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Stereodude

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Frankly, I'm more skeptical of the US media who are too busy hoping for a Chernobyl so they can use it to push their anti-nuclear agenda in the US to report facts rather than opinions.

I also don't get the giddiness that Pradeep is reporting the bad news with.
 

jtr1962

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I agree, SD. Watching the news coverage on CNN and elsewhere, it's almost like they're hoping for a meltdown, sprouting things like previous nuclear accidents have always gotten worse before they've gotten better.

My educated guess here is we've had partial meltdown. I'd say the rods melted, but enough heat had been removed by the seawater prior to this to keep the molten material from breaching the containment vessel. Hopefully we'll eventually get enough info to see if I'm right or wrong.
 

Stereodude

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Well, that just doesn't sound like the near Chernobyl the media has been playing up. :scratch:

Then again, it's par for the course with the drive-by media / state run propagandists. Look at the bevy of lies they propagated during the whole hurricane Katrina story about people shooting at the rescuers, the pile of dead bodies in the Superdome, and all the other stuff that didn't happen. Not only did they never apologize for the lies, but they instead collected awards from their peers for their great coverage. :tdown:
 

LiamC

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BBC is reporting that ..."Radiation is 400 times the annual legal limit near Fukushima's reactor 3, the Kyodo news agency reports."...

From time's earlier post, that's their MOX (Uranium/Plutonium) reactor. That is a catastrophe. ..."Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano says: "Now we are talking about levels that can impact human health."... Winds are apparently blowing towards Tokyo.
 

Pradeep

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Frankly, I'm more skeptical of the US media who are too busy hoping for a Chernobyl so they can use it to push their anti-nuclear agenda in the US to report facts rather than opinions.

I also don't get the giddiness that Pradeep is reporting the bad news with.

There won't be a Chernobyl in Japan. There the reactor was at beyond max power and exploded with no containment, covering large areas. Parts of the core were thrown hundreds of feet. The biggest risk now (apart from the potentially melting cores) seems to be that they can't keep temps down in the spent fuel storage pools. Are those areas within the containment structure?

Clearly worse than TMI, less than Chernobyl.

Giddiness? I must be part of the green power brigade? Coal power emissions kill tens of thousands every year, in terms of safety risk nuclear is still safer.
 

Howell

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BBC is reporting that ..."Radiation is 400 times the annual legal limit near Fukushima's reactor 3, the Kyodo news agency reports."...

From time's earlier post, that's their MOX (Uranium/Plutonium) reactor. That is a catastrophe. ..."Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano says: "Now we are talking about levels that can impact human health."... Winds are apparently blowing towards Tokyo.

It is worth noting that many of the radioactive particles have a very short half-life and so to sustain a reading that high would require a continuous release of radioactive particles. Also significant would be if the reading was taken right at the outlet.
 

Pradeep

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With the evac zone now at 30KM, I guess the question is how far away you need to be in a worse-case scenario, and then hope for the best.
 

CougTek

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The French experts claim that the gravity of the event reaches 6 on a scale of 7 (Three Miles Island was 5, Tchernobyl was 7). The Japanese still say it's only a level 4. Now, before the usual stupid jokes about the French pop up, let me state that they are one of the most knowledgeable people about nuclear power. And they are not part of the American medias. In fact, they would probably benefit a lot if the Americans would decide to move to nuclear power as they would certainly supply some of the expertise to build the power plants.

That and the high radioactivity levels measured at Tokyo points at very bad things for Japanese people. I find it very sad for the average people living there. I saw their faces in the news and it's saddening. It's a country that made the nuclear choice partly for environmental reasons. I hate to see those who try to make the good choices fail.

However, I read a comment at the bottom of an article saying that building 55 nuclear power plants on a seismic ridge is mightly moronic. It's partly true. The reactors should have been design to sustain a level 9 earthquake AND a giant tsunami because those events occured several times in the past of that region. Maybe it only happens once every two hundred years, but they should have known that it was going to happen sometime anyway. If they were not capable of building a nuclear power plant to sustain those two natural disasters, THEY SHOULD NOT HAVE BUILT THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE.
 

jtr1962

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The French are indeed experts on nuclear power, with nuclear plants generating 78% of the electricity produced in France. What the French and Japanese did was standardize on certain components to make nuclear power more cost effective. The US has a history of one-off designs. This is one reason why nuclear power here is way more costly.

You can design a nuclear power plant (or any other structure) to cope with even a hypothetical magnitude 10 quake. The only question is will it be cost effective to do so. Usually it's a question of likelihood. You design the plant to cope with the magnitude of whatever event is likely to occur in its lifetime. If we assume that a nuclear power plant's design life is 50 years, then you might design it to cope with once in a century events, but not once in a millenium events, because the latter would most like result in expensive overdesign with no safety benefit. Was this a once in a millenium event? If so, then nothing wrong was done in the plant design. If not, then the plants should have been designed to deal with it. One obvious oversight was not putting the diesel generators above the highest likely tsunami. The cost to raise them 40 or 50 feet higher would have been negligible in the scheme of things. I'm sure this mistake won't be made again.
 

time

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Well, it's clearly worse than Three Mile Island (due to radioactive emissions and number of reactors) but nowhere near Chernobyl (and never could be). I guess it's worth a six if conditions worsen.

However, at this point my feeling is that there's been enough decay to get them out of the extreme danger zone. The breach to reactor 2 could keep emissions happening for a few days, but it doesn't look like they're going to get super-serious (famous last words).

The Japanese PM asked people to think of the brave workers on site. I wonder how many will still be around in 20 years? Respect.
 

ddrueding

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The thing that is bugging me at the moment if that none of the press is talking reactors with passive safety vs. those without. Only reactors without passive safety are ever in danger of this kind of problem.
 

Handruin

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ABC news in Australia has some before and after pictures that you can mouse over to see how much damage was caused by this.
 

Mercutio

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It is worth noting that many of the radioactive particles have a very short half-life and so to sustain a reading that high would require a continuous release of radioactive particles.

It's also fairly straightforward to deal with most radioactive materials. Anything, even clothing, will stop the most common sorts of emissions and you're basically fine as long as you aren't ingesting any of it. The "OMG instant cancer death" high-energy stuff burns out very quickly.

Granted that at a certain point, having that stuff in the air or water is not good, but there's a LOT of air and water out there too.
 

jtr1962

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ABC news in Australia has some before and after pictures that you can mouse over to see how much damage was caused by this.
Those pictures are haunting. Entire settlements wiped clean as if they've never existed. This just drives home the point that Earth does what it wants and we're all just tenants here.
 

Howell

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One obvious oversight was not putting the diesel generators above the highest likely tsunami. The cost to raise them 40 or 50 feet higher would have been negligible in the scheme of things. I'm sure this mistake won't be made again.

Ive been thinking that the proper course is not to design the generators higher up as they could always be swamped by a bigger tsunami; but instead to design them to be submerged either inherently or in a vessel.

This tsunami was in and out in what, two hours max. The batteries last 8 hours and don't have to vent hot exhaust gases in the same way the diesel generators do. I say button up the generators and run off the batteries for a few hours then fire the generators back up when the coast is clear.

Its also a shame the plant itself can't generate enough electricity to keep the pumps running.
 

LiamC

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It's also fairly straightforward to deal with most radioactive materials. Anything, even clothing, will stop the most common sorts of emissions and you're basically fine as long as you aren't ingesting any of it. The "OMG instant cancer death" high-energy stuff burns out very quickly.

Granted that at a certain point, having that stuff in the air or water is not good, but there's a LOT of air and water out there too.

Absolute rubbish! There are three types of emitters—alpha, beta and gamma. Alpha radiation (basically and electron stripped Helium atom) can be stopped by clothing.

Beta particles, are high energy electrons and can (that's can, not may, and not will) penetrate human tissue and clothing and cause mutation of the tissue it strikes. A lot depends on the energy of the electron. It is used in radiation therapy for cancer.

Gamma is the most damaging, and shielding on a mass scale is for all intents an purposes impracticable.

A lot of this is fine if the particles stay outside of your body, but you have to breath don't you? Eat? Drink?

It's true that some of the half-lifes of the by-products is short, but that doesn't mean that the issue is over quickly. It depends on the quantity released and what is released, which the Japanese government is playing down, yet the figures don't support what they are saying--which leads me to believe that a cover up is in place. Radioactive Cesium and Iodine are particularly troublesome, Iodine because of the preferential take-up by the body even though it has a short half-life, and Cesium-137 because it's half-life is 30.7 years or so, so any major contamination by it is not going to be cleaned up in your or my life time.

Is it likely to affect the U.S. or Canada? No. Australia? No. Korea/Russia/China, only locally (on a global scale). The trouble is, it is going to affect a few hundred thousand, perhaps a few million Japanese for decades to come, long after the rest of the world has just consigned what's happening to a page on Wikipedia.

I used to be a proponent for nuclear energy. And in a perfect world, it would be a good thing. But it's not a perfect world, greed and short sightedness takes over and an "accident" happens. This wasn't an accident. It was a gamble. Some people thought the risks too remote and rolled the dice...
 

Stereodude

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I used to be a proponent for nuclear energy. And in a perfect world, it would be a good thing. But it's not a perfect world, greed and short sightedness takes over and an "accident" happens. This wasn't an accident. It was a gamble. Some people thought the risks too remote and rolled the dice...
:erm: Absolute nonsense. Compare how many people die from nuclear power each year to how many die in automobile accidents. No one bats an eye about the automobile deaths, but we shouldn't use nuclear power because it's not perfect?

Do you refuse to get in a car or step foot on a plane?
 

LiamC

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:erm: Absolute nonsense. Compare how many people die from nuclear power each year to how many die in automobile accidents. No one bats an eye about the automobile deaths, but we shouldn't use nuclear power because it's not perfect?

Do you refuse to get in a car or step foot on a plane?

Talk about short-sighted. If a plane crashes, or in a car accident, only those directly involved die. In a nuclear accident, people hundreds of kilometres away may die. And even if they don't die, their children may be born deformed, or suffer sicknesses that require lifelong medical care. Even the nominally healthy may suffer medical complications. Are the insurance companies or operators going to foot the bill? I think not. Deny and litigate. And it can go on for generations. Talk about a straw man argument.
 

LiamC

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And as for automobile deaths, people do bat eyelids, at least in this country. Despite exponential growths in traffic, the actual number of deaths have fallen in absolute terms over the last 30 years.
 

Stereodude

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In a nuclear accident, people hundreds of kilometres away may die. And even if they don't die, their children may be born deformed, or suffer sicknesses that require lifelong medical care. Even the nominally healthy may suffer medical complications. Are the insurance companies or operators going to foot the bill? I think not. Deny and litigate. And it can go on for generations. Talk about a straw man argument.
You're the one waving the straw man argument around, not me. Maybe you should look in the mirror.

Many modern reactor designs are intrinsically safe. They don't meltdown even if you completely stop all active cooling of them. So, they're incapable of having one of those accidents where people hundreds of miles away may die. :rolleyes: You're grasping at straws to support an illogical fear / hatred of nuclear power. Nuclear fission is the most concentrated practical source of energy humankind has access to, and yet due to irrational fears we instead use fossil fuels and coal instead and then complain about the emissions.
 

time

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The batteries last 8 hours and don't have to vent hot exhaust gases in the same way the diesel generators do.

This misinformation was in a piece that a Production Engineering academic (no nuclear connection whatsoever) wrote to his brother. It was released on the Internet and embraced by media and heaps of nuclear fanbois, who assumed it was by an expert!

As an expert has said, the batteries are to support control functions, the generators are for the pumps. You'd need some pretty impressive batteries to run those massive pumps for 8 hours, although I imagine batteries would be used until the generators fire up.

Its also a shame the plant itself can't generate enough electricity to keep the pumps running.

It can, but then the reactor would be active rather than shut down, so any mishap would be genuinely catastrophic. This is pretty much what happened at Chernobyl; they were testing a system where the reactor would continue to run the pumps until the generators could be started.

Ddrueding, even these old reactors use "passive cooling"; that's what they've been relying on since the tsunami. Their problem was that they couldn't replenish the coolant that is inevitably lost with the reduced heat exchange effectiveness. Apparently, they've been falling back on fire tenders, which lack the pump pressure they really need. And those pesky explosions have destroyed quite a few.
 

LiamC

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You're the one waving the straw man argument around, not me. Maybe you should look in the mirror.

Many modern reactor designs are intrinsically safe. They don't meltdown even if you completely stop all active cooling of them. So, they're incapable of having one of those accidents where people hundreds of miles away may die. :rolleyes: You're grasping at straws to support an illogical fear / hatred of nuclear power. Nuclear fission is the most concentrated practical source of energy humankind has access to, and yet due to irrational fears we instead use fossil fuels and coal instead and then complain about the emissions.

Absolute rubbish. The very fact that you've resorted to personal attacks and unsubstantiated claims is proof of who is coming up short in the rational argument stakes. "intrinsically safe" By whose measure?
 

Stereodude

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"intrinsically safe" By whose measure?
By the measure that they won't melt down in the event of the removal of active cooling. Try to keep up!

Ps: My post was no more a personal attack than yours. Apparently though only you get to tell someone else that their argument is a straw man (even though my argument was not).
 

Howell

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This misinformation was in a piece that a Production Engineering academic (no nuclear connection whatsoever) wrote to his brother. It was released on the Internet and embraced by media and heaps of nuclear fanbois, who assumed it was by an expert!

Thanks for the clarification. I pulled what I used from the MIT site I linked to above. :roll::erm:
 

Bozo

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Just remember that the generators need fuel. They might have stopped running because the pipe to the fuel source broke.
Also, diesels can run on natural gas or propane. When properly set up they are very clean burning.
Diesels can run under water as long as it has fresh air in and waste gases out. During a flood at our plant, our fire system diesel pump located in the basement of the pump house ran for hours until someone managed to shut its fuel supply off.
( it was actually funny. all you could see of the pump house was about the top 5 feet of the building. The plant was without power. But you could hear the diesel running in the flooded basement. The air intake and exhaust came through the buildings roof and the diesel fuel was stored in a 1000 gallon tank at ground level.)
 

sechs

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If it weren't for our stupid submarine heritage, I think we would have switched to helium-cooled reactors by now. They're a much smarter design.
 

LiamC

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You're the one waving the straw man argument around, not me. Maybe you should look in the mirror.

Many modern reactor designs are intrinsically safe. They don't meltdown even if you completely stop all active cooling of them. So, they're incapable of having one of those accidents where people hundreds of miles away may die. :rolleyes: You're grasping at straws to support an illogical fear / hatred of nuclear power. Nuclear fission is the most concentrated practical source of energy humankind has access to, and yet due to irrational fears we instead use fossil fuels and coal instead and then complain about the emissions.

Umm no. I supported my my stance with counter arguments and indicated why I believed your argument (why not complain about car, aircraft or conventional power station accidents) were specious. What you replied with was "no, reactors are safe so there". If you want to have another try please do so, and "try to keep up"—another Stereodudism. So don't try and take the high moral ground.
 

time

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I've been trying to get a handle on radiation exposure levels. As LiamC points out, the type of radiation makes a big difference, and most importantly, whether it's on your outside or inside. Ingestion of alpha particle sources is highly dangerous because the radiation will all be absorbed by your tissues. Most of the Chernobyl thyroid cancer cases stemmed from drinking milk produced by cows that ate contaminated grass ...

As a completely unscientific exercise, I have come up with a quick and dirty rule of thumb that tries to relate whole of body exposure to an increased risk of dying from cancer. It's based on what's known statistically about the effects of medical radiography, but please don't take it too seriously.

Increased risk percentage = millisievert dosage divided by 100.

Firstly, you have to realize that your chances of dying from cancer are about 25% anyway. If you somehow manage to be exposed to the recommended maximum 1 millisievert dose every year for 70 years, that equates to a minimal additional risk of 70/100 = 0.7%. So nothing to see here.

If you're a nuclear industry worker (eg uranium miner), the maximum recommended level is apparently 50 millisieverts per year, although normal exposure is expected to be much lower. If you rack up 20 years service in a hypothetical shoddy workplace where you always experience that maximum dose, your risk of fatal cancer moves from 25 to 35%. In practise, I'll bet exposure would more likely average 10 millisieverts, so that's only a small 2% extra risk.

Chest x-rays these days use really, really low amounts of radiation (I've read 60 microsieverts, i.e. 0.06 millisieverts), so you don't need to worry about them at all. However, CT scans are an entirely different beast; thorax scans may be between 2 and 8 millisieverts and a barium enema 15 millisieverts. You wouldn't want to have too many of these procedures without good cause. My rule of thumb overstates the risk by about 2.5 times at this point (we don't live in a linear world). Adjusting for that, one out of every 667 people who receive a barium enema will theoretically die from a cancer caused by the scan. Of course, they're far more likely to die from whatever illness they had that required the scan in the first place.

At the extreme end, a 10 sievert (10,000 millisievert) exposure works out to be 100% fatal. 5 sieverts gives you a 50% chance (about 30 of which is death from radiation sickness, but hey, I'm trying to keep it simple). One sievert is 10%, so that's starting to approach Russian Roulette odds.

Over the last couple of days, measurements at Fukushima Daiichi have been reported as 400, 1000, and 600-800 millisieverts per hour. So using my ready-reckoner, a worker who is exposed to the full 400 for 6.25 hours just doubled his chances of fatal cancer. 100 minutes at 1000 millisieverts can be compared with spinning a six-chambered revolver with one bullet.

I guess that would be why they evacuated the workers earlier today.
 

Stereodude

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Umm no. I supported my my stance with counter arguments and indicated why I believed your argument (why not complain about car, aircraft or conventional power station accidents) were specious. What you replied with was "no, reactors are safe so there". If you want to have another try please do so, and "try to keep up"—another Stereodudism. So don't try and take the high moral ground.
You supported your argument with your emotions. The old "think of the children" cliche. Not with facts based in reality. There are safe reactor designs. I didn't say all reactors in use today were of the safe variety. I said that we know how to make safe reactors, and being opposed to new nuclear power plants because some 40 year old designs aren't safe like the new one can be is silly.
 

jtr1962

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Over the last couple of days, measurements at Fukushima Daiichi have been reported as 400, 1000, and 600-800 millisieverts per hour. So using my ready-reckoner, a worker who is exposed to the full 400 for 6.25 hours just doubled his chances of fatal cancer. 100 minutes at 1000 millisieverts can be compared with spinning a six-chambered revolver with one bullet.

I guess that would be why they evacuated the workers earlier today.
Unfortunately, it's basically going to come down to the same situation as Chernobyl-anyone involved in the cleanup/containment is going to go in knowing they're not going to survive long. IIRC a few thousand workers sacrificed themselves in this way ( 100,000 according to wikipedia ). Hopefully here they'll have benefits to take care of their families. Along those lines then it probably makes the most sense to use either the very old and/or those who already have cancer to do this work, plus also those who have already received a large radiation dose. Chances are good if you're 80 or 90 that you'll die of something else before you contract radiation-induced cancer. And if you already have cancer, then you've already lost the game. Given that most cancer "treatments" at best buy you a few years, if that, nothing additional to lose by exposing yourself to radiation other than possibly a few months. It makes no sense to use young, healthy unexposed workers in their prime here unless they possess a skill which can't be quickly learned. Most of the work at this point is going to be unskilled, low tech anyhow, basically entombing the reactors, removing/burying waste, etc. Maybe Japan has robots also which can do a large part of the most dangerous work. That would be the best of all worlds.
 

CougTek

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Chances are good if you're 80 or 90 that you'll die of something else before you contract radiation-induced cancer.
You know many 80 years-old who are still able to work and being productive in an industrial environment where the work is mostly physical? Not me.
 

Bozo

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Does it really make any difference what reactor is better? Those reactors are almost 40 years old an I'm sure they were best that could be done at the time.

Besides, the Tsunami has kill far more people than any of those reactors. Maybe we should debate the best kind of Tsunami to have while the people of Japan are suffering.

How about we debate what we can do to help.
 

LiamC

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You supported your argument with your emotions. The old "think of the children" cliche. Not with facts based in reality. There are safe reactor designs. I didn't say all reactors in use today were of the safe variety. I said that we know how to make safe reactors, and being opposed to new nuclear power plants because some 40 year old designs aren't safe like the new one can be is silly.

Please show me where I used the "think of the children" cliche.
 
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