you, and your colleagues that have decided there is a risk, not me.
As for the level, 30,000 Bq/m2 is way too hot for me. That's 30,000 events per second, if you were to eat vegetables grown on that ground you'd be ingesting over time tens of thousands of particles that when they decay are capable of causing cancers.

We should remember the damage radiation does to people before we write it off as harmless. I'm glad to see you are involved in the Chernobyl cleanup, please do not get too blasé about the risks - I know it's easy to do so when you work in a particular field and just because you are prepared to take that risk doesn't mean other people should be forced to.

[Globs]

hairykrishna said:

As with all nuclear measures that seems a scarily high number. Natural potassium decay in your body averages >4000Bq. 30kBq is about 2000 bananas. I'm not saying that it's a good thing but the whole point was that you need to have a sense of perspective. In others words, how likely it is to cause the cancers.

That was just the additional Cesium137 count, the other naturally deposited + weapons testing/usage sources are still there.
People get cancer/leukemia etc without the help of additional radiation, some will happen from cosmic rays for instance. It's a statistics game: More activity = more people die, even if the percentage is small.

Radioactive pollution is not an exclusive problem for reactors, the use of depleted uranium in shells is deliberate contamination of areas for temporary battlefield gains - do we count that as background radiation/contamination too now?

Back to the plant:
Does anyone have any ideas what we would expect to see if the meltdown goes down some of the torus tubes, melts through the thinner concrete there and into the groundwater?

Also what compound related to reactors is yellow? Could it be a uranium compound that was seen by the Japanese?

[Globs]

hidetheelephants said:

One of British Energy's first acts when they bought Scottish Nuclear was shutting the visitors centre at Hunterston(presumably they did the same at Torness) and get rid of the 3 part-time guides who had collectively been there for 35 years.

Makes you wonder how much the bean counters 'saved' in the reactors...

llewop said:

Interesting stuff +

Unfortunately from the point of view of 'wow that's a big number' the Becquerel is very very small

It's true that a single decay is very very small, but also true that the decays do the damage. I suspect alpha is the most damaging and Cs137 is a beta source IIRC. So if you were contaminated with a 200mm x 200mm patch of ground from a 30k/m2 site for a while you'd get 0.2^2 * 30k = 1200 Bq. Now that's 1200 decays per second ingested (for this example), which is that stayed inside you for a week would give you 725,760,000 beta bombardments, which I think is quite a lot.

If you lived off that land for a year you'd be at 37,739,520,000 internal beta hits, so I guess the question is how much internal radiation can ones DNA take until something goes wrong?

[Globs]

hidetheelephants said:

supersingle said:

They've certainly got form.

It's all very well saying that British nuclear is safe but what about India, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and dare I say it... The USA?

What about it? Regardless of whether you or I like it the Indians and the Chinese are intent on building reactors by the dozen. The best we can hope for is the IAEA offering safety/design tips and having them accepted.

Its' not just the country, a simple change of ownership from the original owners of a plant to new guys seeking a quick buck can make all the difference.

http://www.american-reporter.com/4,352/161.html

This is a story about a plant in the US, same design as the melted Fukushima plants, which used to be run extremely well but the new owners are making the residents extremely nervous (and slightly radioactive)..

[Globs]

http://enenews.com/nhk-breaking-news-fire-breaks-j...

A fire at reactor 1, with video - doesn't seem to be well publicised though.

http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/forum/218/fukushima-re...

Also news at reactor 4, not sure if it's falling down or being dismantled.
I suspect the spent fuel pools are more dangerous that the melts, because they are un-contained and of a far greater mass.

Edited by Globs on Thursday 15th December 20:54

[Globs]

More about the cleanup at the plant:

Absolutely no progress being made' at Fukushima nuke plant, undercover reporter says - The Mainichi Daily News

Sad to say it but it appears the Russians did a far better job with their disaster and grasped the nettle, the Japanese seem to be locked into a cycle of secrecy, penny pinching and incompetence that beggars belief.

The west coast US is also in line for the continuing fallout..

[Globs]

Busa_Rush said:

At least he confirms that cold shut down has been achieved - a major success !

Without a) any instrumentation and b) without knowing where the cores are I find that rather unlikely!

Particularly as at least one of the cores appeared to be fissioning and having criticality episodes, not the usual way to cool decaying by-products down..

[Globs]

hairykrishna said:

Globs said:

Without a) any instrumentation and b) without knowing where the cores are I find that rather unlikely!

Particularly as at least one of the cores appeared to be fissioning and having criticality episodes, not the usual way to cool decaying by-products down..

Cold shutdown just means that the coolant's at lower than boiling temperature at atmospheric pressure. It's not hard to believe. Even if there have been limited criticality excursions because the fuel melted the amount of 'fresh' fission byproducts is probably low.

How would they even know the coolant temperature though? It's not even a closed system.
Plus it's not coolant unless it's actually cooling something - a fact they are rather unsure about..

[Globs]

hidetheelephants said:

hairykrishna said:

I dunno. Not caught up with the IAEA report to know the current state of the cooling systems yet. I was just commenting that I don't see any reason to disbelieve it.

How dare you bring common sense into this hysteria!

What hysteria - have I missed something?
Going to double-check the papers...

[Globs]

Another day, another leak: http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/20111219_02.ht...

Still, trivial to whats happening in the reactors I guess.

One also has to wonder what caused reactor 4 to look like this, if it's just full of a tepid pool of water and some spent fuel rods..



Interesting vid from back in August: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baya8-agPs4
Bear in mind it's probably 'hysterical and biased', perhaps a balance to the 'cold shutdown' propaganda.

Any corroboration of the claim (in the video) that the NRC found fuel fragments from a reactor core (not the pool) over 1.5 miles from the plant?

Edited by Globs on Tuesday 20th December 23:44

[Globs]

Good article Oystercatcher, let's hope we do not see too many additional cases.

I found this interesting youtubie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-4YJfwF1MQ

Of course it's biased, but it does address the media bias that radiation is our friend. I particularly liked the bit at the end, where the guy advocating people could safely live in the area dons special boots before touching the ground..

The Wall Street Journal article here is well worth a read:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240529702043...

Not least for the pictures. Go to the gallery too. Lest we forget this is what that large bang at reactor 3 did:


The hairy bits are the steel reinforcing rods that were ripped out of the concrete support beams they used to be embedded in, which gives a good idea of the amount of force in that explosion. Checking out the picture of reactor 4 it's easy to see the difference.

Below is an interesting video where a nuclear expert explains why the hydrogen explosion of number 1 was quite different to the power and force of what happened in number 3... and a theory about where that extra energy came from.

http://vimeo.com/22865967

[Globs]

Well there has been quite a bit of news from Fukushima, none of it good.
First from Enenews, a good source of news but has some loopy people. In the absence of _any_ official visibility of what Tepco are up to (the company that faked it's own safety records) it will have to do.

First an earthquake underneath
http://enenews.com/report-shallow-quake-right-unde...

The worry is that these weaken the SFP (spent fuel pool)s which are already weak (#3 smashed anyway, #4 leaking faster and near collapse). It also seems that after the New Years quake cesium levels were up:
http://enenews.com/cesium-fallout-rises-sharply-fu...

Also a lot of reports about animals and birds getting ill, not sure what to make of that.
http://enenews.com/fukushima-birds-unable-fly-allo...

Reports of corium being dug out of the concrete, looks like uranium oxide as that's yellow
http://enenews.com/fukushima-whistleblower-contain...
Not sure about this but the corium is eating into the concrete so I guess they are finding it there. At least no one is claiming reactor integrity (apart from 'cold shutdown' propaganda).

A certain amount of extra isotopes being detected outside of #3
http://enenews.com/report-radioactive-tin-113-anti...
which was the one where the SFP was pulverised by the huge explosion there in March.

Quite a bit of radiation over the US being detected too, it looks like they are right downwind of the disaster. My own prediction is that Fukushima will make Chernobyl seem like a small local event. I would trust Russian operators more than the Japanese (apart from the lunatics who created Chernobyl) but for reading about the complete and utter mess that is the LNPP(Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant) http://www.bellona.org/filearchive/fil_lnpp.pdf . I found p39 on the most disturbing to read.

It's interesting that there is SO MUCH nuclear waste. At the LNPP they filled up all their storage, then they crammed it all in at double the density, then they built another plant to put the wretched stuff in concrete, thousands and thousands of spent fuel assemblies to get rid of, always needing cooling and monitoring. So I now understand why there is so much spent fuel hanging around at Fukushima. Chernobyl involved the main reactor core and no spent fuel, Fukushima obviously has the three melt-thoughs but also it has dozens of spent fuel pools - many of them badly damaged, ready to cause even more trouble. For all the waste it's a shame they just throw the heat away, after a time that decay heat much eventually add up to a pretty big amount.

Also talk of a neutron ray from the plant - from criticality events I guess. No idea how they would affect people who are miles away though so it may be bunk but it does seem that more people are sickening than expected.
http://enenews.com/breaking-neutron-ray-measured-i...

Also in Tokyo suburbs they are running out of space for the storage of radioactive ash from incinerators
http://enenews.com/mainichi-massive-radioactive-wa...

Makes you wonder how much radiation disappeared out of the chimney of those incinerators, and about just how much fallout there is and when the peak emissions were.

Now from the excellent newsblogged - worth bookmarking to keep up to date from:
http://newsblogged.com/fukushima-nuclear-power-pla...

Also cesium now found in well water
Link

Only a tiny bit but does beg the question of how it got there.


Other than that the plant seems fine.

[Globs]

thinfourth2 said:

I'd hate to have a power station belching out radioactive waste all the time

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=c...

I do not think anyone has any issue with systems to collect fly ash from coal plants. In fact I'm fairly sure the modern ones do, just to remove carbon particulates. I also suspect no one has any issue with the low environmental radiological signature of a properly function nuclear plant.

So I have no idea what your point is.

On the point of safe operation: nuclear is clean if operated properly. In practice there are low level accidental leaks of radiation from time to time. Additionally there is a long term safety issue with the SNF that coal doesn't have, because it needs to be cooled for a long long time and then protected for about 100,000 years as the rod assemblies (FAs) are still dangerous. This long term safety issue increases with each new dump of SNF, which adds up to a big storage/legacy issue.

The additional point of safe operation is that a coal plant is literally impervious to natural and human disasters. Sadly the reason for this thread is that when a nuclear plant loses coolant all hell breaks loose and long term contamination of tens of thousands of square miles is literally assured.

Ironically for your post TF2, since March 11 2011 we have had power station belching out radioactive waste all the time, blanketing the surrounding areas, Tokyo, Hawaii, the US, Canada etc with radioactive fallout including uranium, plutonium, cesium, strontium, iodine and various other trans elements. This is not from a functioning coal station but from a nuclear plant that only had its cooling interrupted for a few days. Given the fact there are literally hundreds of nuclear plants and SNF cooling ponds in the world that would do the same thing if their coolant was interrupted I find your faith in nuclear statistically challenged. In fact there was a russian incident of a pool drying out and subsequent explosion causing massive contamination, I'll have to look that up again.

Apache: Not sure of your question, but in Fukushima some of the spent fuel was stored in the reactor building in open topped cooling pools about halfway up the building, older stuff was moved to a common pool in the Daiichi plant.

There is a reasonable theory that the very big explosion at #3 ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdHbp-tU5O0 )came from a criticality at the reactor's SNF caused by a pool SFA melt down and triggered by a hydrogen explosion above the pool. Even if the mechanism was different the effect was to literally blow (one of) the SFA pools in #3 apart and fuel rods all over the place. #3 as a result is the worst condition and has the most radiation and the most unknowns, next is #4 that has significant leaks to the SFA pools (the reactor was empty - transferring the problem to the fuel pools as it had fresh hot fuel put in it recently to the incident).

ETA: One non-intuitive thing that people probably miss is that in a nuclear plant the brand new fuel assemblies are pretty (radiologically) safe before they go into the reactor, but when they come out they are extremely hot and full of a whole range of radioactive isotopes created by the neutrons that power the nuclear reactions.
So the spent fuel is the dirtiest and most radioactive stuff that is in a nuclear plant, the fresher from the 'oven' it is, the worse it is, another reason for storing it under pure clean water is to shield some of the radiation (the high water purity also slows corrosion). Hopefully 9 months of impure water and seawater has not corroded the (warm) Fukushima fuel assemblies too much.

Edited by Globs on Saturday 7th January 12:19

[Globs]

thinfourth2 said:

Globs said:

So I have no idea what your point is.

And other then nuclear power is dangerous I have no idea what your point is.

So you really have no clue.

This thread has one point: to discuss the Japan Fukushima nuclear plant disaster.
It's not a thread to discuss how safe nuclear can be, despite several desperate attempts to turn it into one.

The disaster at Fukushima has already happened. The genie is out of the bottle now. Get over it.

[Globs]

thinfourth2 said:

Globs said:

The disaster at Fukushima has already happened. The genie is out of the bottle now. Get over it.

Sounds like a damn good idea

Thanks, I knew you'd stop being spurious eventually

From http://fukushima-diary.com/2012/01/actual-fukushim...

Despite an estimated 40 years of cleanup and much of the cooling attempts using temporary pipework it seems people are being withdrawn from the disaster site. I guess the positives is less people get dosed, the negatives is that less gets done to stop the leaks.

From the webcam thread: http://enenews.com/forum-fukushima-webcam-discussi... it seems there are still fires at #3 and #4 SFA pools so I'd be tempted to send people away too.