Radioactive Water Found In Two Reactor Buildings 442
RedEaredSlider writes "Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said it detected several kinds of radioactive material in the water on the floor of reactor buildings at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The isotopes found in the water were cobalt-76, technetium-99, silver-108, iodine-131, iodine-134, four isotopes of cesium, barium-140 and lanthanum-140. All have half-lives measured in hours or days, with the exception of cesium-137."
Have any of the workers developed superpowers? (Score:5, Funny)
You can keep your sieverts. I prefer to measure radiation by the level of socially-isolating, mutated superpowers that it produces. Are any of the plant workers brooding yet, or developing secret identities, or lamenting how society has shunned them, or experiencing montage sequences where they learn how to use their new powers?
Re:Have any of the workers developed superpowers? (Score:5, Funny)
I propose a different measurement: How many Godzilla's will this produce?
And not the 1998, Matthew-Broderick-starring Godzilla either, because, let's face it... that Godzilla sucked.
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Unfortunately I think Natalie Portman peaked with it too. Pretty rough to reach the pinnacle of your acting career at age 12. They can give her all the Oscars they like now, but it won't change the fact that her best performance was one from 15 years ago that she wasn't even nominated for.
plutonium was just found outside (Score:5, Informative)
This does not have a half life in days, but years
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/28/3-types-of-plutonium-detected-at-japans-fukushima-daiichi-plant/
This is extremely bad
Re:plutonium was just found outside (Score:4, Insightful)
This is extremely bad
Oh my God, the protons in your body have a half-life of over 10^30 years!
You, uh, do realise that the longer the half-life the _less_ radioactive something is? Generally speaking, plutonium is more likely to kill you because it's toxic than because it's radioactive (unless someone makes a bomb out of it).
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> You, uh, do realise that the longer the half-life the _less_ radioactive something is?
That rule of thumb fails if said element happens to decay into yet another radioactive isotopes. Like, say, uranium...
Re:plutonium was just found outside (Score:5, Interesting)
That rule of thumb fails if said element happens to decay into yet another radioactive isotopes. Like, say, uranium...
Somewhat, though you're not going to get much of that other radioactive isotope if you start with a few grams of something that has a half-life of hundreds of thousands of years.
Re:plutonium was just found outside (Score:5, Insightful)
no more than i would lead.. but that is because of the same reasons.. it is more toxic to the body than it's radiation is.
Re:plutonium was just found outside (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish I had mod points, but I'm tired of getting into arguments about it.
I would be far more concerned about the health and environmental effects of the big refinery fire that we didn't hear much about, than the Fukushima reactor so far.
Re:plutonium was just found outside (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:plutonium was just found outside (Score:4, Informative)
not to put too fine a point on it but there's no shortage of completely non-radioactive substances which will diddle with your DNA, get something planar which can bind between bases and you get a nasty little insertion mutation.
lead and it's friends bioaccumulate pretty badly as well.
Not to put too fine a point on it but radiation isn't very special.
plutonium leaking into groundwater is serious but so would be lead or arsenic getting into food or groundwater.
Re:plutonium was just found outside (Score:5, Informative)
.... not really no.
it ups it but if your isotope with a 20K year half life decays into something something with a halflife of say (for an example that would be easy on the math)5 seconds then you'll get twice as much radioactivity out of it (assuming the seconds products are as dangerous forms of radiation) with a little variation.
a isotope with a 20K halflife will still be utterly dwarfed in terms of radiation output by something with a halflife of a few decades even if the former has a decay chain 10 isotopes long because it can only add a linear multiplier, not an exponential increase in radiation output.
once you're into halflives in the tens of thousands be more afraid of heavy metal poisoning than radiation poisoning.
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Re:plutonium was just found outside (Score:4, Informative)
From what I read, plutonium is pretty bad if you inhale or ingest it, otherwise not too much of a problem. If it gets into you it can stay in you for years, causing cancer and bone problems (it can get into your bones and bone marrow).
Outside of your skin, the radiation is too weak to cause much concern, but when it is inside you, the radiation is enough to cause reasonably serious harm (or at least the potential therein).
Re:plutonium was just found outside (Score:5, Informative)
Plutonium in perspective [nextbigfuture.com].
As far as widespread release of Plutonium into our environment is concerned, consider this:
The most important effects of plutonium toxicity by far are those due to nuclear bombs exploded in the atmosphere. Only about 20% of the plutonium in a bomb is consumed, while the rest is vaporized and floats around in the Earth's atmosphere as a fine dust. Over 10,000 pounds of plutonium has been released in that fashion by bomb tests to date, enough to cause about 4,000 deaths worldwide. Note that the quantity already dispersed by bomb tests is more than 10 million times larger than the annual releases allowed by EPA regulations from an all breeder reactor electric power industry.
Plutonium is not good for you, but the sky has yet to fall, and seems unlikely to in the future.
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> you can eat Plutonium and nothing will happen to you
Very true. If Plutonium is the name of your pet duck.
Re:plutonium was just found outside (Score:4, Interesting)
Its radiotoxicity is very significant, more so than its chemical toxicist. Ingested alpha emitters are nasty - Thorotrast [wikipedia.org] was highly carcinogenic despite Thorium having a 14 billion year long half life and so being only weakly radioactive.
Of course, Thorotrast was ingested in huge quantities, which won't happen for this plutonium.
you don't say! (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh. So you say they dumped water all over the radioactive disaster with helicopters, firetrucks, a big concrete pump truck, and now the basement of the reactor is filled with radioactive water?
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Yes, and in related breaking news, it has been discovered that water is indeed wet!
I am soo tired of the sensationalized stories surrounding Japan's "nuclear crisis." I'm interested in hearing objective news grounded in science, and that there are "trace amounts" of plutonium found on the grounds surrounding the reactor is only barely newsworthy. What is newsworthy is that the containment units withstood a 9.0 quake which is many orders of magnitude greater than the design specified. That is impressive and
Re:you don't say! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm interested in hearing objective news
No, you're interested in news reinforcing your subjective opinion; just like everybody else.
Re:you don't say! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm interested in hearing objective news
No, you're interested in news reinforcing your subjective opinion; just like everybody else.
I'm interested in hearing news that reinforces my opinion that I don't like reinforcing my opinions. It's hard to find, though.
Re:you don't say! (Score:4, Insightful)
The "trace amounts" are newsworthy because they indicate that the inner steel containment has been cracked and so have a few of the fuel pellets.
In particular, these isotopes are fission products, which are supposed to stay solid and encased in their cladding.
Previous radioactive materials were probably a consequence of neutron activation and had short half-lives, but weren't long term cause for concern.
above post: example of techie vs public disconnect (Score:5, Insightful)
what happened at fukushima might not be as horrible as the media portrays. however, you have to understand, when the general public sees this kind of accident and some techie starts scoffing and arrogantly laughing and proclaiming how insignicant this accident is THEY STOP LISTENING TO YOU
there is an educated person on a given subject matter, and an uneducated person. what does it take to turn the uneducated person educated? well, not the attitude you see on display in the post above
when the educated person acts like an arrogant ass, the uneducated people doesn't learn anything except that you have an ego problem. they immediately tune you out, and most importantly, they decide, without your input, that nuclear power is too dangerous and insist to their politicians that we don't use it. because no one educated them. they just scoffed at them
do you want nuclear power to be widely adopted? then impassionately and concisely summarize why things might not be as bas they seem to be to the average person. when they ask a stupid question, or display colossal ignorance on a subject matter, smile and educate them simply and succinctly. or laugh at them. and see nuclear power get mothballed everywhere
frankly, ego problems like on display in the comment board above are more irresponsible than an uneducated public. because they show that the educated are more interested in proclaiming their "superiority" (eg, their ego problems) than actually informing people
congratulations jackass: your attitude helps kill nuclear power
Re:above post: example of techie vs public disconn (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not a very well informed argument, although your target selection is not too bad.
The unwashed masses stop listening because they want to be scared. They want to be scared because anyone whom doesn't watch garbage like the mainstream media produces... does not watch that garbage.
You know how much of a pain in the ass it is to sit next to the guy at the magic show who spends all his time telling everyone around him how its all fake and I bet I know how it works? Or the guy at the horror movie whom feels the need to tell everyone around him how its all fake and none of it is real? What a PITA for the folks whom want to be entertained.
Same way with the TV news viewers. They literally don't want the truth, so stop trying to tell them. They want to be scared. If you somehow convince them not to be scared about this thing, they'll be pissed that you've "ruined the fun" as they wait for the next scary story.
With a memory best measured in days or weeks, I don't think the opinion of the general unwashed masses really matters for nuclear power, at all.
Now on /. its OK to tell the truth about whats going on. Some of us actually want to know. But keep the non-fiction here and the fiction out there on the TV news where it belongs.
see how powerful the disconnect is? (Score:3, Insightful)
i pointed out people with ego problems more interested at scoffing at the uneducated than educating them, and this yahoo replies by being exactly the sort of archetypical arrogant jackass i am talking about:
"The unwashed masses stop listening because they want to be scared."
oh, really? congratulations, you have an ego problem
being uneducated on nuclear power is not uncommon, it is normal. being ready and interested in being educated is not uncommon, it is normal. unfortunately, techies with ego problems, mo
Re:see how powerful the disconnect is? (Score:4, Interesting)
actually I thought the GPs point was valid and well made. it's this:
CNN/Fox/et. al. have access to many qualified, tv-friendly experts who could put the Fukushima accident in perspective, but they choose not to. Why? Because their audience is not interested in reporting, they are interested in "news". They want the "magic" and "horror" of real live disasters. They are not interested in seeing the "magic" or "horror" revealed as neither magic nor particularly that horrifying.
Not everyone who fears/hates nuclear power falls into this category. Not even everyone who watches cable news channels. But it does seem an interesting insight into why the cable news channels prefer talking heads who hype the disaster over experts who would offer a more even-handed and sedate assessment of the situation.
okay, let's go with this observation (Score:5, Insightful)
if you understand something about the psychology of people's attentions, then you can and should begin to understand how it is permanent, intractable, and just an unchanging facet of human nature. now what? laugh at it? scoff at it? get depressed? use it to tell yourself how superior you are?
analogy: car rides are far more dangerous than airplane flights. but the average person perceives the opposite. the psychological reason is the aspect of control, or the illusion of it. in an airplane, you are handing control of your life over to a pilot. a dedicated trained seasoned pilot with many safety and security protocols, but you are handing over control nonetheless. in a car, you have your hands on the steering wheel: you are in control. but this is an illusion, because you are on a road with hundreds of other people also driving, and texting, and applying makeup, and drunk, and they have power over your life by their actions behind the steering wheel. it doesn't matter how good a driver you are if one of the hundreds of assholes around you crosses over the yellow line
psychologically, it is about what you can perceive as finite and concrete (a tsunami) versus what you cannot perceive as limitless and never-ending (nuclear decay and radiation). perception, and control: more important to human psychology than other risk factors
so if you emphasize to someone what they can perceive, and what they can control, about nuclear radiation, you demystify it, you make it concrete, you make it within their grasp. and thus you reduce the fear and panic and hysteria
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I can't help but be amused that your post berating someone's attitude closes with "congratulations jackass"...
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Sincere question for the sensationalist media: Show us one person who shows any sign of actual harm from this nuclear incident. Now stand him next to any of the many people harmed by the tsunami.
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you don't understand human psychology
here's a guide to help you get started as to how and why you are so out of touch with the subject matter:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/weekinreview/27johnson.html [nytimes.com]
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You are going to have to smack them quite a bit harder.
And then only for my amusement, as they are incapable of understanding your point here. My dog gets it, they don't and won't.
Re:above post: example of techie vs public disconn (Score:5, Insightful)
what happened at fukushima might not be as horrible as the media portrays. however, you have to understand, when the general public sees this kind of accident and some techie starts scoffing and arrogantly laughing and proclaiming how insignicant this accident is THEY STOP LISTENING TO YOU
THEY WEREN'T LISTENING IN THE FIRST PLACE. Sometimes you only can get people to listen to you by disagreeing "arrogantly".
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do you want nuclear power to be widely adopted?
No.
your attitude helps kill nuclear power
Excellent. Go right ahead snarking, Slashdot. The sooner fission gets shut down, the fewer catastrophic 'once in a million years' leaks every twenty years we'll have.
Re:you don't say! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:you don't say! (Score:5, Interesting)
The lesson for the future is to include redundant diesel generators
And more importantly, don't place your backups at or below sea level; and especially not so when on the coast. And especially, especially not so when tsunamis are prevalent in your region. The absolutely obvious stupidity is jaw dropping.
I would seriously like to know why the IAEC didn't have something to say about that long before this happened. Even moreso, I'd like to know why they didn't have generators in standby for such emergencies; as is commonly done in the US. I actually thought this was an international standard. And even moreso, I'd like to know why generators were not immediately made available within the first 12-hours by the military after an emergency had been declared. Had any of this been done, there would have never been an initial emergency declared, let alone an ever growing escalation.
Everything about this smacks of massive human incompetent by the Japanese government and the utility company, which seemingly, has unyielding authority which seems to usurp that of the people and even the government.
The final word in analysis, once its actually penned, is likely to be a scathing review of incompetence at almost every level of governance and corporatism.
They had helicopters functioning. Its not like all of Japanese society ceased to function. It literally would have been trivial to have a generator, or a series of generators delivered within the first twelve hours. Hell, contrary to the popular spin, their inability to deliver the most basic of emergency services by their military strongly suggests that they were in fact, completely unprepared for any and all emergencies they are likely to face.
Re:you don't say! (Score:4, Insightful)
> It literally would have been trivial to have a generator, or a series of generators delivered within the first twelve hours.
Or for that matter just airdrop complete self powered pumps and hook those up. Before the area became a radioactive hell on earth just how hard could it have been to drop in a pump, hook it up to the inlet and let it rip. Hell, in the DAYS that elapsed with no water in those reactors we could have flown a single pump from New Orleans that could have put enough water into those things to blow the fracking tops off the steel containment vessels and created geysers a thousand feet high over all four of those damned reactors. And it is a veritable certainly that somewhere in Japan existed an equally powerful pump or three. The investigations and recriminations over this pooch screw is going to go on for decades.
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Precisesly. In theory, everything is safe and works. In practice, things are more complicated because people are shocked after a tsunami, incompetent, or both, or absent for other reasons. Perhaps there were other reasons than "incompetence", and things aren't actually as simple as they seem from your vantage point in your moms basement.
That is the fundamental reas
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The absolutely obvious stupidity is jaw dropping.
Yes, isn't it? And the really scary part is that the 'obvious' stupidity in the design was done by General Electric and approved by the best nuclear regulatory authorities in the world.
The lesson is that 40 years ago, when Top Men told us that commercial fission was perfectly safe, they were either unbelievably stupid, or lying, or both.
But those same companies and organizations are perfectly trustworthy today?
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Thanks for your most excellent response.
I just want to say that the entire thing saddens me, the trouble with nuclear power is that post Three mile island and chernobyl, people are to affraid to allow for newer and safer reactors to be built, yet their energy demands make it impossible to get rid of all the older outdated reactors, had public opinion on nuclear power been less scared-cattle like, we might have a much safer and greener power situation right now (ironically)
This very fact is something I've been attempting to hammer home hard here. The reality is, anti-nukers have effectively created self fulfilling prophecy by actively preventing newer, safer reactors and literally mandating certification extension. Sadly, I've either been troll moderated or seemingly, un-read and left alone.
People don't seem to understand that nuclear keeps energy prices low, dramatically reduces demand on existing energy supplies, is extremely clean, a
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Because Japan has 2 incompatible power grids a large scale transformer is apparently what would have been necessary to hook up those generators and I guess they didn't have any sitting around. The generators from this part of the country (the ones that would have worked) were likely mostly damaged in the Tsunami and the ones that were not are probably keeping the lights on in hospitals and such.
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It's like a nuclear disaster started in slow motion and everyone ran around in circles waving their arms like Keystone Kops
Let's keep in mind that that's how all disaster response starts, especially on something this novel and of this scale. It's disorganized, confused, and nobody knows what's going on. Please recall that there hasn't been a potential core melt anywhere in the world since Chernobyl, 25 years earlier. Nor has there ever been a core melt with ongoing disaster recovery from a magnitude 9 quake.
We'll probably find all sorts of serious errors, miscommunication, and other problems when we study this in hindsight.
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Except it didn't withstand a 9.0 quake. The 9.0 quake was quite some distance out to sea, but the time it got to Japan it wouldn't have been nearly as strong as that
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That's the ever-overlooked aspect of these "invulnerable to failure" design scenarios. They seemingly never account for "unknown unknowns" (aka, we didn't realize tsunamis could get that big when it was built, and so simply assumed that they couldn't) and for human error.
One of the new reactor designs calls for a giant bathtub of water to be positioned overhead so, in the case of failure, it opens a valve and floods the reactor, keeping it cool for days. And in case of valve failure -- hey, they thought o
Re:you don't say! (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, at this point, I'm almost tempted to say who cares what's damaged or not? The contamination is happening, no matter what the cause. Residets of Iitate, 40km from the reactor [telegraph.co.uk] and outside the exclusion zone, are getting a free dental X-ray (40 microsieverts) every 4-6 hours (including pregnant women and children). That's merely considering radiation from external sources; if they feel much like breathing or eating, they'll be getting internal accumulation and exposure, which is orders of magnitude worse.
Sure, what exactly failed matters for the cleanup and post-mortem, but regardless of how it happened, Serious Problems Occurred(TM) that have to be dealt with.
one slight problem with your math... (Score:3)
Although the Richter scale is base 10, it is the log of the amplitude of the moment of movement, the actual energy of the earthquake is approximatly proportional to 1.5 power. So effectively the energy ratio is about base 31... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale [wikipedia.org]
Not that anyone uses this scale anymore (they use the very similar moment magnitude scale).
Using your argument, that's about 15.8 times [google.com] which is more than an order of magnitude, but probably less than many orders of magnitude.
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No, what is being said is that this most likely indicates holes in the reactor containers. Those same containers that TEPCO has been saying are safe since the week when we had daily explosions. In another week, they'll finally come around to say, one by one, that they've had meltdowns in 1, 2 and 3, and that there is significant leakage from the spent fuel in 4.
Then, maybe, we can start learning the truth of what really is happening in Fukushima.
Re:you don't say! (Score:5, Interesting)
Reactor 3 had no reports of a similar explosion, but they are inferring that containment is breached based on higher than expected radiation measurements. That is the more worrisome one, since it's using a MOX fuel rather than plain uranium. However, they are reporting that reactor 3 isn't losing pressure, so maybe there isn't a leak.
If you check my post history, you'll see I'm adamantly for nuclear power. But we shouldn't downplay what these reports are telling us.
Radioactivity? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see - they've been pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of seawater into the spent fuel pools for over a week now. I would take a wild guess and predict that, yes, there will be some radioactive water lying around.
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Radioactive fishes. radioactivity will accumulate in the top of the food-chain.
Re:Radioactivity? (Score:5, Funny)
I would say the best way to contain the threat is to not go fishing in the reactor building.
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On the bright side - I, for one, welcome upcoming wave of Kaiju overlords (and maybe even more posters in such style [pinktentacle.com], from my part of the woods)
Re:Radioactivity? (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's see - they've been pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of seawater into the spent fuel pools for over a week now. I would take a wild guess and predict that, yes, there will be some radioactive water lying around.
Makes sense to me. The problem is, through concentrated disinformation, the corporation in charge has been very good at minimizing the extent of the issues their lack of preparedness has caused the people of Japan.
Everything is being relayed in terms of what they are doing to prevent this or that nuclear side-disaster; nothing to do with the effects of the disaster that has already occurred and continues to occur.
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But what you wouldn't expect is plutonium to be found in the environment. You wouldn't expect that unless the fuel rods have been damaged and some of the radioactive fuel has escaped.
And what you overlook is that the report is not that there is water loose that is radioactive, but that there is water loose that is 100,000 times more radioactive than normal for water INSIDE THE REACTOR. Not in the environment; not in the building, but IN THE CORE.
"half-lives measured in hours or days" (Score:4, Informative)
Technetium-99 has a half-life of over 200k years. Of course, it's still days, just a lot of them.
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The reason that materials with half lives of 200k years last so long is because they don't emit much radiation, i.e. they're relatively safe to work with (unless they're poisonous).
The ones you need to worry about are the ones which are decaying rapidly, i.e. the ones with short half-lives.
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The ones with very short half-lives are not so bad either, since they only need to be contained for a relatively short amount of time until they aren't dangerous anymore.
The worst are the ones with half-lives short enough that they're pretty energetic, long enough that they'll stick around, and which can bioaccumulate. Cesium-137 and Strontium-90, for instance. Or several plutonium isotopes.
Re:"half-lives measured in hours or days" (Score:4, Informative)
As others pointed out, they're probably referring to Tc99m, which has a short half life. The fact that ground state Tc99 has a half life of roughly forever is probably why it's not mentioned... It's so long that you need a lot of it to get a lot of decays. It's also fairly unreactive and doesn't form any particularly soluble salts (as best as I can tell), so the exposure possibility is limited. Finally, it decays with a fairly low every beta (294keV) and only very rarely emits a low energy gamma (90keV @ 0.0006%).
Compare to Cs137 which has a 30yr half life, so it has the same decay rate as 7,000 times as much Tc99. It forms highly soluble salts and can be absorbed by the body and concentrated in plants. On top of that, it has a much higher decay energy, and usually emits a strong beta (514keV) and gamma (662keV). It makes the Tc99 look like so many bananas. So, they aren't technically correct, but Tc99 isn't really important.
For reference:
Tc99m: http://ie.lbl.gov/toi/nuclide.asp?iZA=430399 [lbl.gov]
Tc99: http://ie.lbl.gov/toi/nuclide.asp?iZA=430099 [lbl.gov]
Cs137: http://ie.lbl.gov/toi/nuclide.asp?iZA=550137 [lbl.gov]
Re:"half-lives measured in hours or days" (Score:4, Informative)
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Unless it's Technetium-99m, which has a half-life of 6 hours.
At which point it decays into...wait for it....wait for it.....Technetium-99
I heard it on TV! (Score:3, Funny)
They said we're all gonna dieeeeee!!!!!
But apparently I find out how, after these commercials... damnit! Now I gotta hang around this channel all day!
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Unfortunately, 100% of people who don't breath oxygen also end up dead, and usually in a shorter period of time.
Tough call.
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I can tell you this, 200 years from now, everyone who is alive today will be dead.
Except Cher, who will still be around.
Re:I heard it on TV! (Score:5, Insightful)
They said we're all gonna dieeeeee!!!!!
Which is what they said after TMI and Chernobyl and for all I know Windscale as well.
If nuclear power is so damned dangerous where are the piles of dead bodies?
Call me when the number of people in the past thirty years gets up to 0.1% of the number killed by automobiles, or half the number killed by coal power in all its dreadful glory.
Nuclear power has serious economic issues. If it had significant safety issues it would have killed WAY more people by now.
And no, Greenpeace propoganda about us not being able to prove that Chernobyl didn't kill 10,000 people world-wide per year in the past 20 years doesn't count. Every reputable health authority that has looked at the consequence of the Chernobyl disaster has pegged the number in the low thousands at the most. No fun fore those people, but the vastly larger number of people killed by coal and cars aren't having any fun either.
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People and animals do live in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Exclusion Zone though.
Thousands of people, many of them elderly, refused to leave 25 years ago, now about 4-500 live there.
Animal life is exploding there as well, with very little animal mutations seen so far.
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Work down a coal mine for 20 years and let me know how good your health is.
Re:I heard it on TV! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I heard it on TV! (Score:5, Insightful)
They're almost as annoying pro-air-travel people who insist that air travel is safer than going by car.
I mean only a little while ago there was all that news about a plane crash and they *still* insisted that air travel is "safer".
while all sensible people know that the only safe way to get anywhere is by driving there or cycling.
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"How about we just put the money in to them to actually modernize them and make them safe?"
The problem is anti-nuclear zealots like yourself fight new reactors tooth and nail.
The end result - To meet power demands, old reactors get service life extensions instead of decommissioning.
This greatly increases the risk of an incident compared to building new plants that have significant improvements in safety design. The problems at Fukushima most likely would not have happened if the reactors were ABWRs due to
I'm fine with nuclear power. (Score:5, Insightful)
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It appears that this reactor was poorly designed in the first place (the technology was new for them and they did not know what they were doing). If they had known what they were doing, they would have worried more about Tsunamis.
It also appears that the company operating it had a *very* cosy relationship with the people responsible for safety. Used elements were simply left on site and had been for years. The safety people apparently did not bother coming around and actually checking.
Recent news indicat
Re:I'm fine with nuclear power. (Score:4, Informative)
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The only real problems are the lack of strong oversight (as you mentioned) and the fact that the reactors were very close to the end of their designed lifespan anyways, and were due to be shutdown within a year (a month, for one of them) due to their age.
The solution to the lat
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Actually, from what I can tell, the reactor design was "outsourced" to companies that had been doing it for some time, like General Electric. And the operating company had cooperated with them several times before at other plants.
And the initial business decision to install GE BWRs was made shortly after losing a world war. And coincidentally one of the biggest corporations on the winning side was selling ..... BWRs.
Theres also some hard core national security type stuff going on with respect to commercial plant design vs military plant design. Its such a struggle to balance experience with security. From a safety standpoint you should be better off exporting what you use in your subs, except that subs inherently are not as susce
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And yet, that's what we have. It's not that the Japanese "couldn't" have ensured that the backup power was operational, it's that they didn't. Unfortunately, I work close to some people with some rather interesting insight into Japanese business and the Japanese nuclear business in particular.
Somehow I feel the US is not as bad as that, but I would be afraid to "test" to see if that is actually the case. And given the safety record we see in coal mines, I get the feeling there is simply a lot that I don'
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I'm not.... not sure I ever will be again. I have long supported nukes for power as a good alternative to our many other heavily polluting technologies. But I was over looking a major detail. The systems are not and cannot be fail safe.
At the same time, there is no other competing technology that has anything close to the potential downside that nuclear energy has. I always worried about reactor control, and never really gave much thought to the holding pools. But the pools have much more fuel, and are not
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Back during the Eisenhower administration, people were talking about power "too cheap to meter". Now, I admit, if it really were too cheap to meter (producing huge amounts of electricity), I think I could live with maybe 1 or 2 nuclear power plants per country.
But given that it's not, and the (small) risk of catastrophic failure, it hardly seems worth it.
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Not sure why you feel that way. These reactors have been through a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami, but still there's not a single death due to direct exposure to radiation. If anything, this demonstrates how safe nuclear power it.
Re:I'm fine with nuclear power. (Score:4, Insightful)
If anything, this demonstrates how safe nuclear power it.
I hope that you can come back in five years and say that with a straight face. I think it's fair to say that at this point we have no idea what the long term issues will be with this reactor and the contamination.
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I'm fine with nuclear power. I'm not fine with nuclear power plants being run by greedy assholes that put the profit margin above the safety margin.
Like Chernobyl?
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Is that supposed to refute what I said?
Chernobyl was run by a government with no concern about 'profit margin', and that lead to the biggest nuclear power disaster in the history of the world. So why do you think the world would be better off if nuclear reactors were run without regard for 'profit margin' (i.e. by governments)?
Back in the real world, reactors run by companies concerned about 'profit margin' have killed far less people than coal power. Even in this case, from what I've read I believe a failed hydro power dam has killed more peopl
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Chernobyl was run by a government with no concern about 'profit margin',
You mean a party with no official profit philosophy.
High level party officials are always profit minded. Diverting building materials, concrete, and workers to their private dachas or for sale on the black market was quite common.
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"No problem..." is what we'll read here (Score:4, Insightful)
This is all just a minor accident that could have been avoided if it weren't for the hippies who won't let us build completely safe reactors to replace the existing completely safe reactors. Right? RIGHT?
IMHO the people who keep playing this down should go to Japan, get in one of those fancy radiation worker suits and CLEAN UP THIS HICCUP WITH THEIR OWN TWO HANDS, FFS.
Re:"No problem..." is what we'll read here (Score:4, Interesting)
This is all just a minor accident that could have been avoided if it weren't for the hippies who won't let us build completely safe reactors to replace the existing completely safe reactors. Right?
I know you're trying to be sarcastic but unfortunately you're correct. The ones that melted down had sorta-crappy Mark I containment structures. They were planning on building replacements on site with much better containment structures... To some extent its just bad luck, but note how they blew up almost in order of construction and the newest ones pretty much shrugged it all off.
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"and we would be able to get enough if you f*cking idiots would permit drilling" - 5-10 years of gas drilling using hydrofracturing techniques has contaminated more groundwater and sickened more people than the entire history of non-Soviet nuclear.
Re:"No problem..." is what we'll read here (Score:4, Insightful)
> The politicians should definately tell them to STFU, nothing gets in the way of a good democracy like voters always yappin'
Yes it is time to tell a small but noisy bunch of socialists (scratch a green, find a red. Not every time but often enough, and the odds grow the higher ranking the green is) to STFU until they come up with a solution instead of mindlessly objecting to every single energy source. And until they are willing to lead by example, other than the admirable way they have at least given up on procreating more of their stupid kind. Give up the cars, planes, mansions and such. And no, driving a hybrid doesn't make it all right, ain't one yet that is net positive. Same for putting up solar panels subsidized by the taxes of people poorer than the sanctimionious pricks installing them.
Pick an energy source that actually works and doesn't cause side effects. Now promise you won't start bitchin as soon as it actually starts providing a non-trivial percentage of the national energy supply.
Oil? Oh the horror.... unless we are paying Petrobras to drill so we can import from them, then it must be ok.
Natural gas? Nope. Coal? Ick, dirty... except this mythical 'clean coal' that will never be viable.
Hydroelectric? Nope, harms fish.
Geothermal? Causes earthquakes.
Solar? Not even in the desert is it ok to deploy on a commercial scale. Great for preening greens to put on their roofs though, just as long as it isn't economically viable it is ok. And we won't worry about the ecological problems from producing photovoltaic cells until it goes into commercial production.
Biofuels? Hello, converting commercially significant amounts of farmland is causing food shortages already and we aren't even getting much of our fuel from it yet. The Four Horsemen will ride long before we got off dead dinosaurs.
Nukes? Please, you guys have been hatin on that since forever, mostly with FUD.
Wind? Not anywhere greens can actually see the windmills... which happen to be where the energy tends to be needed, so until we can get better transport of electricity it is a problem, and the cost/benefit still blows. (ok, that was horrible)
Tidal energy will almost certainly kill some rare fish in 100% of proposed locations.
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Freudian typo in caption in story (Score:2)
This event totally altered German elections ... (Score:3)
The real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
We're missing the real problem here. If these test results are correct, (and there's some question about that) then there is still a critical reaction going on intermittently. The reactors's scrammed nearly two weeks ago and therefore couldn't be putting out something with a half life of days or hours unless fission had restarted. That would be a Very Bad Thing.
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Fission is always taking place in nuclear fuel and spent fuel, as long as there are unstable isotopes present. It's just not very much fission.
You can certainly have materials with a half-life of "days" two weeks after fission is "stopped". If the half-life is one day, then there's 1/2^14th as much as there used to be. While one part in 16 thousand or so is not very much, the detection threshold for radioisotopes is very low. How much they detected matters quite a lot.
Still not looking good (Score:5, Informative)
The best reports on reactor status are at Japan Atomic Industrial Forum [jaif.or.jp], which publishes a status table every day. This is addressed to people in the industry. They just list the facts, without explanation.
The good news for March 28 is that Unit 3's containment is now listed as "undamaged" instead of "possibly damaged". Unit 2 is listed as "damaged and leakage suspected", and that's now the most worrisome unit.
There's finally a fresh water supply for cooling. That's a big relief. Sea water cooling in a boil-off situation leaves tons of salt behind, and there was a real worry that the seawater cooling would stop working once too much salt accumulated. Fresh water cooling can continue indefinitely. It's not clear where the water is coming from. Hopefully they have a water line to a reliable source by now, and aren't just bringing in tanker trucks.
The cores in units 1,2, and 3 still have exposed fuel rods. Until water injection into the core is working again, the reactor can't be brought to cold shutdown. Remember, the reactor vessel is pressurized and contains a mixture of water and steam. Injecting water into a boiler is inherently difficult. Injecting water into a damaged boiler in a ruined structure in a highly radioactive area is very tough.
The spent fuel pool situation on reactors 3 and 4 is marginally under control. Seawater spray continues, but if they have to keep putting water in, the situation is still bad.
They're weeks from a stable emergency shutdown.
That's just the beginning. The situation isn't safe until there are again redundant closed loop cooling systems working. The current cooling hacks dump radioactive water into the ocean.
Then comes decommissioning. The spent fuel pools have to be cooled for three years or so, and then the fuel rods transferred from the wrecked buildings to dry casks. It will probably be necessary to build another containment building around unit 2, at least. Units 1,2, and 3 are all too damaged to ever de-fuel normally. It's not clear what will be done there. Unit 4 wasn't fueled, but it had a hydrogen explosion while cooling was lost, and will probably never be restarted. Units 5 and 6 can potentially be restarted, but it's doubtful that they will be.
Re:Still not looking good (Score:5, Informative)
Great post. One issue with it:
Units 5 and 6 can potentially be restarted, but it's doubtful that they will be.
The history of nuclear power accidents does not support this. Three Mile Island No.1 reactor is still in operation in Pennsylvania. Chernobyl No.1, 2 and 3 reactors were operated for up to 14 years after No.4 blew up and contaminated Europe, and there are 11 other RBMK reactors still in operation elsewhere. The power reactor at the Windscale site was operated for 46 years after the graphite fire in the weapons reactor.
Nuclear reactors represent astonishing capital investments by their builders, and by that I mean the companies, governments and citizens. Japan is dealing with rolling blackouts. This is intolerable in a nation that relies on meeting the demands of the export market. The No.5 and No.6 reactors represent about 2GW of generation capacity they desperately need.
They'll bring those reactors up at some point.