Fukushima Cleanup, 5 Years On (bbc.co.uk) 167
AmiMoJo writes: Today is five years since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was damaged by an earthquake and tsunami, leading to a series of meltdowns. Nearly half a million people were evacuated at the time, with 100,000 still unable to return to their homes. The government has set a goal of 20mSv/year before people are allowed to live in affected areas again, and while progress is being made hotspots are still a problem in many areas. Reconstruction has been largely waiting for decontamination to be completed, allowing homes and businesses to fall into ruin. Those who do wish to return find their communities gutted, with essential services and jobs gone. Meanwhile, engineers are still unable to determine exactly what happened at Daiichi, particularly what saved reactor 2's pressure vessel from exploding. The initial reports were scary even before the nuclear plant problems were evident. Engadget notes that even now, the worst part of the cleanup remains a grueling work in progress, tough even for robots. Reader the_newsbeagle writes, too, with a link to the New York Times' take on the 5-year mark, and notes that The state and location of the melted fuel inside the reactors is still a mystery. The meltdown zone is too dangerous for human workers to enter, and robots have had limited success navigating in the wreckage. So Japan is recruiting subatomic particles called muons to map the reactors' insides. These particles, born of cosmic rays, constantly stream down from the atmosphere, passing through most matter unimpeded. But their occasional interactions with the subatomic components of uranium allow physicists to locate the blobs of the deadly stuff.
what saved reactor 2's pressure vessel from explod (Score:2)
what saved reactor 2's pressure vessel from exploding?
I'd suspect it was the same that saved reactor 1, 3 and 4's pressure vessels from exploding.
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Indeed. The main reason is that pressure vessles don't just explode.
Re:what saved reactor 2's pressure vessel from exp (Score:4, Informative)
The other reactors were vented. They had a venting system that passed the contaminated air through water before releasing it. The water cleaned it much of the contamination, but not all, and now they have massive amounts of highly contaminated water to deal with.
They had to send people in to connect up emergency battery power to activate the vents. Those are the people who got the biggest dose of radiation, and who saved Eastern Japan.
For some reason the venting system in reactor two didn't work. The water level was low, but due to the severity of losing the containment vessel they decided to vent anyway. That didn't work either. Then at the last moment, with the vessel way beyond design limits, something happened and the pressure dropped.
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So you have some links I can read? I'm finding it somewhat difficult to get any details about this event.
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There is an NHK documentary called 88 Hours, that's pretty good. See if it is available where you live.
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Leslie Corrice's Hiroshima Syndrome [hiroshimasyndrome.com] is the best all-round source. Corrice's site is an amazing work, he has collected into one place facts as they became known, and news coverage of the events. He is particularly attuned to distortions, exaggerations and certain scenarios that have been delivered to the press chosen for their dramatic description despite a laughably low probably. And unlike just about everyone else, he strives to segregate his news reporting [hiroshimasyndrome.com] from his own commentary [hiroshimasyndrome.com].
Some no-hype and anti-hyp
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To clarify, the reactor vessel is designed to fail in a somewhat less severe way than simply exploding. There are points that are designed to fail first and vent the high pressure gas inside, into the containment building. However, in this case the containment building already had holes in it from explosions of other nearby containment buildings, so it would have been venting into the atmosphere.
So yeah, no explosion as such, but a massive disaster anyway.
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Reactor 1, 3, and 4 never had a sudden massive pressure excursion which appeared to drop off for reasons either unknown or not revealed.
NHK Re-enactment of the first 88 hours (Score:3)
I watched this on NHK this weekend and was very impressed. A bit dramatic but very informative technically
88 Hours - The Fukushima Nuclear Meltdown
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld... [nhk.or.jp]
Meltdown?! (Score:3, Insightful)
I was assured by the Slashdot elite, even weeks on from the earthquake/tsunami, that there had been no meltdown nor even any kind of breach of the nuclear fuel at all and to say otherwise was a tinfoil-hat-tier conspiracy.
This is shocking to hear of a meltdown today!
Re:Meltdown?! (Score:4, Funny)
I was assured by the Slashdot elite
Who are the slashdot elite and how do I join? It sounds like a really awesome secret cabal of illuminati. Is there a special handshake I have to know? Or, is it something gets awarded after you've been been modded funny for a "beowulf cluster" or "hot grits" gag more than 65535 times?
Re:Meltdown?! (Score:5, Funny)
Who are the slashdot elite and how do I join?
Only people who read an article before posting can join. There are no actual members yet.
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None of the editors are members...
There used to be a FA reader that was in the habit of posting when he finished reading. To mark all the people just racing for karma.
FA reader. I told him to GTF out.
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Someone above told us that we'd have to RTFA. Not worth it. I shall never join the cabal!
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Pat yourself on the back. With all the effort your selective reading must have taken you really deserve it. The meltdowns were known about in days following the incident. 3 reactors were without cooling water after all.
As for breach of nuclear fuel you should listen to the slashdot elite.
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>As I recall there was a legion of nuclear apologists who'd stop at nothing to try to downplay this major disaster.
Please tell me more about major disasters where nobody dies from the disaster itself, but where the response to the disaster killed infinitely more people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll#Fukushima_disaster
The disaster is that people like you call those of us who are knowledgeable "apologists" and then kill 1600 people in a chicken with thei
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Please tell me more about major disasters where nobody dies from the disaster itself, but where the response to the disaster killed infinitely more people.
How is that relevant?
500.000 people evacuated. You have no idea, no has anyone else, how to calculated how many of them had died if they where not evacuated.
So: you are an complete idiot. And idiots even bigger than you mod you up.
Unbelieveable.
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Logical fallacy. If they had not evacuated, people would have become extremely ill and/or died. The evacuation area wasn't safe, and in fact parts of it still aren't.
Faced with a disaster, the scale of which is unknown and impossible to predict, they had no choice but to evacuate. If there is any criticism, it's that they should have had a better plan in place.
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Disasters that don't kill anyone are really far down on the list.
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To the point where they're willing to distort reality. As I recall there was a legion of nuclear apologists who'd stop at nothing to try to downplay this major disaster.
We're pro nuclear for a reason:
Here's a complete list of power generation methods that have killed less people than the entire nuclear industry:
.
And the winner for the single worst industrial accident, and largest number of people displaced goes to:
Chernob... hahah just kidding, it was a hydro-electric dam.
Now quite frankly the storm we had last summer ranks worse than this disaster. One person drowned and another was killed by a window pane which fell from a skyscraper. That's 2 deaths more than those cont
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Three of the six reactors are believed to have melted down.
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That is impossible, nuclear power is cheap, safe, and radiation cannot hurt me anyway; and soon nuclear reactors will be EVERYWHERE and it will be GLORIOUS!
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Just something to keep in mind when you see crap like "If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then". Hey clueless, the cores haven't melted. Yet. They are losing their heat removal capacity over time as less and less water surrounds them. When they do get hot enough, they will melt their containers, and we will have a chernobyl-style release. Not exactly the same as chernobyl, because there's no graphite to burn. Instead the particulate radioactive isotopes and actinides (and plutonium, yay!) will be propelled into the atmosphere via hydrogren explosions. There's also a hell of a lot more uranium and plutonium on site since some clever laddie beancounter got the used fuel rods containment pools located above the reactors.
Fukushima hasn't completely melted down, yet. If it doesn't it will because we (the planet) threw everything we have at it.
And then there's exhibit B [slashdot.org]:
12mSv/h is slightly more than one red square, no where near an orange one. This makes the highest level of radiation detected, in the cloud of vented gas from inside the containment vessel about 30,000 times less than those at chyernobyl, and only for a very very brief period involving very short half life elements.
The radiation level has since fallen back way down, especially since managing to resubmurge the spent fuel. The reaction has also slowed to about 1/2000th of it's original rates in the reactors, making a melt down extremely unlikely at this point.
So there you have it. The Slashdot elite consists of two posters with opposite viewpoints. Sure, I might have missed someone or some article, but if there were a bunch of peo
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There was a lot of bullshit posted back then... Can't find it now, but I recall a post where someone claimed to have taken a train passing near the exclusion zone, and used his Geiger counter to "confirm" that the radiation wasn't too bad and there was no need to evacuate. When people have that little understanding of the danger, it's hard to discuss it with them.
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"uranium ... the deadly stuff" BS (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was I high school in Ontario in the mid-90s, we got a presentation by a gentleman from the AECB (now renamed CNSC), the Canadian nuclear regulator. He passed a hefty chunk of uranium ore around the school auditorium. Every student got to hold it. Yet, I'm still here to tell about it, and just fine (other than having become a slashdot poster), and I have no concerns about my former classmates, either. Why? Becase playing with that chunk of uranium increased our overall environmental exposure to radiation imperceptibly.
Uranium can be deadly in the long run if you eat it, breathe in uranium dust, or put on a night face lotion laced with a good amount. Aside from that, it's only critical amounts of it, and the byproducts of uranium, that are deadly. The sly wording of the author, though, is intended to associate uranium with death in a general sense, and is FUD that reveals his bias.
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Once on a tour of the Nevada Test Site I got to handle a chunk of pure U-238. Dark gray, the size of a common brick and insanely heavy. They use it for shielding.
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It was not *technically* mine but was my older brother's - though I later purloined it, sometime in the mid-1960s. I don't know what ever happened to it. He had (and then I had) a chemistry set or something along those lines. In that set was uranium - I have no idea what for as the manual had long-since been lost. It had a small Geiger counter but I don't think that came with the set.
I'm remarkably healthy for my age but I never developed super-powers. I don't know for certain but, given that we were kids,
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I'll go one better. I have a small chip of uranium ore in my desk drawer right this very moment. I got it to test a geiger counter gizmo I got for testing whether old watches I was working on had radium pigment. Naturally I had to make sure the thing works before I trusted a "normal" reading.
I'm not afraid of handling this bit of ore, not in the least. But I wouldn't feel the same about handling the same amount of refined fuel, or the random by-products of a reactor disaster. Clearly I'm not radiation p
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I'm not afraid of handling this bit of ore, not in the least. But I wouldn't feel the same about handling the same amount of refined fuel, or the random by-products of a reactor disaster.
Refined fuel is fine. They handle it with cotton gloves - mostly to keep the oils in their hands off the expensive metal stuff.
Random stuff from a reactor disaster? I'm with you.
It was a surprise to seismologists and engineers (Score:2)
A similar thing happened in Sichuan China a few years earlier. Three faults broke making a quake larger than anticipated.
So seismologists are revising their ideas about California
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This quake was the fourth largest in measurement history, one of the rare magnitude 9 earthquakes.
The mag 9 quake was 450 miles away, I believe 'natucal miles' even.
At the plant side the quake was roughly mag 6.
What's in the water? (Score:2)
I keep hearing about the contaminated water in Japan but I'd like to know what's in it to get an idea of the problem this poses.
If the problem is heavy hydrogen then I suspect the problem will resolve itself before anyone gets around to processing the water. Some stuff like cesium and strontium are quite deadly but that is also what makes them valuable. There might be money to be made in "mining" this water for valuable radiation sources like that, for things like cancer treatments and disinfecting food.
J
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Just how radioactive is this stuff? Couldn't we just fill an old oil tanker with this water, seal it up tight, then flood the outer hull and watch it sink into a deep sea subduction zone?
No, Oil Tankers are made from steel and rust, it would never stay sealed. Even if it did, it would likely break in half when it hit the bottom of the ocean traveling at a respectable speed.
Leaving the water where it is likely makes the most sense.
As someone who lives near the Fukushima plant: (Score:5, Interesting)
Here are photos and an article in National Geographic from the massive quake and tsunami in the same area in 1896. Almost 27,000 people were killed and a tsunami was reported as high as 50 feet.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.... [nationalgeographic.com]
The excuse that the tsunami was unprecedented and a "once in a 1,000- year event" is false.
The take away for me after five years is that it was criminally incompetent to not have planned for the possibility of a similar event so recent that there are photographs of it.
The engineers involved in the construction and operation should be in prison.
Disclaimer: I have a BSME with a Nuclear option, and I should be in prison if I had anything to do with the plant. I also live within 90 miles of the plant and remember thinking that I was in serious jeopardy when I saw a helicopter dropping water onto the stored fuel rods on TV. When the helicopters come out, it's the last straw.
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There is now a prosecution of some of the senior staff going ahead, but it remains to be seen if it amounts to much.
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(seppuku) was originally a samurai ritual and there aren't any samurai left. Japan still has a very high suicide rate, but big businessmen, bankers and government minions are much more westernized now - they've turned into self-centered weasels.
No bankers are throwing themselves off of buildings. Those would be people in financial trouble, bullied kids, rejected lovers, lonely singles and people who were left with nothing. They lost their homes and livelihoods after having to evacuate from the plant area,
need new reactors (Score:2)
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A small amount of nuclear contamination in exchange for saving millions of tons of carbon from entering the atmosphere and a lesson in how to prevent this ever from happening again is a good trade, imo.
I agree. Especially when you consider that far more people have had, and will have, serious health problems (including cancers) from all the coal-fired power plants used in Japan than from this incident.
And while the trigger was the earthquake and tsunami, the failure was purely human in nature- poor planning, stupidity, etc. When it comes to coal power, the solutions are not nearly so well known or easily implemented.
Re:The trade was a fair one. (Score:4, Informative)
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It's a problem of culture, not physics. Most of us feel safe flying despite knowing that about once a year, somewhere in the world, a planeload of about 200-300 people will be lost. Furthermore, those who do fear flying just keep quiet and take the train. You never see them protesting around airports or filing suits to prevent Boeing from building the next model. I used to explain this as aviation being grandfathered in before the liberal fear factory decided to start hating science, but recently we have se
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It's a problem of culture, not physics. Most of us feel safe flying despite knowing that about once a year, somewhere in the world, a planeload of about 200-300 people will be lost.
I'd argue that it's actually the opposite. Many of us fear flying despite it being generally the safest mode of travel, to the point that you're far more likely to die on the drive TO the airport than on the flight.
The damage from coal is steady and persistent, and therefore we come to ignore it. The damage from nuclear power is approximately once every couple decades, so we fear it. Much like how car accidents trickle in the deaths in 1-2s, normally speaking, so we never hear about them - but we certain
Completely wrong (Score:2, Offtopic)
In fact (Score:2, Offtopic)
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Your brainpower must be exceedingly limited if you don't understand the length of time and scope of problem that a nuclear meltdown poses to the environment versus some "carbon", that arguably does or does not have a limited effect solely on the climate of the planet.
Re:The trade was a fair one. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oddly, the meltdown may be good for the environment. The meltdown has created regions that a bad for humans and may be good for nature. Overfishing in the hot zones is no longer an issue...
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Yes, it's not good for the environment, except relatively, in that humans are so incredibly bad anyway.
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It's also with noting now close it came to being far, far worse.
Number 2 rector was building up pressure and the operators were unable to relieve it. The valves seemed to be stuck, even after they got emergency battery power to them. The containment vessel was over its design limit for pressure. Then suddenly the pressure fell, and no-one knows why.
Had the reactor containment vessel failed, the worst case was the loss of Eastern Japan. Hopefully one day we can find out what saved the country.
Re:The trade was a fair one. (Score:5, Informative)
Had the reactor containment vessel failed, the worst case was the loss of Eastern Japan. Hopefully one day we can find out what saved the country.
It's not that mysterious. For example, according to this report [ans.org], the pressure release of Reactor 2 is unexplained, but they weren't close to blowing out the pressure vessel:
The containment pressure rise at first was much slower than should be expected if all the decay heat is delivered to the suppression pool, which is an indication of a leak in the containment boundary. The wetwell venting line configuration had been completed by 11:00 a.m. on March 13, but the containment pressure had not reached the rupture disk setpoint, so no venting occurred. After core damage, the containment pressure increased more rapidly, probably because of hydrogen production. At 6:00 a.m. on March 15, an impulsive sound that was initially attributed to a hydrogen explosion was confirmed near the suppression chamber of the containment. Later reviews suggested that sound was not due to hydrogen burn. In any case the containment pressure did sharply decrease. It is not clear whether the designed vent path was ever in service; however, longer term, the containment pressure has remained low, around the level of atmospheric pressure.
In particular, it's worth noting that there is a rupture disk here precisely to prevent the reactor pressure vessel from experiencing a catastrophic rupture and that the vessel was leaking enough that it might not have even reached a high enough pressure to break the rupture disk.
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In particular, it's worth noting that there is a rupture disk here precisely to prevent the reactor pressure vessel from experiencing a catastrophic rupture
This seemed wrong to me, since the RPV in Unit 2 was already breached. I believe AmiMoJo was talking about is pressure in the the primary containment vessel (PCV), not the RPV. Just to be clear the reactor core is inside the metal RPV and the RPV is inside the reinforced concrete PCV. The in the Mark 1 reactor design the PCV is the outer wall of the "dry well".
I also looked up some design diagrams for the venting system. While venting system rupture disk is indeed designed to protect the PCV it is not built
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In a way I do agree with you. It's not mysterious why the PCV didn't explode; it didn't explode because it failed in some other, unknown way. Under the circumstances that was a very good thing in comparison to the alternative, but it takes a rather determined optimism to construe it as an endorsement of the reactor's design. It was more like a stroke of good luck.
Or that one or more components were designed to fail first. Or that the part of the PCV which was overpressurized (the "dry well") eventually vented to the part that wasn't (the "wet well"). I'm still hearing way too much assumption about what normal operation during a core melt is supposed to be. I know that if I were designing this thing, I'd have most plumbing passing through the shell of the PCV fail first (especially anything for venting the interior of the PCV).
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Well, that's how I would do it too, but it's evidently not how this particular reactor was designed back in the 50s. If the reactor failed in any kind of planned way, we'd have some idea what that was. What we're learning is that we don't have any idea how this particular design behaves when it's operating outside its normal operating envelope.
I think it's important to stipulate I'm talking about this design. You can't really talk about the "safety of nuclear power plants" as if all designs are the same.
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The report doesn't contradict what I said, it agrees with it. The pressure was very high, beyond the limit at which the reactor was designed to operate or sustain for long. Not quite high enough to force open the final emergency rupture points that were designed to fail first to avoid an even more catastrophic explosion.
What you have to remember is that the containment building was already damaged at this point. The explosion of building 1 had put holes in it, which happened to vent hydrogen and prevent yet
Re:The trade was a fair one. (Score:5, Funny)
Number 2 rector was building up pressure and the operators were unable to relieve it. The valves seemed to be stuck, even after they got emergency battery power to them. The containment vessel was over its design limit for pressure. Then suddenly the pressure fell, and no-one knows why.
Oh they know why. But they don't think the world is ready to hear about that big ass lizard that took a bite out of the containment vessel and absorbed the radiation.
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Sorry to break it to you, but you're the one who doesn't seem to grasp the problem.
If you're talking about coal powerplants vs nukes, the correct metrics isn't brainpower, but "deaths per PWh".
And coal is many orders of magnitude deadlier than nuclear power, even with Tchernobyl and Fukushima.
Global warming isn't the only negative impact of coal powerplants : miners are dying in the thousands per year, in China alone (another example : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]), and air pollution is alarmingly high
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You miss the point. Ignore the CO2 and all the "traditional" pollutants (particulates, VOCs, SOx, NOx, etc.) completely. Forget about it; it's irrelevant for the purpose of this post. We're not talking about carbon, or any of the rest of those,
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Coal plants in first world nations don't release radiation. ... and the ash js not more 'radioactive' than pure uranium or pure thorium, how could it?
In other words, the general public never gets into contact with it.
The fly ash js deposited
The idea that coal plants are irradiation the population js debunked since thirty years.
Or to say it with words you understand: a coal plant with all its radioactive ash (most plants don't even produce radioactive ash as there is no uranium or thorium in the coal) releas
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I doubt that the thousands of people evacuated from their homes and businesses for the last 5 years and continuing in the future for a while yet would agree.
It was an unnecessary lesson, given that other nuclear power plants in the same area survived the tsunami just fine because they were properly prepared: they built tsunami walls high enough to handle historical tsunami, plus a bit more as a safety factor. Even as there were warnings in the 2000s that the protection was inadequate at Fukushima the manag
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Yea.. oversight. Like how the oversight of the Mines and Mineral Service here in the states prevented the British Petroleum disaster that spewed oil into the gulf for weeks. I'll take profit motive over a government agency's oversight any day, the odds are better. At least the company has a motivator, the government bureaucrats are just biding their time until they can pension out.
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Stop lying, there was no such thing.
Nuclear defense force, ASSEMBLLLEEE!! (Score:2)
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Is the argument that we're stuck with nuclear due to how crappy the alternatives are, supposed to reassure me?
Depends? Answer the question: would you like more people to die to provide you with electricity or fewer? Everything comes with downsides. The downside of nuclear is that it sometimes contaminates small areas of the earth.
The downside of all other sources compared to nuclear is they kill lots more people.
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no, it's supposed to make you think "hey, if this thing is actually better in this way than anything else, is it really in our best interests to avoid it instead of using it?"
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As if there were only two ways to generate electricity.
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As if there were only two ways to generate electricity.
There are many ways to do it, but for now, the major ways are Fossil Fuels or Nuclear.
Wind and Solar will slowly grow as a percentage of the world wide total amount of power generated, but neither will be a major source of power in the 21st Century.
There are many political reasons for that, as well as economic ones.
So what do you prefer? Carbon or Nuclear?
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Please wake up. Everybody is already adding renewables and this is working just fine. Germany added about 200 TWh per year in actual production (not capacity) in a little bit more than two decades. This is more than it had nuclear even when nuclear was its maximum (about 170 TWh / per year). So no, there is no choice between carbon and nuclear.
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Please wake up.
I would love to say the same to you...
Everybody is already adding renewables and this is working just fine.
Yep, I said they were, and they will continue to do so... but it won't become a major part of the total world-wide power production this century.
If you think it will, you haven't done the math.
Germany added about 200 TWh per year in actual production
The last numbers I could find was for 2014. In 2014, Germany produced 34 TWh of solar power. Not sure where you get your 200 THh hour number from.
http://www.tsp-data-portal.org... [tsp-data-portal.org]
In 2014, Germany produced 572 TWh of power and about half of it came from coal.
It is also worth not
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Germans also pay triple the cost per KWh that Americans do for power, so frankly using them for an example is a pretty piss-poor one.
I was about to say that their industrial electricity prices were better, but according to this site, they're paying 10.88 pence per kWh versus the US's 4.26 pence per kWh. Ouch.
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Germans also pay triple the cost per KWh that Americans do for power, so frankly using americans for an example is a pretty piss-poor one.
Setting that into the right perspective for you.
Also the 'calculation' is wrong. The average American pays three times the amount for power than the average german does. Because he uses ten times more power ;) for no apparent reason besides bad insulation and inefficient gear and stupid livestyle.
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Wind and Solar will slowly grow as a percentage of the world wide total amount of power generated, but neither will be a major source of power in the 21st Century.
In Germany, Portugal, Denmark, they are already. And the century has still nearly 85 years left. So it is unlikely you win your bet. Most European countries will long before of the end of the century completely carbon neutral. And the main power source will be wind.
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In Germany, Portugal, Denmark, they are already.
No, they aren't, not in Germany anyway...
So it is unlikely you win your bet.
No, I'm actually very likely to win it. You can't seem to see beyond the EU. Who gives a crap what the EU does, it is only 10% of world-wide carbon, it could go to zero and wouldn't make any real difference.
There is a world beyond your little space, when you're prepared to come out and see it, you'll be prepared to deal with reality.
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We should be building solar and wind power plants as fast as we feasibly can. While that happens, we should be decommissioning the coal-fired plants first, then the oil-fired ones, then the natural gas-fired ones, then evaluating the hydroelectric dams for damage to river ecosystems and demolishing the sufficiently-harmful ones, and only then decommissioning the nuclear plants after everything worse is already gone.
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I always love how the chief argument on /. for continuing the use pf nuclear power use into eternity entails holding people hostage with the mediocrity of coal-burning and its waste. Is the argument that we're stuck with nuclear due to how crappy the alternatives are, supposed to reassure me?
No, but that is the reality for the time being...
For the 21st Century, we largely have 2 options when it comes to the bulk of our power needs.
Coal/Oil/Natural Gas
or
Nuclear
Solar and Wind will slowly increase in overall percentage, but won't be a major part of the total world wide power consumption this century. Maybe in the 22nd Century they will, but hopefully by then Fusion is working and we won't need them.
---
Those who say we can switch it all to Wind and Solar are bad at both politics and math, for vari
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> Solar and Wind will slowly increase in overall percentage, but won't be a major part of the total world wide power consumption this century. Maybe in the 22nd Century they will, but hopefully by then Fusion is working and we won't need them.
Yeah, right. This is just wishful thinking on your part.
Wind power alone is already making 10% of the EU's average electricity supply, and wind energy is now cheaper than coal or gas in many parts of America.
Wind power in the world is growing enormously quickly, lit
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Yeah, right. This is just wishful thinking on your part.
Like I said, people who think Wind and Solar will become a majority of our power are bad at politics and math.
Wind power alone is already making 10% of the EU's average electricity supply, and wind energy is now cheaper than coal or gas in many parts of America.
The EU has spent a huge pile of money to get there, and you start to run into problems if you grow it more. But I suspect they'll get to 20%.
Of course, I said world-wide, not EU. The EU is 10% of the world-wide carbon problem, so it is nice, but not really a solution.
The US is growing, but Wind is only cheap when government dollars make it so. In Texas, I can buy coal power for 7 cents per kWh or
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> The US is growing, but Wind is only cheap when government dollars make it so.
No, it's not subsidies, and the cost is still going down. Taller wind turbines produce energy much more cheaply and give more consistent power.
> Like I said, people who think Wind and Solar will become a majority of our power are bad at politics and math.
Uh huh. Nuclear power is getting more expensive over time, and is already more expensive than onshore wind. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And there's no upper limit
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No, it's not subsidies, and the cost is still going down. Taller wind turbines produce energy much more cheaply and give more consistent power.
Then why is Wind power 30% more expensive than coal power?
It also isn't consistent, if you think it is, you're kidding yourself. Texas produces more wind power than any other state, yet it is highly variable and natural gas turbines have to be kept on standby to make up for the shortfalls when they happen.
Uh huh. Nuclear power is getting more expensive over time, and is already more expensive than onshore wind.
I don't doubt it, but the reasons for that are also political in nature... we could get the costs down if we got over our "oh my god the nuclears" fears. If we don't, then it will be coal, oil, and natu
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I always love how the chief argument on /. for continuing the use pf nuclear power use into eternity entails holding people hostage with the mediocrity of coal-burning and its waste. Is the argument that we're stuck with nuclear due to how crappy the alternatives are, supposed to reassure me?
If the argument works, then there's no reason to stop using it. And it's supposed to reassure you because it shows the risks are grossly exaggerated for nuclear power. You can then worry about more serious things, like traffic accidents or lightning strikes.
Re:The trade was a fair one. (Score:5, Informative)
You do realize this is actually killing off an entire ocean right?
No, I don't realise that. Whatever makes you think that's the case?
You do realize eating ANYTHING from the Pacific Ocean is very very risky... right?
No, I don't realise that because it's not true.
Half of Japan should have been, and still be, evacuated
If that's the case, I'm sure you can tell me what the average excess dose in mSv/yr in the half of Japan that ought to be evacuated? I mean you'd never make such a wild claim without knowing the numbers, right?
Carbon doesn't continue to react outside of the reactor leaking gamma and beta rays
By reaction, you mean decay right? Coal ash has decaying radioactive elements in it too, by the way.
yes, the same ones that made the Hulk
I hate to break it to you, but the Hulk isn't real.
Carbon doesn't cause mutations and cancers,
Certain allotropes of carbon are in fact strongly suspected to be carcinogenic.
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It took some work but I read (and properly parsed - I think) their post, not once but twice. I've decided that it has to be trolling. Seriously... It has to be.
I don't know a whole lot about nuclear energy but I've taken the time to learn the basics. I know what to do with the three cookies, I know how safe they are (or can be), I understand the mechanics and process well enough, and I know what half-life means. I'm pretty sure they're intentionally trolling. What's curious is that I'm using an alternative
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http://www.sfgate.com/health/a... [sfgate.com]
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Chernobyl was an explosive event, yes, but considerably less than fukishima on all honest accounts
That is a demonstrably false statement.
Do you even know what happened at Chernobyl?
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To the extent that's true, it's true mostly because of mercury contamination produced form coal-fired power plants, not radioactive particles from Fukushima.
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There is nothing wrong with having a nuclear reactor in this region. It just needs to be built to fail-safe. This plant in particular was not appropriately built to that standard.
And honestly, if there was a 500 foot tsunami, Japan's going to have other things to worry about. I mean, yeah the homes all around will be irradiated, but since they will have been flattened already and anyone left inside dead, irradiation of their dead bodies is probably just going to slow down decomposition at that point.
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Well, just fucking build it above 500 ft and put base isolators [wikipedia.org] under it, then!
The issue is not that we "cant" build nuclear power plants that are safe; the issue is that we stupidly chose not to.
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The issue is not that we "cant" build nuclear power plants that are safe; the issue is that we stupidly chose not to.
But that's how humanity works. When is the last time you heard of a leak at a chip fab? You don't, because they have double-walled pipes and detectors. We could build oil pipelines that way, but it would cost money, and that money is better spent on yachts and hookers and blow
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Are you saying that the people who run chip fabs do not like yachts or hookers? Because I'm guessing that's probably not it. There is probably a difference in the situations which is more likely to be the reason.
I'm not saying that energy company execs are innocent, I'm just wondering how chip fab execs are somehow different. I'm guessing that they aren't, they just don't have the same risks to deal with. That or they hide their problems better.
Now, if they are better, we should recruit fab execs to run
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Are you saying that the people who run chip fabs do not like yachts or hookers? Because I'm guessing that's probably not it. There is probably a difference in the situations which is more likely to be the reason.
Yep. Here it is: If you kill a bunch of educated engineers, you may be held personally accountable. If you poison the land for decades (or longer) into the future, you will probably get away with it. QED, the difference is accountability.
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I was more commenting on the point that you are talking about a 500 foot tall tsunami. The one that happened at Fukushima was only 49 ft tall. A tsunami ten times that size would inflict so much damage that I doubt you could do much to realistically mitigate that. But a 500 ft wave is unknown in human history. The tallest wave known was 100 ft tall at Lituya Bay in 1958.
It's not about whether it could happen, because its probably not impossible. However there is an assessment of risk that has to happen
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500ft, far out, it always sounds scarier in US units. :)
I'm pretty sure that wave that killed Patrick Swayze in Point Break was nowhere near 150m.
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Check your dates. The 40 year old cars are great, pre-smog so grandfathered. What we want off the roads are the 30-35 year old cars. Those were bad years. Few exceptions.
These old designs containments appear to have worked. They had to have made a sufficiently wide and shallow pool of corium.
Engineers will learn a lot from taking these 3 reactors apart. TEPCO should not be directly involved. It's too important for 'face' to matter. They all 3 appear to have reached full tilt melt down and the containme
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Nobody would advocate using a 40 year old car on the roads.
Sure they do. In fact, the law is set up specifically to advocate using older cars, if you're an enthusiast; you can't import random vehicles until they're 25 years old, which is what kept the Skyline out until now. Now there are R32s coming over here, and there are about to be R33s... I am just now moving away from driving a 35 year old car, but they still have many enthusiasts and there are surprisingly many of them still on the road.
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Their statement was patently absurd. There are some gems that are 40 years old, older, or nearing that mark. Pure, unadulterated, hogwash. They should be soundly beaten with a bumper from a '57 Mercury.
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Neither continue AGW business as usual, nor use more nuke. Those aren't our two only and sole choices.
In the long run, you're correct.
In the minor, you're correct.
In the short run major, you're wrong. For the rest of the 21st Century, Coal/Oil/Natural Gas/Nuclear are likely to be the primary 4 power sources for humans on Earth.
Yes, Wind and Solar will slowly go up as a global percentage, but not by enough to really move the needle.
So what do you prefer, Carbon or Nuclear?
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For the rest of the 21st Century, Coal/Oil/Natural Gas/Nuclear are likely to be the primary 4 power sources for humans on Earth.
That is extremely unlikely as basically every nation that is building new plants is focusing on wind and solar: they are cheaper.
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That is extremely unlikely as basically every nation that is building new plants is focusing on wind and solar: they are cheaper.
Saying that doesn't make it true. Wishing it doesn't make it true. Hoping for it doesn't make it true.
Let me know when you wake up to reality, then we can have an adult conversation about this.