Robots Enter Fukushima Reactor Building 244
swandives writes "For the first time, a pair of remote controlled robots have entered a reactor building at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power hopes the iRobot Packbots will be able to provide data on the current condition inside the buildings, although the company hasn't yet released any information on what they found inside."
Jerry Pournelle's *rational* view of Fukushima (Score:3, Insightful)
I continue to conclude: It's not Chernobyl. When all this began I said a worst case would be one or more Tsar Bomba equivalents. We now know it is far less than that. It does not appear that the entire mess will equal one Chernobyl.
There will probably be a greater and more fatal impact: the rejection, in the West, of nuclear power, which will either have dire economic consequences and lead to even more transfer of wealth into the sovereign investment funds of the Near East, or possibly to wars: I point out that our Middle East Wars have been deadly; nuclear power has not directly killed anyone in the United States. There are debates about "extra" cancer cases caused by nuclear power, but I know of no proof that there have been any.
Note that China is not going to halt nuclear power construction. The major effect of Fukushima Daiichi may well be a very great Chinese comparative advantage. Cheap easily available energy and freedom are the keys to economic prosperity: the Chinese are moving toward both. The United States is moving away from both. The results are predictable.
Meanwhile, there is no sign of any danger to anyone outside the evacuation zone in Japan, and indeed not much evidence of danger inside it. Japan will be deprived of some rice farming land for a few years -- perhaps -- and of the energy from the plant. Of course the plant was older and scheduled for retirement to begin with.
The 9.0 earthquake is now said to have been the largest ever recorded to have hit a civilized area.
Re:Jerry Pournelle's *rational* view of Fukushima (Score:5, Insightful)
The 9.0 earthquake is now said to have been the largest ever recorded to have hit a civilized area.
Because as we all know, Chile, Indonesia and Anchorage, Alaska are composed entirely of backwards tribal villages.
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The 9.0 earthquake is now said to have been the largest ever recorded to have hit a civilized area.
Because as we all know, Chile, Indonesia and Anchorage, Alaska are composed entirely of backwards tribal villages.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, given that most of those places are particularly backwards.
Re:Jerry Pournelle's *rational* view of Fukushima (Score:4, Informative)
Ah, yes:
Backwards Chile, [google.com]
backwards Indonesia, [google.com]
backwards Alaska. [google.com]
Nope, no civilization there.
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Touche. I think the use of the words "backwards" and even "civilized" were not particularly appropriate or helpful; however, the point that this was the strongest earthquake to have hit a densely-populated urban area appears to be correct. To address your response:
The earthquakes in Alaska and Chile happened about 50 years ago, when those areas were much less built up than today.
Valdivia Chile has a much less impressive skyline than Santiago even today, and the epicenter of that earthquake was over 400 mile
Indonesia... (Score:3, Interesting)
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worship uncivilised gods
continually have tribal battles
Well that must make us Westerners absolutely prehistoric then.
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No. He would never talk about Sarah Palin that way...
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I remember reading early reports in the immediate aftermath of the quake that suggested it was a global record breaker. Later, these were retracted or forgotten once hard data started circulating (it's actually somewhere on the order of the fifth largest on record).
It's entirely possible that either A) the passage the GP quoted was written before the facts become known or B) Pournelle was going by memory and wasn't up to date on where this quake actually ranked.
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I would suggest you go and re-read this one idea novel, its is a lot more then that, and they do not save civilization, *spoiler* alert shouldn't be needed here, as you 'claim' to have read it, they may have the last working nuclear plant that they know of, but someone somewhere is still flying Jet plains! In the end they just saved them selves. Civilization is fine else where.
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Elite Randian/Libertarian survivors? That would be the ones led by a US Senator from Cailifornia? What have you been smoking?
Or were you perhaps referring to the amateur astronomer/rich-guy who had trouble opening a can of peaches at one point in the story (no can-opener)?
Note, by the way, that there is no suggestion whatsoever in the book that the plant in question was "the last remaining nuclear power plant". It just happened to be the only one in the immediate vici
Re:Jerry Pournelle's *rational* view of Fukushima (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually the fact that the earthquake occurred so close to the shore probably SAVED lives in the end. In the Indian ocean quake, most of the affected areas never actually felt the quake, all they saw was the water receding then a giant wave. Most had no chance to escape. At least in Japan the fact that the quake was so powerful gave an unmistakable warning to the people living near the coast to get to high ground. The closeness of the earthquake to the shore probably ended up saving, not costing, lives.
Re:Jerry Pournelle's *rational* view of Fukushima (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not Chernobyl, but still a level 7 disaster with 1/8 the amount of radiation leaked (very very large). Chernobyl is so radioactive that it can't be inhabited for at least a few centuries.
If the core and its steal containment structure is melted with radioactive material with water leaking through cracked concrete from it, then indeed the situation is much more serious. Radiation is going up in the sea outside the plant right after a 5.9 aftershock. This was after it fell when the leak was plugged. This points to a crack through the foundation where this is leaking into the groundwater and sea.
Either way, it is very rational to view this as a catastrophy and these robots will be needed to find out what is going on and how to fix the plant. If the worst fears are true and that the metal reactors themselves have melted then I do not know how it can be fixed. It took 20 years before people could enter the reactor after 3 mile island shutdown to actually see the partial meltdown to confirm it.
Not something to laugh about and forget by any sense of the means
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It is not Chernobyl, but still a level 7 disaster with 1/8 the amount of radiation leaked (very very large). Chernobyl is so radioactive that it can't be inhabited for at least a few centuries.
And yet people live there. Sure, they're not supposed to, but they do. http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,412954,00.html [spiegel.de]
The Germans have a saying: Nichts wird so heiss gegessen, wie es gekocht wird. Nothing's ever eaten as hot as it's been cooked. After all the media gets its claws out of this, some people will go back, others won't. Life will go on.
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A good friend of mine was in Pripyat last summer, with a dosimeter (MKS-05 terra IIRC) and he showed me the photos. The radiation is not uniform and can go from pretty low to very dangerous after a few steps off the roads. You can do the tour, and there are certainly many tourists there, but if you plan to have children, better wait with visiting Chernobyl.
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Sure, no arguments there. But people act as if a big, evil monster was lurking there and to go there was certain death.
That's just not the case. Yeah, in Bavaria you should still be careful about eating mushrooms. It's far from ideal but it also won't kill us. Life will, mostly, go on as before in a few months already.
This does not mean we shouldn't be looking for alternatives... but a being a bit more level-headed would do many people a lot of good.
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Going there is OK. Living there probably is certain death - an unpleasant cancerous death. The uninhabitable area is hundreds of square miles, and those Bavarian mushrooms are HOW far away?
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Note, as a matter of perspective, that "hundreds of square miles" is about the size of a small county in the USA.
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Cheap easily available energy
Nuclear energy is neither cheap nor easily available. The strongest argument against nuclear energy is the economic argument. No one wants to factor in the hundreds of billions of dollars of cost after something goes wrong. If even 10% of the resources invested in nuclear (which is trillions of dollars, btw) were invested in PV, nuclear would not be able to compete with it. As it is, the relative pittance that has been invested in solar will begin to give nuclear very real competition within 2 decades. And
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Nuclear is far cheaper per megawatt than anything else built to date.
on Average /Salt Plants = 10-15 Solar/electric fields = 2000 wind turbines.
1 nuclear plant = 2-3 coal plants = 2-3 hydro turbines = 8-10 Solar
note how the green energy requires land areas 3 times that of chernobyl for equal energy output.
* based roughly on the largest output of the various power plants.
considering that 90% of the population is fighting large scale deployment wind and solar so that they don't hurt the "view" from their pro
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No one wants to factor in the hundreds of billions of dollars of cost after something goes wrong
you forgot this part.
some people are saying the cost of cleanup and indemnification in fukushima can be as high as 60 billion.
how many wind turbines can you buy with that ?
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Ok, correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't Tsar Bomba famous for being the largest nuclear weapon detonated? I don't see the relevance of it to estimating the consequences of an accident at a power station. The effects in each case are almost entirely incomparable. Sure, they're both "nuclear", and each involves a release of radioactivity. But the distribution of that in terms of isotope mix, time, intensity, location follow entirely different models. Furthermore, Tsar is renowned for its fusion deton
Jerry Pournelle's *crackpot* view of Fukushima (Score:3, Insightful)
"...there is no sign of any danger to anyone outside the evacuation zone in Japan"
This is truly hilarious. Words delivered with the same sincerity as those uttered by representatives of the cigarette industry back in the 1950's.
Pournelle cleverly avoids comment on the Japanese workers who are now dying a slow death as a result of their efforts to deal with the problem and obviously Jerry cannot wait to see exactly just what problems might emerge from the 9 month project to seal the reactor.
The fact that the
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The fact that there is need for an evacuation zone at all should wake dear old Pournelle up to the problem, but he is too drunk and set in his ways.
FTFY
Seriously, I once saw Pournelle physically threaten an audience member at an SF convention panel on Reagan's "Star Wars" pipe dream, because the guy dared to question the technical viability of the proposal, all the while weaving and slurring his words, obviously drunk on his ass.
Pournelle is and has always been a fascist asshole - and a stone alky, to boot.
Re:Jerry Pournelle's *rational* view of Fukushima (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure that China will avoid the same organizational flaw where the people running the nuclear plans for profit are identical with the people who are making decisions about cost and safety. In Japan, after working at the electric utility TEPCO many managers went to work for NISA, the Japanese government Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. Given how the Communist Party dominates all political and economic planning activities, all the regulators will call the shots, and safety will never be compromised to meet production schedules and profit goals.
If you don't want to take my word for it, just ask all the people in China who were poisoned by melamine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal [wikipedia.org].
What could possibly go wrong?
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The Times noted that while one child in 20 in Shanghai may have kidney damage as a result of drinking contaminated formula milk, on the other hand, "like the emperors of old, the new communist elite enjoy the finest produce from all over China, sourced by a high-security government department."
What could possibly go wrong?
Just keep in mind that our leaders operate under the very same principles. They're not eating what we eat.
Did you even read the headline? (Score:2)
Re:Jerry Pournelle's *rational* view of Fukushima (Score:5, Interesting)
Conservative estimates (Areva) point to at least 60% meltdown in three cores, mobilization of about half the cores' inventory of solubles and of essentially all gases.
That's way more material than a Tsar Bomba or three (remember, the Tsar Bomba was high-altitude, 90-something % fusion yield). I'm not even counting the three cooling pools with unknown amounts of water in them which are steaming and outgassing in the open.
Is it more than Chernobyl? Certainly not, in terms of heavy metals and activated carbon released, so the long-term effects (heavy metal toxicity, mostly) will not be as pronounced.
I see, howewver, an estimation of 1T Bq/hr being released. That's definitely going somewhere and with the monsoon season starting, that somewhere is the southwest of Japan (Kanto will be hardest hit, if this is a regular monsoon).
I have reason to believe that additional cancers, birth defects and miscarriages over the next 30-50 years or so will not be correctly reported, nor, indeed, correctly attributed should they be detected. Even simple facts such as radiation measurements are being withheld or obfuscated.
Also, you yourself are spreading untruths. The plant was on an approved 10 year life-extension that had just started. The earthquake was definitely not the biggest earthquake ever and its magnitude at Fukushima was even lower than that, because of distance from the epicenter mainly.
The #2 reactor is cracked. That could not have happened because of the tsunami (not enough energy), nor can it be because of the hydrogen explosion ("wrong" blast pattern). That leaves only one culprit - the earthquake itself, which indeed exceeded the puny 7.5 Richter design maximum.
There is now talk (from TEPCO) of flooding the reactor buildings. They are not designed to hold water in the first place. They are already compromised, structurally, by a massive earthquake, two aftershocks and an explosion each. Will they hold if another quake comes?
No need to answer that, of course. Just go back to your dreams of "energy too cheap to meter".
Just a Tsar Bomb (Score:2)
" It's not Chernobyl. When all this began I said a worst case would be one or more Tsar Bomba equivalents. "
Well, that's very comforting, after all the Tsar Bomb is just the BIGGEST FRIKKIN HYDROGEN BOMB EVER BUILT.
Yeah, I know residual fallout is smaller in atomic/hydrogene bombs than in dirty bombs, but I still wouldn't make the guy my PR/spokesperson.
Umm, I know people are irrational about nuke power (Score:2)
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I think a few more people have died in the history of United States nuclear:
HOWEVER - All of them were involved in the early days of nuclear R&D. Louis Slotin (Manhattan Project), Harry Dahglian (Manhattan Project), and the SL-1 crew (Remember, it was three military personnel at a military research reactor) come to mind.
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The problem with this notion is that it has officially been declared to be as bad as Chernobyl already, and they have announced that they are literally months from cleanup.
Jerry Pournelle's *uninformed* view of Fukushima (Score:5, Insightful)
I continue to conclude: It's not Chernobyl. When all this began I said a worst case would be one or more Tsar Bomba equivalents. We now know it is far less than that. It does not appear that the entire mess will equal one Chernobyl.
Rubbish, Tsar Bomba's fall out is measured in kilograms, Chernobyls around 10's of tons. Due to the spent fuel pools there is approximately 30-40 years worth of spent fuel at Fukushima and we could be looking at around 800-1000 tons of plutonium assuming a 10 year refueling cycle. Great that it didn't blow up however the release of radionuclides will continue to occur until all the leaks are repaired. The question is how this will be achieved. Chernobyl released it's radionuclides into the air and all over the land because it was land locked. It seems that because Fukushima is releasing its radionuclide yield into the ocean that this is somehow less concerning. Let's do and see the science and asses the actual damage based on that, not hyperbole.
There are debates about "extra" cancer cases caused by nuclear power, but I know of no proof that there have been any.
The claim can be made for two reasons. First at TMI the science wasn't even done. Dr Carl Johnson, an expert in radiation related diseases asked the NRC and DOE to do a survey to look for some of these elements in the respirable dust around TMI after the accident and they refused. So if the authorities *refused* to take measurements on which to base long term cancer studies can be based, how can a supposition be made about how many lives have been lost due to increased cancer rates?
It can be best summed up by this 2004 quote of Dr Michael Fernex formerly of the University of Basel who worked for the WHO;
"Six years ago we tried to have a conference. The proceedings were never published. This is because in this matter the organisations at the UN are subordinate to the IAEA. Since 1986 the WHO did nothing about studying Chernobyl. It's a pity. The interdiction to publish which fell upon the WHO conference came from the IAEA. The IAEA blocked the proceedings; the truth would have been a disaster for the nuclear industry"
Here is the actual text of the agreement. [wikisource.org] However the UNICEF report "Human consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear accident" summarised it neatly;
"Life expectancy for men in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, for example, is some ten years less that Sri Lanka, which is one of the twenty poorest countries in the world and is in the middle of a long drawn out war"
Maybe Pournelle is just to lazy to look and since cancer takes years to gestate I think it's premature to understand the damage done to the Japanese populace by Fukushima.
the Chinese are moving toward both. The United States is moving away from both. The results are predictable.
Absolutely predicable. If they make the same tragic organisational mistakes that every other country has made then we will see an accident on the same scale. It's difficult to believe that the Chinese will succeed where the UK, USA, USSR, Germany and now Japan has failed.
Of course the plant was older and scheduled for retirement to begin with.
Of course this is completely irrelevant and actually should have promoted investment in *ensuring* the plant wouldn't fail. The activated isotopes inside the reactor, or CRUD (Chalk River Unidentified Deposits - look it up), will be leaking into the Pacific if the reactor vessel is as breached as it appears to be. I suspect we are just at the
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However the UNICEF report "Human consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear accident" summarised it neatly;
"Life expectancy for men in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, for example, is some ten years less that Sri Lanka, which is one of the twenty poorest countries in the world and is in the middle of a long drawn out war"
Deceptive quoting makes the report seem to imply that the low life expectancy is due to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident whereas the report actually says something else:
"As is true throughout the Former Soviet Union, life expectancy is low not only as compared with Southern and Western Europe, North America and Japan, but also with a number of countries from the developing world. Life expectancy for men in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, for example, is some ten years less than in Sri Lanka, which i
Re:Oh, a nuclear energy thread. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not even pro-nuclear (I'd call it the lesser of two evils), and even I take exception to the assumption that the realists about Fukushima (or Chernobyl for that matter) must be nuclear industry shills.
There is a general trend of alarmist hysteria surrounding nuclear power, and slashdot is one of the few places I read where there are people basically telling the alarmists to stow it. A few of these people shouting down the anti-nuclear sentiment are strongly biased in favour of nuclear power, but most are simply more informed about the risks involved than the general public. Dismissing the anti-alarmist commentators as "nuclear industry PR folks" is essentially throwing reason out the window in favour of fear.
(Just to preempt the inevitable accusation that I am "one of them", my own view is that nuclear power plants should be built in lieu of coal power plants. See the "lesser of two evils" sentiment above. I'm all in favour of solar homes and where local conditions permit I support hydro, geothermal or other means of power collection. In the long run I think fusion offers our best hope. Nuclear power is a stopgap.)
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Re:Oh, a nuclear energy thread. (Score:4, Interesting)
"Nuclear power" in the vernacular sense means "power generating fission reactors". Mostly because those are the only tech presently used to harness nuclear reactions for electricity. Informally, virtually every member of the public hears "nuclear" and understands it to mean "fission", assuming they know what fission is.
I am aware that a hypothetical fusion power plant would "nuclear" in the sense of the word used by physicists, however I do not generally refer to them as "nuclear power plants" to avoid confusion. When precision in language gets in the way of clarity, clarity should always come first; being correctly understood matters more than being technically correct when dealing with non-experts.
All energy is nuclear (Score:5, Informative)
Geothermal is also nuclear power. It relies on the intrinsic fission of elements within the Earth's mantle, and legacy heat from prior fission as well as legacy friction from planetary formation. It's implemented by steam turbines also, or turbines driven by the flash evaporation of some other coolant.
The difference betweent fission, fusion and geothermal is that geothermal requires no fuel creation or elimination. You dig two deep holes fairly close together and force water down one of them. The heat of the Earth heats the water, which comes up the other hole - usually as steam or superheated water that will become steam when the pressure is released, but sometimes just as much hotter water. Naturally after the energy gained is tapped, the hot water is then re-injected. For new water some use sewage effluent and solve two problems at once. There is no ash, no spent fuel to rot in casks 100,000 years under close supervision of a non-proliferation task force. There are no mining deaths because there's no mine. There are no refining risks because there's no refining. There's no proliferation risk because there's no nuclear products onsite. The cost of dealing with the emissions are well understood because there aren't any. Geothermal plants require a much smaller geographic footprint than even nuclear plants, because they can mine energy from several miles in each direction and there is no risk.
With geothermal power in the event of a disaster of the worst possible sort: a Geothermal plant is simultaneously attacked by terrorists, crushed by a 10.3 earthquake and inundated by the subsequent 90m tsunami at the exact moment that a Justin Bieber album goes platinum, the worst that can happen is that some steam will vent and electricity will stop being generated, and Justin Bieber gets a slot on Dancing With the Stars. That's not a lot of downside risk, relative to fission and fusion.
There are established economies on Earth that can't provide 100% of their electrical energy needs from geothermal sources. Some parts of Africa, the US East Coast, Brazil. Japan, though? Yes, they could. Their entire nation is a chain of active volcanos. They are geothermal rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
Re:Oh, a nuclear energy thread. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, thus far every design type of theoretical fusion plant would necessarily create radioactive waste, although not as much of it as fission plants. The reason is the same one that the waste-water in the original article is a problem: nuclear reactions work by massive cascades of nutrons randomly hitting atoms in the core. When those nutrons hit the nucleus of an atom (in a way that causes them to be absorbed in the right way), then you get your nuclear reaction, and that in turn produces more neutrons as ersatz-billiard-balls to continue your reaction, plus energy (in the form of heat) that you harvest off (usually with water) to convert into your power-transmission method of choice (usually electricity).
The problem in all of this is that you can't just limit it to your fuel and your energy harvester (water), you wind up with lots of other elements in the reaction chamber that also get bombarded with neutrons. And some percentage of those elements are going to wind up transmuting into radioactive waste.
In the case of a fusion reactor that is probably going to be whatever serves as the reaction chamber wall. Remember, neutrons are magnetically/electrically neutral particles, so you can't contain them using magnets, so you just have to let your reactor wall take the hits, and slowly degrade into radioactive waste. No one has a solution to this problem, and it is unlikely that one exists.
So, there really is no pedantic to call out here. Nuclear energy produces nuclear waste, the only question is how much (vs. the extracted energy), and how bad the byproducts will be.
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The plasma facing first wall and structural materials of fusion plants are being designed to minimise the generation of long lived radiative elements (search for IFMIF for info on the planned materials test facility). Over the lifetime of a fusion plant you'd end up with barely enough high level waste to put into a small oil drum - this can then be destroyed. People seem to forget that you can use the huge neutron flux of a fusion reactor to transmute materials, ie you can convert dangerous radioactive wast
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Fusion researchers have done an excellent job in pushing their lies and PR so as to continue receiving funding but it would literally be a miracle to have fusion power plants running in less than a couple hundred years; with five to six hundred years being far more realistic.
Wow, a prophet right here on /.!
I'd really like to know which orifice you pulled your numbers from? We are possibly at the edge of the AI singularity, meaning soon we might build a computer smart enough to build a smarter computer. It's a fairly short track from there to IQ 10,000. I strongly suspect such an AI would have very little trouble designing a working fusion reactor. This will likely all happen well within 100 years, possibly within the next twenty years.
Even ignoring the possibility of a singular
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So please, keep your ignorance to yourself.
Amusingly, that's precisely what I was telling you.
It's also quite funny that you're claiming "physicist" (sic) support your view, when the person who discovered the principle that makes fission possible (Einstein) was dead wrong about its practicality. He didn't think it would ever work, not even claiming it would take hundreds of years. He was proven wrong within ten years.
Once again (and I hope it sinks in this time) technology predictions are hard, and many extremely smart people have been burned making
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There is a general trend of alarmist hysteria surrounding nuclear power
You mean hysteria like this?
“Fukushima is going to kill 200,000 from increased cancers over the next 50 years.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/japan/110415/fukushima-death-toll-meltdown-chernobyl?page=full [globalpost.com]
Read about it here and first! (Score:3)
I predict the rates of deaths from Cancer in Japan will not increase but rather drop off, as ppl will now be more aware of a risk, and more likely to follow though on it!
Treatments will be made cheaper and more widely available, and thus a much lower death rate the other parts of the 1st world!
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You mean hysteria like this?
Yes, perfect example.
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A perfect example.
Admittedly, it's hard to properly estimate which cancer deaths were due to a release of substances and which were due to something else, but Chernobyl itself (reactor with no containment filled with highly combustible graphite had its core fully exposed to outside air) is estimated to have cause 4,000 deaths.
The guy in that article is stirring up some nice sensationalism to sell page views, as usual.
Re:Oh, a nuclear energy thread. (Score:5, Interesting)
As I see it one of the biggest problems is the expectation of 100% zealous fanboy behaviour or you are out. Suggest a thorium solution on the ground of increased safety? Out the door you go, distinguished career over with the successful project cancelled. Suggest a brilliant way to very cheaply chemically incorporate everything in high grade waste in a stable material? There is no waste problem screams the fanboys - you cannot have your dismal amount of funding so it's going to take you three decades to put the finishing touches on.
Once nuclear power became a way to funnel huge amounts of money from the taxpayers it ceased to be anything other than an excuse for that transfer so it was technologically finished in the USA. What Westinghouse would sell you before Toshiba got involved was little more than TMI painted green. Now it's currently not much better. Meanwhile South Africa has more advanced civilian nuclear technology - derived from that via Germany is the pebble bed reactor in China. India is way ahead. France for all it's troubles and the dead end of plutonium fast breeders and pointless reprocessing is well ahead.
Meanwhile in the USA it's just a cheer squad that pretends it is all perfect and it's rare that some improvement sneaks in from elsewhere (eg. the Toshiba stuff that inspired the AP1000). It's been a dead industry in the USA since even before Carter told them they had to survive on their own merits.
Re:Oh, a nuclear energy thread. (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that there is in fact a lot of nuclear astroturfing going on.
How is it astroturfing if they are a) a group specifically and publicly formed by and for the nuclear industry, b) not hiding who they are, but openly and honestly giving their side of the debate, c) to an audience that is there specifically to hear what they have to say because they WANT to hear what they have to say?
Sorry, but that's just silly. It's kinda like saying the catholic church astroturfs every time a priest stands up and gives a sermon.
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Second - "large corporations" is a strawman argument - unless you can give me a single example of any large scale example of ANY energy generator that is *not* a "large corporation"? That's where the regulatory framework comes in.
Third - There are probably more people that die in just West Virginia each year than have died IN TOTAL due to nuclear accidents. Hint: mining disasters aren't even close to being the
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Are you crazy?! (Score:5, Funny)
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Don't be afraid, Comrade! Just like my iRobot's Roomba it will totally forget its humanity enslaiving plans when it encounter a loose power cable and start chewing on it.
They'll Regret That! (Score:5, Funny)
iRobots? (Score:2)
Who will be the first to sue this company about the name, the Isaac Asimov estate or Apple?
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iRobot has been building robots for years with no problems with the name.
It is substantially different from crApple products by the fact iRobot products are actually useful rather than shiny technology, and substantially different from Asimov's titicular story, 'I, Robot' in the fact that (a) iRobot's are not 3 laws safe, and (b) it doesn't use 'I, ' but rather 'i' and (c) the company in Asimov's stories is US Robotics which shares the name with another company that you may have used back in the dialup days
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PS WTF Japan, you're only NOW starting to use robots help fix the reactor???
Why bother, when genpatsu gypsies [businessinsider.com] are so much cheaper?
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iRobot has been building robots for years with no problems with the name.
It is substantially different from crApple
That's good to hear. At first I thought that these were some kind of wafer-thin robots with lustrous white plastic shells. I was afraid that they would get ruined with scratches from all the debris in the reactor buildings.
Finally! (Score:3)
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Well, Japanese companies seem to spend their time producing things that are small and efficient and good enough for day-to-day activities.
While in the US, everybody expects the world to turn into a Mad Max movie next Tuesday—so we spend our time making everything as overpowered and heavy-duty as we can get away with.
Still, it's nice that the products of our trillion-dollar defense budgets do benefit someone once in a while.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
I am surprised they weren't doing this on day 2 after the event.
Me too. After 9/11, there were robots on scene in under 2 days. The iRobot unit being used here is a standard PackBot [irobot.com], of which about 20,000 have been manufactured for the US military.
The worst aspect of this disaster for the future of nuclear power is that it all came merely from a loss of cooling. The plant survived the earthquake. The reactor's cooling system survived the tsunami and continued to function until the battery backups were drained. Loss of cooling caused heat buildup, hydrogen release, and the hydrogen explosions. All the damage you're seeing is from the hydrogen explosiions, not the natural disaster.
A total loss of cooling power could happen for other reasons - a fire, tornado, hurricane, or act of terrorism. There's been a design assumption that no disaster would result in the loss of all power sources. That turns out to be a bad assumption.
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I think the future of nuclear power has been considered to be small reactors that will not suffer from this problem since sometime in the late 1970s. Apart from a pebble bed prototype it hasn't arrived yet.
It's not here yet because the powers that be [bodybuilding.com] build the current, shitty reactors [democratic...ground.com].
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I am surprised they weren't doing this on day 2 after the event.
Me too. After 9/11, there were robots on scene in under 2 days. The iRobot unit being used here is a standard PackBot [irobot.com], of which about 20,000 have been manufactured for the US military.
The priority just wasn't having a look. They had to cool the thing, and some robot poking round the reactor would not have helped the cooling one bit.
After 9/11, the priority would have been to find improbable survivors. Hence the deployment of robots.
The worst aspect of this disaster for the future of nuclear power is that it all came merely from a loss of cooling. The plant survived the earthquake. The reactor's cooling system survived the tsunami and continued to function until the battery backups were drained. Loss of cooling caused heat buildup, hydrogen release, and the hydrogen explosions. All the damage you're seeing is from the hydrogen explosiions, not the natural disaster.
One could argue that had the hydrogen been allowed to be vented to the atmosphere, even the hydrogen explosions wouldn't have happened.
It has been noted that these were old designs, and more modern designs have passive cooling designs that do not require power
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And there you have the answer. Japans military was largely dismantled after World War II. They are not spending the money on rugged robots for military purposes, so they don't have this type of thing lying around for use in disasters. I also suspect that if it were in the US and we didn't have robots, someone wo
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
With all the stories of robots invented by Japanese over time, I am surprised they weren't doing this on day 2 after the event.
Give them a break, they had to mod the robot so that it's mouth no longer vibrated sensuously .
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It was my understanding that the radiation was too high at that point for any existing robot to operate in that environment. Since radiation levels on this magnitude is rare I suspect that robots designed to withstand such high radiation will not exist for some time.
I have much respect for the mechanical and software advancements that the Japanese have brought to robotics. The problem here is that the electronics, while being very capable in completing computations, lack the capability to function in high
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i guess they still havent solved the issue about who exactly is in charge of Gundam, after the ministry of agriculture denounced the responsibility
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I think they were hoping for reptile sequestration of all the radioactive material.
Allow Me (Score:5, Funny)
Allow me to be the first to say, "domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!"
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Oh man, somebody mod that up!
I...I don't think any other comment in this thread will top the parent!
What they found inside (Score:3)
"My God! It's full of stars!"
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"My God! It's full of stars!"
These robots also seemed to have trouble opening doors.
iRobot? (Score:4, Funny)
TEPCO press material (Score:3)
The media is getting this material here [tepco.co.jp]. You can find video of RC helicopter flights over the buildings, video of the No.4 spend fuel pool sampling operation right down to the surface of the water, photos of the tsunami water marks on the turbine and reactor buildings and photos of the destruction of outlying structures. Also interesting are photos of the emergency staff and their on-site facilities. Much of this stuff is high resolution photography.
Bender Says (Score:3, Funny)
Hey flesh bags, bite my shiny metal radioactive a.....
Oh Fukushima, not Futurama..... Sorry my bad...
Radiation for 6-9 months (Score:4, Interesting)
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The "always see the bright side" folks will tell us, "it's ok, the ocean is huge".
All together now... (Score:3)
"Well Artoo, this is another fine mess you've gotten us into"
Obligatory Useful links: A very good description of radiation by the EPA
http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/understand/index.html [epa.gov]
Follow the link under the green heading at the right of the page
Trivia (Score:3)
After the Chernobyl accident, the team that had created the Lunokhod rovers was asked to build remote-controlled vehicles (RCV) to help clean up. The RCV's first task was to remove reactor debris (chunks of graphite from the core) from a roof, by pushing it off the edge of the roof. The RCVs worked well; eventually though they failed due to the radiation. This despite them being rad-hardened, as the original Lunokhods had been powered by an RTG.
Re:Trivia (Score:4, Informative)
After the Chernobyl accident, the team that had created the Lunokhod rovers was asked to build remote-controlled vehicles (RCV) to help clean up. The RCV's first task was to remove reactor debris (chunks of graphite from the core) from a roof, by pushing it off the edge of the roof. The RCVs worked well; eventually though they failed due to the radiation. This despite them being rad-hardened, as the original Lunokhods had been powered by an RTG.
RTGs do not produce much external radiation - they are based on alpha-emitter material that is absorbed by the surrounding shielding converting radiation into heat. However, space hardware is rad-hardened because of cosmic rays - natural radiation present in space. This is often not as high-level as can be found near reactor core.
Here is an interesting description of using a robot to fix a high intensity radiaiton source [physorg.com].
Damage comparison... (Score:2)
Could anyone provide figures of property lost value and dead count caused by:
- the Fukushima accident
- the earthquake, excluding the tsunami
- the tsunami, excluding the Fukushima casualties
?
I mean, the power plant problem is a big one, but I'd really like to see how it compares to the big image. Somehow I have a feeling that even establishing a permanent 30km exclusion zone around the power plant, and all the cancer accidents resulting from radiation leaks will not get anywhere near to the number of dead an
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I don't have the actual numbers, but it's safe to say that the tsunami dwarfs the earth quake and the nuclear incident in deaths and property damage.
People focus on the nuclear incident though, because the mitigation strategies against the quake and the tsunami mostly worked. "Only" 25000 people died compared to the 200000+ who died in the 2006 Indian Ocean tsunami. On the other hand, we have no mitigation strategy against the the nuclear incident (other than keeping it cool at all costs to prevent a meltd
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Fukushima will never even approach the death count of the tsunami. Unlike in Chernobyl, evacuation was timely and long before the levels got dangerous. Human life is treated with much better care and people don't enter "hot" areas without proper protection. The death count may reach low hundreds at worst.
As for property loss... lots of land is lost but great most of property in the area has been already destroyed by tsunami when the exclusion zone has been established, so it will be hard to write that up as
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Your logic is flawed, but i will try to do so anyway...
fukushima: official 2 deaths due to radiation.
Really? Can you provide citation please?
Overblown...or not? (Score:2)
the greanpeace number [greenpeace.org] is claimed to be a additional deaths to due cancer, not all cancer cases. Their pessimisc view is that this number can rise to 200.000.
Not that that really matters now, because it impossible now to reverse what happened in chernobyl 1986.
One thing is for sure: the "Don' panic" numbers released by authorities are only one hlaf of the truth.
Not forthcoming?? Really? (Score:3)
This is typical and normal for Japanese companies not to be forthcoming with information. They simply don't offer information unless it is required. You might consider this "secretive" especially when such an event literally has potential to affect everyone on the planet in some way, but this is simply not inherent to the way the Japanese think. This is an embarrassment and simply would prefer not to talk about it. I think this trend is clear and obvious from the very beginning of the reporting of the situation. The picture painted was always one indicating "nothing to worry about" and so on. As things progressed, they had to "admit" more failure as it couldn't be denied.
In the western mind, this does the opposite of "building trust" and is read as being deceptive. Even now, I cannot help but feel that way. But I have to remind myself that this is "normal" for this different cultural mindset. Then ask yourself why would they do anything that wouldn't be normal for them to do? They don't read this as a "public trust" issue -- they see it as an internal affair.
Old design reactors failed... (Score:2)
The reactors at Fukushima Daiichi that failed were designed in the 1970's. Newer designs using current technology are designed with a more 'fail safe' type of cooling and probably would NOT have suffered the cooling failure under the same conditions. Nuclear power plants designed TODAY are much safer than the ones put in service before Three Mile Island. The problem is that the older plants that are subject to the failure modes we have seen are NOT going to be replaced until they either DO fail, or are p
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92fP58sMYus [youtube.com]
Some images and vids http://www.zerohedge.com/article/must-see-tepco-releases-unmanned-helicopter-drone-video-destroyed-fukushima-reactors [zerohedge.com]
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Yeah, no kidding! They've been touting their awesome robotics breakthroughs for years, but when it's crunch time apparently it takes a couple of months before they can even get one on the scene. Whoops!
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They've been touting their awesome robotics breakthroughs for years, but when it's crunch time apparently it takes a couple of months before they can even get one on the scene. Whoops!
It's been a couple of months since the Japan earthquake? Really?
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probably robots are more expansive than throw-away workers.... (monday morning, not enough coffee - I'm cynical at the moment)
Re:kidding (Score:5, Informative)
There is one serious problem with sending robots there.
All the old BOFH jokes about cosmic rays? It's all true in there.
High radiation levels make bits skip like crazy in high-density memory and CPUs. Your parrot drone's firmware would crash within a mile of the power plant, unless you shield the CPU with enough lead so that it would never take off.
Then try to drive that remotely. The name "radioactivity" is not there in vain. It really creates horrible noise in all radio frequencies, so forget "fly by radio" models. Either it's autonomous, or driven by cable, or you set up a goddamned 100KW radio tower for driving your drone to overcome all the noise.
And then you got a ground drone with all electronics shielded by an inch of lead, driven by a mile long spool of cable unwound from a roll on the back. Now give it a camera that can still see the outside and won't crash due to radiation - possibly analog, with only the CCD exposed, and in such a way that radiation won't pass inside bypassing the lenses. Give it a manipulator arm that has all electronics shielded. Give it a battery that will be able to drive the half a ton of lead, 100kg of wire, and another half a ton of hardware of the device - forget your fancy micro engines, every exposed part must be thick rugged so that electric noise doesn't affect it. Make sure it's radiation-leak proof, because even a small hole in the shield may crash the software.
And now build it. How long will it take you to do it?
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You realize you just posted spam on a discussion board literally filled with black-hat hackers that can ruin your day, your year or your life?