The Panic Over Fukushima 536
An anonymous reader points out an article in the Wall Street Journal about how irrational fear of nuclear reactors made people worry much more about last year's incident at Fukushima than they should have. Quoting:
"Denver has particularly high natural radioactivity. It comes primarily from radioactive radon gas, emitted from tiny concentrations of uranium found in local granite. If you live there, you get, on average, an extra dose of .3 rem of radiation per year (on top of the .62 rem that the average American absorbs annually from various sources). A rem is the unit of measure used to gauge radiation damage to human tissue. ... Now consider the most famous victim of the March 2011 tsunami in Japan: the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Two workers at the reactor were killed by the tsunami, which is believed to have been 50 feet high at the site. But over the following weeks and months, the fear grew that the ultimate victims of this damaged nuke would number in the thousands or tens of thousands. The 'hot spots' in Japan that frightened many people showed radiation at the level of .1 rem, a number quite small compared with the average excess dose that people happily live with in Denver. What explains the disparity? Why this enormous difference in what is considered an acceptable level of exposure to radiation?"
Red Heading (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Red Heading (Score:5, Funny)
they are red when they are freshly posted
I'm still blown away (Score:5, Interesting)
Not by the Fukushima thing - but by the fact that the tsunami was 50 feet high at the plant. I understand how it can happen; but that is truly awesome (in the literal sense of the word).
Re:I'm still blown away (Score:5, Informative)
If that is awesome, what is this [geology.com]?
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Re:I'm still blown away (Score:5, Informative)
This confirms (for me, at least) Amory Lovins' assertion that the US will never build another nuclear plant because there's no way it will ever be cost effective, even when most of the liability risk is assumed by the government. This WSJ article is snake oil being sold by some would-be investors (or sellers of investments).
Re:I'm still blown away (Score:5, Insightful)
That ain't how it works. For the probabilities to multiply like that and provide redundancy, the vulnerabilities have to be independent events. Burning through O-rings isn't an independent event. A condition which causes one O-ring to leak and burn through (cold weather) is highly likely to affect subsequent O-rings. So you aren't really making things safer by adding an extra O-ring.
At Fukushima, it looks like they had a dozen or so backup generators on the theory that if one has a (say) 1 in 10 chance of failing, then the chance of all of them failing is 1 in 10^12. But nearly all of them were located in the same place, so a single event (a tsunami) which took out one generator took out all of them. Having multiple generators situated this way did not provide redundancy because they weren't vulnerable to independent events. They were vulnerable to the same event.
What they needed to do was put the generators in different locations, with different fuel sources, probably even different manufacturers and fuel types. That way an event which affected one would not affect the others, making their vulnerabilities independent events. The generators at reactors 5-6 were located further uphill, and thus survived the tsunami intact and were able to keep the fuel storage tanks there cooled.
Actually the WSJ article is by a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. And he is spot on about the huge mischaracterization of the risk assigned to nuclear power (including by insurance adjusters). People in general suck at rationally analyzing extremely rare events with huge consequences. For nuclear power, fear of another Chernobyl overwhelms the rational fact that historically it's the safest power source man has ever invented. For lotteries, the desire to hit the jackpot overwhelms the rational fact that nearly everyone who plays loses money, and even on average you lose money.
Re:I'm still blown away (Score:5, Interesting)
At Fukushima, it looks like they had a dozen or so backup generators on the theory that if one has a (say) 1 in 10 chance of failing, then the chance of all of them failing is 1 in 10^12. But nearly all of them were located in the same place, so a single event (a tsunami) which took out one generator took out all of them. Having multiple generators situated this way did not provide redundancy because they weren't vulnerable to independent events. They were vulnerable to the same event.
What they needed to do was put the generators in different locations, with different fuel sources, probably even different manufacturers and fuel types. That way an event which affected one would not affect the others, making their vulnerabilities independent events. The generators at reactors 5-6 were located further uphill, and thus survived the tsunami intact and were able to keep the fuel storage tanks there cooled.
They did actually do that. TEPCO had plenty of reserve equipment stored at a location about 50KM from the plant, so it would cover both Fukushima Daiichi and Daini. Unfortunately infrastructure damage prevented them getting the equipment to Daiichi, even by helicopter. The plant itself was damaged so that even if the spare generators had been located up on a hill it wouldn't really have helped much anyway because there was no quick way of attaching them to the cooling system. The entire plant design was flawed in that respect.
The cooling system was also damaged by the earthquake and tsunami. Valves failed and even though they had power available (taking car batteries out of staff vehicles) they couldn't operate them.
This is only now coming to light and data is analysed, CCTV footage released and the wrecked plant explored. The initial assumption that there was a single point of failure and that the tsunami caused all the damage has turned out to be wrong.
Re:I'm still blown away (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems from the reports I've read to be pretty spot on. I would add an addendum to an earlier comment about this being why no nuclear plants will ever be built in the US again though; the current designs are generally "passive fail", meaning that unless electricity is supplied to the control systems, the plant will just... stop being just sub-critical and will go non-critical very quickly. For instance the pebble bed designs. My (somewhat, I'm probably giving myself a little too little credit) understanding is that these plants use nuclear fuel that just... can't react on it's own due to the sheathing materials. I think those are pyrolytic carbon still though, so of course there will still be problems with burning if they are exposed to air, the accompanying release of hydrogen, etc (I think).
This seems very honestly to be the entire focus of the nuclear industry -- designing plants which are safe to operate no matter what, which maintain reasonable cost-effectiveness. It's basically the holy grail.
I think the current problem is:
1. Natural gas is cheap, coal is cheap, they are cheaper to build and easier to maintain.
2. The regulatory process and validation work to get a new plant design is intimidating. Probably even intimidating as compared to the design of fighter jets.
3. Nuclear *is* scary to the vast majority of people. This is residual in large part from Long Island, and based in concerns over running reactors commissioned in the 60s still being operated. *That* part I am scared of. But as a scientist and engineer, I think that these are solvable problems so long as safety and the concepts of "fail safe" systems engineering based on the Therac-25 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25) which seem to have very permanently changed the way that people fundamentally think about how to do system engineering. These problems had not arisen and become understood when those plants went into operation. A current plant definitely would do a far better job of that.
Heck, it even effects me on a daily basis (at this point in my career I would classify myself as a systems engineer); I think all the time "What happens if all this equipment just stops working" and the answer is always "go to a safe operational mode". The are different ways to do that. You have the F-16 style of doing that, which includes crazy amounts of unstable control algorithms. But by *far* the preferred mechanism is physical. For instance, if I have a furnace I expect to go to 2000C, and monitor the temperature with one thermocouple while I use a single additional thermocouple as a safety, is not really enough. I would *far* rather have a thermal fuse that blows hard when a temperature exceeds some set ultimate super failure limit and shuts everything off immediately. I don't trust thermocouples to be reliable, and I don't trust the controls equipment to respond properly in an emergency.
But in one of these pebble beds, the sorts of controls they are integrating are way beyond "having power", by far the best safety integration is to design it such that electricity failing causes large physical things to happen. Dumping the pebble bed entirely, or dumping immediately a mediator into the reactor that is only prevented from triggering by constant electricity. Some of the designs I've seen literally place the reactor under a ridiculously large tank of water held closed by electricity. I don't know in what way that would fail, but it would be far superior to what happened in fukoshima.
Re:I'm still blown away (Score:4, Informative)
You are wrong on all three counts.
O-rings. It was a stupid/deadly management decision.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/us/roger-boisjoly-73-dies-warned-of-shuttle-danger.html [nytimes.com]
Fukushima. “They completely ignored me in order to save Tepco money,” said Mr. Shimazaki, 65
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/world/asia/critics-say-japan-ignored-warnings-of-nuclear-disaster.html?pagewanted=all [nytimes.com]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2920525&cid=40351611 [slashdot.org]
WSJ article author is retarded and doesn't take into account bio-accumulation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster [wikipedia.org]
Do you just make this stuff up? Read up on my other responses in this thread and learn a thing or two.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3057855&cid=41041571 [slashdot.org]
They didn't want to anticipate (Score:4, Insightful)
>> They had systems in place for a loss of power event. The problem was they didn't anticipate the length of time the loss of power event would continue
They didn't want to anticipate long power losses, so they pick the cheap option. Anyway, there is evidence that the reactors were badly damaged before the power loss
They didn't want to anticipate faults directly under the complex (and there can be unknown faults everywhere !) so they just took the most economic option of ignoring strong earthquakes
They didn't want to anticipate tsunamis, so they just build a ridiculous but cheap protecting wall.
and the list goes on.
Take risks, be "cheap" when possible, but give a false illusion o security. It's just the way the whole industry works
Radiation in Denver is unavoidable (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Rem != rem.
It is a difference whether you get one rem by inhaling radon gas or if you get one rem by inhaling iod or caesium.
Comparing rems is utter nonsense. Also I find the numbers quoted not realy convincing.
Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable (Score:4, Insightful)
You are not comparing like with like. At Fukushima the radioactive material is of a type that can get inside the body, which is where it is dangerous and leads to health risks. Merely comparing levels is pointless, you have to look at the nature of the radioactive material.
Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable (Score:4, Funny)
I've avoided it my entire life here in New Hampshire.
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I doubt it - if you're near granite, you're getting dosed. Isn't New Hampshire the 'Granite State'? Unless NH granite is special, it's got similar levels of uranium in it, and the resulting radon escaping from it. Granite, from what I've read, is almost always a 'good source' of radiation. Granite from Canada, Washington and Oregon is the primary source of the radiation that makes the Columbia River the most radioactive river in the world.
I did a quick Google to find the typical levels in NH but didn't
Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of that mildly radioactive granite eventually ends up as sand and just water and gravity is enough to concentrate it a lot, so some of that beach sand might be irradiating people more than in Denver.
Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable (Score:5, Insightful)
Radiation in Fukushima was manmade, and the inadequate safety features and inept management seem to be common problems with nuclear (and other) power plants.
Yeah, for definitions of "common" of perhaps one in a thousand.
Of course, coal plants kill people when working as intended, but it doesn't look scary on CNN, so nobody cares.
Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable (Score:5, Informative)
It's worse than that. Coal plants on average emit more radiation per kWh than nuclear plants. Including all the disasters of the past few decades.
People suck at dealing with low probabilities of very high magnitude. Which is why we're so scared of terrorists we can't leave our homes...except to get in a two ton killing machine to which tens of thousands die per year in the US alone.
Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody cares about total radiation emitted. Nothing matters except where the radiation ultimately ends up.
Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable (Score:4, Interesting)
You choose this post, which reveals your bias
Actually it reflects my understanding, which is backed by scientific evidence, that particulates spewed into the air by coal plants as far away as mainland China are more likely to end up in my body than emissions from the damaged containment structures at Fukushima or Chernobyl.
Do you have evidence to the contrary that you'd like to share with the class?
Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable (Score:5, Insightful)
No. I have seen no evidence that the one-time release of a small amount of radioactivity into the ocean five thousand miles away could possibly be a significant threat to my health.
If I were worried about "orders of magnitude difference," I would be much more concerned the long-term effects of nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific than I would be about Fukushima.
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Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable (Score:4, Insightful)
Evacuating large groups of people for months at a time, and killing and burying their livestock "WAY deep" constitutes a magnitude of liability no private company is prepared to take on. Your comment suggests you are in favor of large, coercive groups of quasi-governmental officials with the power to evacuate or temporarily relocate populations, organized and financed by the government, and all for the sake of continued profits for the power companies. Seriously.
What happened at Fukushima was a very rare event that had national consequences. The moving of people and killing livestock would also be a government function in any situation, including similar situations where something like an oil refinery blows up or some other similar significant industrial accident.
Just look at what BP had to do with their oil rig accident in the Gulf of Mexico. Even that involved government actions to deal with the general public.
This isn't just for the sake of profits of power companies, but a vital national resource where power from an energy plant is necessary for economic vitality. Without power being produced in some form, a country like Japan simply couldn't survive as a nation and millions would die due to starvation, disease, and simply being without shelter of any kind. In this regard, I dare say that nuclear power plants actually save lives and most definitely improve the standard of living for not just the shareholders of the power plant but for everybody that uses the power from those plants.
In fact it could be argued that a better gauge of poverty is to calculate how much energy is at the disposal of the person being measured instead of calculating monetary wealth. Certainly people in developing nations (or frankly "undeveloped nations") don't have access to nearly the same amounts of energy that people in developed countries have.
I have seen massive evacuations for wildfires (sometimes started by people and not natural), tornadoes, hurricanes, and many other kinds of disasters. A problem with a nuclear power plant is unfortunate and experience should try to improve the situation because it is a man-made device, but that doesn't mean you need to have a knee jerk reaction against the idea due to irrational fear of the technology like some sort of Luddite.
Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable (Score:5, Informative)
What, do I look like a librarian? It's the glasses, right?
Operational power reactors, worldwide: Approximately 430
Research reactors: Approximately 250
Ship/submarine reactors: Approximately 180
Formerly operational but decommissioned commercial and research reactors: Approximately 350
Total # of scary asploded nucular reactors I can think of offhand: 3
(including Three Mile Island which resulted in negligible radiation leakage and no deaths)
Source: Yahoo Answers [yahoo.com] and associated links to world-nuclear.org
Re: (Score:3)
I don't have the numbers, but I do know that the total number of all past and present nuclear submarine hulls is 509, with some hulls carrying multiple reactors. I suspect the total number of nuclear reactors ever constructed is well over 10000.
But then again the total number nuclear accidents is much higher than
Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable (Score:4, Interesting)
... don't undersell the very real risk of idiots in charge of large dangerous equipment.
Indeed, no argument there.
But at least the potentially-dangerous incidents you mention were documented by someone, even if they ended up buried in an obscure NRC report. These reports don't always make the five o'clock news, but they are certainly useful to the regulators, engineers, and environmental scientists involved with designing the next generation of nuclear power plants.
On the other hand, nobody is documenting what happens when you and I inhale radionuclides that were released into the atmosphere by fossil-fuel combustion, potentially thousands of miles away from us. We can draw general conclusions about pollution levels and trends, but at the point where the damage is actually done, it always goes unnoticed. The prevailing attitude in the media is, "Hey, nobody saw it. It must not be a problem, right?"
That's the point that has to be made in threads like this one, over and over, to keep everyone honest.
Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable (Score:4, Insightful)
Radiation in Denver is unavoidable. Radiation in Fukushima was manmade.
And everybody knows that natural radiation is good for you, while manmade radiation is bad... wait what?
Even more reason why it's nonsensical to fear (Score:5, Insightful)
Radiation in Denver is unavoidable.
Yes, and yet hundreds of thousands of people live in Denver, by choice. Many people in Colorado have lived here their whole lives. And yet they are not a city of cancer-ridden tentacled freaks.
So what does it mean when people like you get freaked out by even lower levels of radiation that obviously harm just about no-one living in Denver their whole lives?
It means your luddite fear of anything nuclear is utterly stupid, irrational, and you are causing way more harm than good by being freaked out about the tiny levels of radiation present in the area and trying to freakout others too.
Re:Even more reason why it's nonsensical to fear (Score:4, Insightful)
The question is not "can we avoid all radiation?" it's "can we avoid large scale accidental releases of radioactive materials?" The mismanagement of the Fukushima disaster may not occur at other plants, but my experience with bureaucracies indicates that similar mishandling is probable. That's not a reason not to have nuclear energy, that's a reason to have nuclear energy that humans can't screw up.
Denver's radiation levels are higher than Fukushima's, but Fukushima's levels are now higher than they were before. Even if they're still harmless over most of the area it's still a large spill of an industrial pollutant. Just because it led to harmless radiation levels this time doesn't mean disasters will always lead to harmless radiation levels, especially with old reactor designs dominating.
Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable (Score:5, Insightful)
Radiation in Denver is unavoidable. Radiation in Fukushima was manmade, and the inadequate safety features and inept management seem to be common problems with nuclear (and other) power plants. The furor is because the Fukushima radiation release could have been avoided, but wasn't.
But remember: Responsible, Serious, Journalists have dismissed any displeasure you might feel about having health risks you don't understand imposed on you become somebody higher up the food chain doesn't give a fuck as 'hysteria', so go about your business...
Honestly, that's what really annoys me about the tone of this article... Do I have the slightest belief that Fukushima residents(or, for that matter, just about anybody else who isn't an epidemiologist or involved in some aspect of medical physics) has an accurate understanding of the risks it poses to them? Hardly. Does this mean that it is 'hysteria' to be worried when your local operators have been exhibiting negligence and incompetence indistinguishable from malice while issuing bland statements about how you have nothing to worry about? Also hardly.
Really, a lot of anxiety about 'nuclear' this and 'GMO' that is pretty tepidly supported; but stems from the (overwhelmingly more robust) sense that the people deploying the technology being fretted about don't actually much care whether it is safe or not, cannot be relied upon to do what is necessary to ensure that it is safe, and are more than happy to lie about it for as long as they can get away with it. It would be nice if the anxiety were a bit more carefully focused; but there is a quite legitimate locus for it...
Re:Radiation in Denver is unavoidable (Score:5, Insightful)
Far more generally, people fear sudden or unusual events far more than they fear regular smaller events, even if those regular smaller events add up to far more damage over time. The panic over such low levels of Fukushima radiation compared to Denver radiation may be an example of this. Another example is the panic in Dallas over the West Nile virus. The virus has killed 13-15 or so people this year, mostly the old and infirm. Guess what also kills the old in infirm? The regular flu. How many have been killed in Texas this year? No one knows, because the government doesn't bother to collect that information. The most recent information indicates some dozen children died of the flu in the 2010-2011 flu season in Texas. Numbers of adults and seniors aren't tracked and aren't available, but the CDC estimates somewhere between like 4000 and 30000 flu deaths a year, depending on the severity of that year's outbreak.
So, a dozen+ people die from something slightly unusual. Odds are pretty good that they all would have died from the flu in a few months anyway. But now the citizens and the government all in a panic to "do something" so they start aerial spraying of pesticides. How do you opt out of aerial spraying of pesticides where you live?
Car crashes, the flu, heart disease, cancer from Denver's background radiation - no one really cares. But risk or kill a small fraction of that number of people - but do it all at once and in some novel way - and people will react with exponentially higher fervor.
I think I saw someone on Slashdot once explain this as human instinct. Things that are unusual are more likely to get cave-man-proto-humans killed, so humans developed or evolved enhanced reactions to them. All I know is that we as a species are smart enough to overcome our instincts and react appropriately to situations, so we should do it in these types of situations, too.
Because science is boring (Score:3)
The news channels can't educate people on what a rem is, or why its important, in under 30 seconds, and nobody knows that from school anymore, so the news spin cycle is forced to sensationalize.
Re:Because science is boring (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. The news channels could easily explain it in thirty seconds. Something like:
"Radioactive exposure is measured in rems. The average American is exposed to 0.6 rems a year. People around Fukushima will be exposed to an extra 0.1 rems, which won't hurt them at all. Now, back to our coverage of the entire villages that were swept away by the actual disaster."
They choose to sensationalize and fan the fires of ignorance because it makes for more exciting news, which gets them better ratings, which gets them more money. Simple as that.
Re:Because science is boring (Score:5, Insightful)
They choose to sensationalize and fan the fires of ignorance because it makes for more exciting news, which gets them better ratings, which gets them more money.
I think our attraction to disaster is biological - I'm not sure _why_, but we all tend to slow down at accident scenes, just for one example. How much of our interest in Fukushima is just the fatalistic viewing of the tide coming in and washing people away? IIRC there is evidence that other primates do this as well.
I suppose destruction derbies and horror movies are successful for similar reasons. Then there's the infamous Roman spectacles.
I used to live in Pittsburgh(early 1990s). One of the local stations was not getting very good ratings for their 11:00 PM news, and decided to chase ambulances. They began showing video footage of every car crash they could get to. Soon they had among the highest ratings in the area.
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The news channels can't educate people on what a rem is, or why its important, in under 30 seconds, and nobody knows that from school anymore, so the news spin cycle is forced to sensationalize.
More like, the news channels in the US won't educate people in a 30 second sound byte. They get better ratings when they pile on the hype. Remember dirty bombs? How they kept saying they were the end of the world and no nuclear knowledge was needed to kill kill KILL with them? The few stations who actually did the math and figured out the (conventional) explosive component was far more deadly than any radioactive jacket you could cover it with, and the radiation 'released' by one could only seriously in
Wrong scare (Score:5, Interesting)
Fukushima wasn't scary because of what happened. It was scary because one of the most developped countries in the world had absolutly no control over what happened.
Untill now everybody was reassured that these things only happened to old sovjet reactors.
Fukushima learnt the ignorant masses that when nuclear shit hits the fan it doesn't matter much which country the fan is located in.
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I think it makes a rather huge difference. Things went far worse at Fukushima than they did at Chernobyl. However the government was able to evacuate effectively, maintain health levels, control the situation.... I'd say the lessen is more or less the opposite.
Re:Wrong scare (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe we're not talking about the same Fukashima but I distinctly recall pretty much total confusion and paralysis by the Japanese government and TEPCO. It was clear they did not have a good handle on the situation. They clearly lied, obfuscated and just refused to talk at times.
THAT is what was so scary. Nobody believed what the government was saying. It was extraordinarily hard to figure out exactly what was going on. Waving Geiger counters around isn't the best way to determine health risks but that is exactly what the general public was forced to do given the poor official response. This went on for months. So, I'm supposed to believe them now?
Note the similarities between Chernoble and Fukashima. Both governments caught unawares. Both governments go into minimize mode. The real situation turns out to be, in fact, pretty bad. People distrust official statements, get upset, get hyperbolic, perhaps panic.
SNAFU....
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Maybe we're not talking about the same Fukashima but I distinctly recall pretty much total confusion and paralysis by the Japanese government and TEPCO.
When exactly was this paralysis? Though out the whole thing the Japanese government and TEPCO were managing the reactor everyday. There was a lot of time they didn't know about what was happening exactly or how to handle it. But more or less they had very effective teams working through how to handle a truly tragic situation effectively. This was the fi
Re:Wrong scare (Score:5, Informative)
The father of one of my co-workers has spent essentially the entire time since a week after the tsunami, in Japan assisting with the planning and execution of the clean-up. As has been recently exposed in the media, he has been saying all along that things were and are much worse than TEPCO, the government and the Japanese media have been saying, that the response and cleanup efforts have been pathetically bad, and that the exposure for many people and the surrounding area has been much worse than have been let out.
Among other things that have been publicized recently, it's been discovered that TEPCO executives had been instructing their workers to either not wear their radiation monitor badges or to cover them (with lead? I dunno, don't recall) to reduce the workers' apparent exposure.
I've also read that an area of some hundred square miles may remain uninhabitable for decades if not centuries. Sorry, don't recall where - it was a couple of months ago.
Re:Wrong scare (Score:5, Informative)
The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission disagrees with your assessment - this is what the chairman has to say in the official report [naiic.go.jp]:
Re:Wrong scare (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry, I would suggest you talk to some japaneese guyes.
Your perception is completely wrong.
I was on a kenjutsu seminar last week in germany. The japanese instructors, about 15, where totaly ashamed about the incompetence of their government regarding fukushima. They where completely upset about the inability of anyone to act on that emergency.
Sorry, if you want to talk about global matters, you should stop listening to US media and inform your self from global news sources.
Re:Wrong scare (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the GP's point is that the Fukushima plants were exposed to far worse conditions than the Chernobyl plant, and yet emerged much better, thus proving the efficacy of the safety devices and procedures in place.
For the requisite car analogy: Fukushima is a modern sedan in a head-on collision, from which the driver walks away. Chernobyl is a Pinto getting into a fender bender and exploding.
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Link to the NRC transcripts. And "many people" is not exactly a reliable source.
If the reactor core had exploded there would be no way in hell for them to hide it. Impartial observers would exclude it by the fact that there were no radiation readings anywhere near intense enough to indicate that as a possibility. On the other hand, anti-nuke fearmongers would suggest this to
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That's not the core exploding. But go ahead, leave offtopic things behind.
"Many People" (Score:3)
Many people believe the hydrogen was not enough to cause the mess at #3
Many People also believe in Santa Claus.
At least the ones believing in Santa Claus have an excuse.
INFORMED people know that the reactor building was designed to explode exactly as it did when hydrogen gas built up.
Because silence is the worst reaction. (Score:5, Insightful)
But over the following weeks and months, the fear grew that the ultimate victims of this damaged nuke would number in the thousands or tens of thousands. The 'hot spots' in Japan that frightened many people showed radiation at the level of .1 rem, a number quite small compared with the average excess dose that people happily live with in Denver. What explains the disparity? Why this enormous difference in what is considered an acceptable level of exposure to radiation?"
Because the government and the electrical utility had been completely opaque and not forthcoming with any useful information and preferred to treat the public like children and tell them to go pound sand at public meetings. The government's handling of this from the beginning was a textbook example of how to *not* handle something like this.
So what do people do when they can't get any valid information from their own government? Assume the government is covering it up and assume the worst. And there are plenty of people out there willing to fill the information void with the most outlandish "facts" going.
That's why.
--
BMO
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You're going to have to be more artful and sincere than that.
--
BMO
Radon (Score:4, Insightful)
Radon, from unventilated places, is the leading cause of radiation induced death. Not nuclear power, nuclear weapons, or nuclear medicine. People need to wise the fuck up, and look at the actual facts and see what is going on. Not only is nuclear power safe, but efforts are underway to make it safer still. Modern nuclear reactor designs using liquid fuels instead of solid are the way to go. But all this anti-nuclear sentiment from alarmists (some of whom are funded by the petroleum industry) make utilities wary of funding the replacement of aging plants.
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I don't know if many humans would be willing to take essential medical advice from a fictional alien doctor, much less one who could probably eat nuclear waste and crap out Daleks. Why not eat some nuclear waste from the pits at Hanford and get back to us on its health benefits?
Re:Radon (Score:4, Informative)
You are incorrect along with the author and the others trivializing the problem.
It's not about the radiation. It's about the bioaccumulation.
To compare the radiation from radon gas to the insanely toxic radioactive isotopes that were released into the air, water, and soil is retarded. (e.g.: Caesium, Plutonium, Strontium, Iodine, etc) It has gotten into the food they eat, the water they drink, and the air they breathe. And when it gets into the body, it will cause cancer. BTW, Radon has a half life of 4 days. Caesium-137, 30 years.
How it's poisoned the food supply, etc. Scroll down to the table of contents and learn something:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster [wikipedia.org]
Fellow Slashdotters, swallow your pride, accept your ignorance, and think before you type and moderate like fools perpetuating fallacies.
BTW, I am pro nuclear power. But Fukushima was a failure in accountability coupled with a corrupt regulating agency. Nuclear power will only work when management and owners are held directly responsible with their lives. Both physical and financial.
Re:Radon (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, during the 1960's Oak Ridge National Laboratory built a small 5 MW reactor based on what we call molten-salt reactor (MSR) design, using thorium-232 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel. The design actually worked quite well, but was discontinued because it didn't produce uranium-235 and plutonium-239, the two main fissile materials for nuclear weapons.
But now, they're dusting off the old research and studying the idea of scaling up this MSR design (best known today by the name Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or LFTR) for a new generation of extremely safe nuclear reactors that offer these advantages of conventional uranium-fueled reactors:
1. Uses a cheaply-made form of nuclear fuel, and thorium-232 is widely more abundant than uranium.
2. Doesn't need an expensive pressurized reactor vessel.
3. Reactor shutdown happens in only a few minutes just by dumping the fuel from the reactor.
4. By using closed-loop Brayton turbines, eliminates the need for expensive cooling towers or locating the reactor near a big source of cooling water such as a lake, fast-flowing river or ocean.
5. Can even use spent uranium fuel rods or plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as reactor fuel.
6. The amount of radioactive waste generated is tiny compared to a uranium-fueled reactor, and more importantly, the radioactive half-life is under 300 years, which means very cheap waste disposal (it can be dumped into any disused salt mine or salt dome). Mind you, the nuclear medicine industry wants that "waste," since the byproduct of an MSR has enormous medical uses.
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Oh, it gets better than that.
For over thirty years, the US Navy has been operating nuclear reactors which can be run at a reduced power level with the pumps turned off entirely. It's called natural circulation. You know... hot water rises, cold water sinks, and all that. They came up with the technology for the Los Angeles and Ohio classes of submarine, because subs hide by being quiet, pumps make noise, and you can make the sub stealthier if you can run the reactor without pumps. So why not require ALL
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Why would you think that radon is unnatural? It is a decay product of naturally occurring uranium and thorium. Perhaps CT scans, which feature artificial radiation, are more important for some people, but there are a large number exposed to high radon levels.
LNT may or may not be
it made Exxon happy (Score:3, Insightful)
I guarantee you that "journalists" were being paid to sensationalize the issue. And people are STILL comparing the fukushima plant to some 1970s Soviet power plant? Incidents like Chernobyl happened due to cheap building and cheaper maintenance; the Fukushima "incident" happened due to a giant tsunami and record seismic activity.
But just look at what's going on now. Japan's shutting down ALL their nuclear power plants so they can import oil from foreign companies, and several European politicians have been pushing for the same thing; meanwhile in the US, this sensationalism has just been cannon fodder for the mindless ranting made by people who own $100 in Exxon/Shell/etc stock.
And these people wouldn't be able to get away with it if it wasn't for the idiots who eat all this up. If you're one of those people who bought into the scare tactics, you share just as much blame as the companies behind it.
Re:it made Exxon happy (Score:5, Informative)
Incidents like Chernobyl happened due to cheap building and cheaper maintenance;
No, Chernobyl happened because they completely botched an experiment in one of the worst reactor designs going - a graphite reactor known as the RBMK design. The Russians got the Latvians to finally shut theirs down like a year or two ago. Graphite reactors are *old* and basically unsafe if you do anything outside the design envelope. They will reliably produce heat for your boilers, but don't fuck with them.
You should read the wikipedia page on the accident. It's pretty thorough and one of the better pages in wikipedia.
--
BMO
PS: How old are graphite reactors? They go as far back as the Chicago Pile-1 in 1942. Nobody designs graphite reactors anymore because the hot graphite has a nasty habit of catching fire when exposed to oxygen, as in the case of Chernobyl.
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"Incidents like Chernobyl happened due to cheap building and cheaper maintenance; the Fukushima "incident" happened due to a giant tsunami and record seismic activity."
NO!! Both happened because of mis-management, Chernobyl's management ignored design requirements and safety limitations and Fukushima's management were corrupt and cheap.
Propaganda (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Well homo sapiens hasn't been been around long enough to have created buildings that are that old, so the premise behind your question is blithering nonsense.
However there are certainly lots of geological formations that have have been stable for 150,000 years. In geological scale that's an eye blink. For example Canada's Acasta Gneiss is 4 billion years old.
There are lots of practical ways of dealing with radioactive leftovers. The best is probably recycling combined with deep geological placement, somethi
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we have to find a way to keep the nuclear waste safe for 150.000 years...
Re:Propaganda (Score:5, Informative)
According to wikipedia [wikipedia.org] 1 Sivert == 100 rem. 0.1rem would be 0.001 Sivert or 1 mSv. According to a quick google [nature.com] there were hotspots = 5.82 microsiverts per hour. That's about 51 mSv per year or an increase of 5.1rem.
Where is he measuring this 0.1 rem increase? On Japan's south island?
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You have no idea on what you speak (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Propaganda (Score:4, Interesting)
That goes to his credit. He reviewed the research, came to conclusions, and bit the hand that feeds him.
There's a big difference between
(1) a scientist who is a contrarian who tries to debunk the conventional wisdom and pick fights (and is maybe a pain in the ass sometimes) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Muller [wikipedia.org] and
(2) a scientist who is a hired gun and makes a case for whoever is paying the bill. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Milloy#Links_to_tobacco_industry [wikipedia.org]
There's an obvious difference (Score:4, Funny)
Hindsight is 20/20 (Score:3)
It's easy to look at the data today and form an opinion. But back when their reactors were exploding on TV and Japan and the US couldn't agree on how far to evacuate with no end to the disaster in sight other than a real possibility of all the fuel escaping containment a little panic was justified. Had TEPCO been forthcoming about conditions instead of hiding them the panic would have been worse. It's the unknown at the time that caused the most concern. And had there been a SSW wind for the first few days then it would be a much different story instead of most of the radiation going into the toilet that is the Pacific ocean so I don't buy the argument that "See, it's safe because it wasn't worse."
Not a good comparison (Score:5, Informative)
While the Fukushima disaster may have increased the background radiation by a small amount, this isn't the end of the story on radiation exposure from that event. Fukushima also released radioactive particles that, when inhaled or ingested by humans, will expose their tissues to ionizing radiation for the rest of their lives. This is why you can't compare the exposure from events like international flights, which are distributed across your entire body and are transient in nature, to the total effects of a nuclear disaster. Some of the exposures from Fukushima were and will be much more than tolerable, transient increases in the background radiation a la living in Denver. For many people, the hot particles they inhaled or ingested will stay with them forever and will lead to significant cell damage and cancer.
explanation (Score:5, Insightful)
Colorado cancer rates (Score:4, Informative)
Colorado is in the lowest sixth of US states for overall cancer rates. This despite being in the top third for skin melanoma. When you go in for a check-up, the docs don't ask you whether you've checked the radon levels in your house. But they will ask you if you wear sunblock, and UV-blocking sunglasses (UV has been linked to cataract development). Cause the UV levels that go with living at 5,000 feet are much more dangerous than the other radiation exposures.
Re:Why? This: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why? This: (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is exactly why it was created without a scale.
Re: (Score:3)
>naturalnews
These are the same people who spread anti-vaccine propaganda and all sorts of nonsense. It's ad-hominem, but to say that they are not reliable is putting it mildly.
>no scale on map
Well that's useful.
--
BMO
Why Fear? (Score:5, Funny)
Average kids pool in Denver:
http://community.avid.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Components.UserFiles/00.00.04.28.10/red-square.png [avid.com]
Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"! (Score:5, Insightful)
Mostly when they discovered to their embarrassment that the nearly arbitrary number they picked was less than the natural background and so wasn't attainable.
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It doesn't help when the industry involved refuses to collect real data and has massive social media presence dismissive of real evidence.
Children in Fukushima are just getting lymph abnormalities and diabetes. That's why nuclear Pollyannas are talking about "natural background in Denver".
We do have hotspots in Tokyo Metropolitan Area that have led to these physiological disorders — some of the disorders that have been observed are as shown here. Things like diarrhea, nasal bleeding, headache, eczema and so forth. We are expecting thyroid disorders in children, but also cancers (bladder, leukemia, lung), diabetes.”
http://midnightwatcher.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/japan-physician-radiation-levels-are-4000-higher-than-reported-by-the-japanese-government-radiation-already-causing-health-problems-around-tokyo/ [wordpress.com]
http://www.businessinsider.co [businessinsider.com]
Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm into reef (as in coral) stuff. This sounds exactly like what you see with the tolerance of these animals to environmental change (temperature, ph, alkalinity etc)
Take a specimen from a stable environment and subject it to sudden changes and it will suffer - perhaps die. However some species seem to be able to build tolerance to environmental change - this can be seen by taking a 'frag' (like a cutting in plants) from a coral, then exposing it to small changes and gradually increasing them until you reach a point where your now 'tolerant' coral can live and grow happily through sudden environmental changes that would kill (bleach) identical specimens that have not been acclimated in this fashion.
There is a lot of research going on into bleaching events at the moment and why some corals are fine and others don't survive. Some research suggests that certain corals/regions that have experienced prior bleaching events are faring much better than other regions that until now were very stable.
It sounds to me like a similar 'acclimatisation' process is at work here with radiation.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger indeed!
Re: (Score:3)
Well, when you do the nuclear equivalent of sticking your ass out a car window...I don't think that's a design flaw of the car.
Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"! (Score:5, Interesting)
The official tallies still only count the firemen and control room staff.. The 600,000 'liquidators' are not. With this kind of behavior, the IAEA does a better job of toppling public trust in nuclear power than greenpeace.
Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"! (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not an expert, but I think you can not compare radiation that easily. It really depends on how you come into contact with the radiation, and where it is stored. For example, eating fish from effected may be more serious than just breathing air -- with the same measured radiation content. I think people at least on Slashdot where well-aware of how to compare Sieverts (or rem) from https://xkcd.com/radiation/ [xkcd.com]
We know Fukushima expelled a third of the radiation of Chernobyl, we know how widespread the mutations are there (people still can't live there), we know Japan is not exactly underpopulated and predominantly fish-eating. That can be a serious concern, especially if you at some point lived in the parts of Europe where radiation from Chernobyl rained down and still today you can't eat mushrooms for example, because they are too poisonous (>1000km away, 25 years later).
Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"! (Score:5, Interesting)
Where things get hairy is when dealing with various isotopes and how they do(or don't) get picked up by biological systems or absorbed by humans.
It is certainly possible to be injured or killed(horribly) by direct, penetrating exposure to a source of ionizing radiation; but that's pretty rare. The Therac-25 cases, that physicist who accidentally stuck his head in a particle accelerator, shoe salesmen from the good old days [orau.org], the occasional poor bastard who gets caught in a criticality accident, that sort of thing.
Much more dangerous, at a population level, is absorbing a zesty isotope that, although too scarce in the environment, or not sufficient to penetrate skin(as with alpha emitters), can build up in specific tissues and irradiate them over time.
The trouble is that the risk presented by these sorts of sources depends a lot on biochemistry, lifestyle factors, and other annoying-to-measure stuff.
Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"! (Score:4, Interesting)
This is actually the huge issue that is completely missed - probably deliberately - in the article. Radioactive iodine is absorbed by plants and fish, and bioconcentrates in humans in the thyroid gland where it causes thyroid cancer. Over 30% of Fukushima schoolchildren show thyroid irregularities already. Cesium isotopes are likewise bioactive, being taken up as if they were calcium in bones. This leads to Leukemia, Lymphoma, and Myeloma. Cesium is particularly pernicious because it is retained by the body permanently.
The article pooh-poohs radiation exposure as not as threatening as people think, without considering these quite serious contaminant issues.
Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"! (Score:4, Insightful)
How many showed irregularities before?
Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"! (Score:4, Interesting)
Thank you. I really don't mean to sound like a dick but if you are worried about this I just want to ask these questions rather than spending the time to seek out the data myself. I have no opinion either way on nuclear power. Once again I completely realize repeatedly asking these questions is making me seem hostile, but I am not trying to be like that.
It is common for definitions of vague concepts like "irregular" to change over time. Has that occurred in this case? Why have the researchers failed to use a parametric approach (ie quantify "how irregular")? Why is the term used "irregular" rather than one that more strongly implies damaging to health?
How does the sampling strategy of children's thyroid glands differ between before fukushima and after?
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As far as I can tell, that paper does not say anything about schoolchildren from the fukushima area having irregular thyroid glands. Maybe I missed it?
Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"! (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, radioactive Iodine has a half-life of 8 days, so I find it rather unlikely that these "abnormalities" were caused by Fukishima. That would make the incidence rate higher than Chernobyl, and that was a much bigger release.
Cesium has a half life of 30 years, so hangs around for a while. And no, cesium does not remain in the body permanently. The biological half-life of cesium is 70 days. So unless you're constantly ingesting it, it leaves the body on it's own accord.
Strontium can remain in the body for considerably longer, so that's the one to look out for. Depending on where it is absorbed it has a biological half-life from anywhere as short as 14 days (soft tissue) to 60 years (bone). It has a similar radioactive half-life to that of cesium.
Radioactive exposure does not mean you will get cancer or suffer any extreme health effects. It depends on the type of exposure. It takes a considerable amount of exposure to even marginally increase the likelihood of developing cancer.
Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"! (Score:4, Insightful)
A couple people in my family died of lung cancer. My whole family is Mormon, they never smoked. They didn't hang around smokers other than me. I've been a heavy smoker since 1969, when I started. I smoke more than 2 packs a day, full flavors, none of that 'ultralight' shit, those just have no taste. Almost 45 years now, no lung cancer yet. My old man had emphysema, from being a professional welder for over 30 years. Never smoked a cigarette in his life. He just did an awful lot of welding in very enclosed spaces without a resperator, like, inside a 10,000 gallon tank (he did a LOT of those). . He was also half blind, because he'd strike his arc with the hood up so he could see what he was doing, then nod his head to bring it down. The light did cause retinal burns, and he ended up with something on the order of 20/200 vision. And people wondered why his driving made me nervous...
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Lung cancer was quite rare up till about the 1930's even though people had been smoking for hundreds of years and quite a few lived till their '70's. (All the lung cancer cases I've known have been in their mid 60's)
While there is very good correlation between smoking and lung cancer there is still not as strong of a correlation between tobacco and lung cancer. There is a huge list of chemicals that are added to tobacco for flavour, even burning and even to make it more addicting. There is the polonium in t
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The 'hot spots' in Japan that frightened many people showed radiation at the level of .1 rem, a number quite small compared with the average excess dose that people happily live with in Denver. What explains the disparity?
I think you can not compare radiation that easily
Exactly. There's a time component left out of the 0.1 rem figure. I probably took Tylenol every week last year. 400 milligrams per dose * 52 weeks = 20,800 mg. That doesn't mean I'd take 104 Tylenol in a day.
Re:Right...just change the "acceptable level"! (Score:4, Interesting)
As far as mutations go, it usually takes a few years for them to show up. Most mutations are not viable, so they die shortly after birth and don't reproduce. End of problem.
Ignore the hype from places like rt.com which claims that Fukishima 'has nuked Kalamazoo, MI' and 'thousands of Russian troops have died trying to cover Chernobyl'. Even Greenpeace admits the radiation is only 70 times background level, at 5.7 becquerels and they have a vested interest in hyping everything out of proportion, so take their numbers with a grain of salt until you see a peer-reviewed report by a PhD. . When it's all said and done, though, even at Greepeace's probably highly inflated numbers, it's still about 1/50th of what's allowed for a nuclear reactor worker in the US to recieve per year. The radiation absorbed from a week at Chernobyl was less than a chest CT scan. A 2 week stay in the Fukishima exclusion zone would give you a quarter of the average yearly background radiation exposure. At the Fukishima town hall, you'd get about a quarter of the radiation you'd get from your yearly potassium decay in your own body, in a two week period, roughly equivilent to 20 dental xrays over 2 weeks.
Re: (Score:3)
There have been a number of predictive models that indicate there will be 5-10M+ cancers caused by Fukushima, mostly in Japan and the western US.
Whoa, stop right there, cowboy. Either give us links to those "studies" or stop spreading that crap. These numbers are so outrageously off it's not even funny.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if the mutated insects around Fukushima know that the radiation is only increased by 0.1 rem ... ...
Especialy if you consider that insects can stand roughly 100 times the radiation a human can
You must have missed this in TFA:
A recent study of butterflies near Fukushima confirms the well-known fact that radiation leads to mutations in insects and other simple life-forms. Research on those exposed to the atomic bombs shows, however, no similar mutations in higher species such as humans.
Re:Contradictions (Score:4, Insightful)
I always find it funny that the generations of people who grew up living in absolute terror of all things nuclear are the same generations that believed hiding under a piece of furniture would protect them from all things nuclear.
No, what's funny is people pretending - even though they know better - that cover-seeking drills aimed at mitigating injuries from marginal damage like shockwave roof collapses from shockwaves were really people thinking that it would save them from "all things nuclear." Please just stop with that idiotic meme.
Re:1500 deaths (Score:5, Interesting)
While the author concedes that 1500 deaths will be the long term impact of this accident, I love that he maintains that Nuclear power is safe and clean.
3000 died in the Twin Towers. Something like 50000 die every year in the US due to auto accidents. There are 7 BILLION people on Earth. 1600 people of a pool of 7 billion really isn't statistically significant. Hell, you take your life in your own hands when you get out of bed in the morning. You DO get out of bed in the morning, don't you?? Do you know how many people die in bed every year???