Mitigating Fukushima's Dangers, 42 Days In 245
DrKnark writes "Tepco has released more information about their plan to stabilize the Fukushima reactors. They are basically facing 4 problems: ensure long term cooling of the cores; ensure cooling of the spent fuel pools; prevent release of radioactive material; and mitigate the consequences of the releases that will continue for a while."
No, thanks (Score:3)
Funny reading a post about people hacking up reactor cooling solutions with radioactive water pooling all over the place on a site called nuclearpoweryesplease.org
Re:No, thanks (Score:4, Funny)
I just checked that site and you were right. No news there, just pages and pages on how reactors work. Wonders of technology. True, when they work and don't burn or explode.
Sarcasm... (Score:2, Interesting)
For some reason, people are terrified of the safest form of power generation that is in common use, but have no problem with the US military using Uranium bullets to shoot Iraqi citizens by their thousands.
thousands..really? ..killed with depleted uraniun anti-tank bullets? thousands?
Quite possibly... (Score:4, Interesting)
Thousands of civilians killed? Yes. [wikipedia.org]
Thousands of civilians killed by U.S.? Again, yes.
The IBC project released a report detailing the deaths it recorded between March 2003 and March 2005[72] in which it recorded 24,865 civilian deaths. The report says the U.S. and its allies were responsible for the largest share (37%) of the 24,865 deaths.
Thousands killed by DU ammunition? Possibly.
Thousands affected by the continuous effect radiation from DU ammunition? Almost certainly.
When you measure something in thousands of tonnes you can safely say that it WILL affect large areas of land and large numbers of people.
And 4.468 billion years is a long time.
The use of DU in munitions is controversial because of questions about potential long-term health effects.[4][5] Normal functioning of the kidney, brain, liver, heart, and numerous other systems can be affected by uranium exposure, because uranium is a toxic metal.[6] It is weakly radioactive and remains so because of its long physical half-life (4.468 billion years for uranium-238). The biological half-life (the average time it takes for the human body to eliminate half the amount in the body) for uranium is about 15 days.[7] The aerosol or spallation frangible powder produced during impact and combustion of depleted uranium munitions can potentially contaminate wide areas around the impact sites leading to possible inhalation by human beings.[8] During a three week period of conflict in 2003 in Iraq, 1,000 to 2,000 tonnes of DU munitions were used.[9]
Re:Quite possibly... (Score:4, Informative)
The main trouble with depleted uranium comes from its toxicity, not from its radioactivity, you can see that since as you pointed out, the half life of U238 comes in a geological timescale.
Well... actually both. (Score:2)
Since the main way DU shells get to affect the civilian population is through fragmentation - which leads to inhaling and ingesting radioactive particles by said population.
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This is why we need sharks. With lasers.
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Re:No, thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
The subtext behind this issue of what source of energy does the most damage is control. Nuclear power plants are big, long term projects which require lots of investment from large Governments. Because of this they increase the reliance which people have for those Governments. You are locked in to both the technology and the political environment which brought it in to being. So people who want political independence on a smaller scale (state, local or individual) oppose nuclear power. They want technology they can control. They want it to be within their own reach.
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even if you count when things go wrong it still looks better than most of the alternatives.
For a parallel.
Many people are afraid of flying.
Why? it doesn't make a great deal of sense, you're more likely to die driving to the airport than while on the plane unless you live really close to the airport or you're going on a really long flight.
It's irrational.
But here's the thing.
When there's a plane crash hundreds of people die all at once.
When there's a plane crash it makes the news worldwide.
When you're on a p
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dirty little community
Thats the issue, isn't it? Why have a dirty little community when you can have a big, fancy, bureaucracy?
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If you don't live decently close to the equator solar panels on your roof are nothing but an expensive status symbol.
Actually, small amounts of wind and solar can and do pay for themselves. It doesn't make you independent -- you still need the grid to compensate for a cloudy, calm day -- but when you generate an excess of power, your meter runs backwards and the power company pays you. Even if this doesn't happen, it's still reducing your power bill significantly.
Also, while I agree with your overall point,
a coal miner here a gas worker there and every now and then someone dies installing panels on their roof.
If we weren't dependent on coal and gas, maybe these could be avoided, but if people weren't installing those panels
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"surely they'd be doing something very similar"
And if they weren't digging coal out of the ground those miners might be doing something equally dangerous, if they weren't drilling for oil those oil workers would probably be doing something else.
If you take that approach then nothing is dangerous since the people dying might be doing something else similar anyway.
If there's less demand for coal then there would be less people working down the mines, if there were less demand for rooftop installations then th
Re:No, thanks (Score:4, Interesting)
IIRC two people were killed at the plant by the earthquake. Both the earthquake and tsunami were of much greater magnitude than anything considered by the designers.
It's interesting that no attempt has been made to compare damage at this plant with that at other industrial plants in Japan. The press has also been silent on toxic chemical spills resulting from the earthquake and tsunami.
Re:No, thanks (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, nobody has followed up the story of the burning refinery of Cosmo Oil at Chiba, very close to Tokyo that burned for a week, or the other 2 refineries washed away by the tsunami in Miyagi prefecture, what stand was left to burn.
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Oh, come on.
I remember a little over a month ago, when we were hearing about how this Japanese disaster was no problem and how the reactors all handled the tsunami well and there was no reason for concern.
"Clean, Safe, and Too Cheap to Meter" was the slogan of the nuclear energy industry. It's turned out to be none of those things, and just because more people die from one of the other toxic sources of energy that rely on scarce, dange
Re:No, thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
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Dams built for flood control (Score:2)
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that's a wierd way to look at it.
you could also say that if the dam hadn't been build most of those people would probably be living further from the river or there would be better flood defences.
And further: a catastrophic failure of a dam releasing the resevoir is going to be far more destructive than some slower yearly flooding.
A wall of water is going to kill far far far more than a slowly rising flood.
perhaps oil should get points for all the people who aren't feezing to death because of the increase in
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Now I'm pro-nuclear, but the way in which we derive most nuclear power in the world is quite stupid and dangerous, with very, very long term risks.
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Who did put this ridiculous lie between your ears? Yourself?
The problem with nuclear energy fanbois is that they produce this kind of lies, i don't know if out of stupidity, greed, or plain old evil. The main reason why I am against nuclear energy is because every person that is in favor of it automatically seems to become a blind and brainwashed apologist instead of at least taking the thing seriously. Dangerous technology run by the
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The Plutonium Monster is a myth (Score:2)
Plutonium has about the same chemical toxicity as cadmium and caffeine. And unless you intend to grind the stuff into powder and snort it, it's not going to do you any recognizable harm. It's next to insoluable in water when in its oxide forms and not volatile... it doesn't go anywhere in the environment.
People make a big fu
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Just a FYI, but very very few nuclear power plants have only a single reactor...single reactors aren't very efficient from a cost perspective.
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Send in the robots (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess that the primary reason that such duct-tape-and-cardboard methods are necessary is that people simply can't go into the reactor building due to high radiation levels. All the hardware required to cool the reactor is in place, it just needs repairs. It would surely be easier to perform those repairs than build a new cooling system, provided that access to the systems was possible.
I can't imagine that flooding the containment buildings was their first (or even second) choice but they must be restricted in terms of what systems they have access to from outside the most heavily contaminated areas.
Re:Send in the robots (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Send in the robots (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, you are probably right - but what does that tell us? They have no concept at all to handle a major failure mode in one of their reactors, none at all. All we are seeing is seat-of-the-pants level improvisation, because they have no plan. Why do we let those guys operate a reactor again?
Why do we let them? Because as much as we'd all love to see a form of electricity generation that uses only perfectly safe fuel, operates without any risk to its users, and emits no waste, the gods have not yet graced us with such an energy source yet.
And why do they have no plan? Well... because we can't plan for everything. We *did* have a plan for an earthquake. Then nature fucked us with a bigger one. We did know the risks of tsunamis -- but nobody thought of the possibility of a big one following a record quake.
For every disaster you plan for, there's always the chance of another one that makes the one you prepared for look like a tiny mishap. You plan for a quake at level X on the Richter scale, nature will throw an X+2 at you. You plan for tropical storms, nature will throw hurricanes at you. You plan for those, you'll get get a tornado. No matter what you plan for, there's always something that you didn't.
And then, after it's all over, and your otherwise-well-designed $PROJECT is a pile of smoking rubble, some asshole will come out of the woodwork and snort "How could those guys not plan for __________?"
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There is no reason such methods are necessary. They are hoping to get to a condition where they will be able to remove the thing rather than having it fester for ten thousand years and therefore they are spewing radioactive material into the air in the meanwhile. Fuel rods AND fuel pellets have been seen in the open in damaged condition. This is completely unacceptable.
Interesting radiation readings (Score:4, Informative)
From http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2011/04/april-20-2011-fukushima-review-of-ines.html [blogspot.com]:
On April 17th the same site had the following radiation levels recorded for units 1-3:
Reactor 1
Dry Well: 121.4 Sv/hr
Suppression chamber: 97.5 Sv/hr
Reactor 2
Dry Well: N/A
Suppression Chamber: 131 Sv/hr
Reactor 3
Dry Well: 253.2 Sv/hr
Suppression Chamber: 103.9 Sv/hr
So that's going to take a while to cool off.
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You are a couple orders of magnitude off. 5Sv is probably lethal and you'd get that in 3 minutes at 100Sv/h.
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A dose of 5 rem will be accumulated in the first 17 years of life and about 25 rem in a lifetime of 80 years.
...
So in 5 hours or so in the suppression chanmber you would get a years dose of radiation. Mind you, it would be worse in the reaction zone of a coal-fired power station.
5 hours would get you 17 years of radiation as per your own post. Where'd you get one year from?
Re:Interesting radiation readings (Score:4, Insightful)
Hehe, minor conversion error.
100 rem is 1 Sv, not the other way around. 1Sv of exposure is around the threshold for radiation poisoning and 8-10 Sv is considered untreatable with death guaranteed to follow shortly thereafter.
So a room at 100Sv/hour would give a guaranteed fatal exposure within about 90 seconds. Radiation poisoning would onset after 30 seconds of exposure.
So you can safely say that 100 Sv/hour is about the threshold for "instadeath".
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Grr, posting too early in the AM. 10 Sv would take around 6 minutes not 90 seconds. Still pretty damn close to "instadeath".
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Minor correction. 1 Sv is the threshold for radiation sickness. 3-5 Sv is the threshold for poisoning (50% mortality rate). Greater than 8 Sv is pretty much guaranteed death.
Of course, this also depends on the timescale the dose was received in.
And yes, the person you responded to made a HUGE conversion error. :)
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So according to the handy and authoritative
<handwaving>
Assuming the Iodine has already decayed by now, I thought the next most abundant decay products are Cesium and Strontium with half-lives of 30 years, if that's true then they could work for an hour until fatal dose in about 109
Mitigating my ass. (Score:2, Interesting)
http://video.godlikeproductions.com/video/Japan_Nuclear_Crisis_Dr_Michio_Kaku_41311?id=5f6b79d071f3c70b40c [godlikeproductions.com]
there are people STILL downplaying this, believing what industry shills are drumming like morons.
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Never heard of this guy before, but I did watch the interview.
Not impressed at all. As you say, very sensationalist, and a complete attention whore.
As someone still in favour of (new and existing) nuclear power, I hope the "anti-s" can come up with people better than this - they do have a a point of view worthy of serious consideration and debate. But guys like this aren't helping that. To be honest, I think the way this guy presents himself is damaging to the viewpoint he represents.
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He's a physicist, so what? Just because he's a scientist (of sorts, his field of expertise is actually string theory) doesn't mean he's an expert on nuclear power or nuclear reactors or even that he knows more than the average Joe. (Worse yet, if you're familiar with his politics, you'll find he's quite anti-nuclear.)
TV producers love him because he's always good for a sensationalist quote - r
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"Don't Panic" after 42 days (Score:3)
Coal vs. Nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe Fukushima and Deep Water Horizon will mark a recognition of the level of care we need to take when handling these very finite resources. I hope so.
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Pu is NOT forever. It decays into something else after a while.
Of course, the mercury in coal IS forever....
Re:Coal vs. Nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
Mercury is safe to eat in comparison to Pu. And Pu has a half-life that the distinction does not make a whole lot of difference. Also keep in mind that its half-life (24,100 yrs) the problem is not gone, but _halved_ and some other nice radioactive stuff created from it. Calling this "a while" is highly stupid. Also, it is quite possible (and done) to remove the mercury from the smoke.
Bottom line: Nuclear power is extremely expensive and deals with time-lines for containing its by-products that are far outside of what the human race can handle. The thing that really ticks me off is that by now it would have been cheaper to just shove all that money down the nuclear fanatic's throats and build up renewable energy source with what was left. And this stuff will continue to be expensive for > 100'000 years, a constant financial and ecological drain on humanity. Just so a few people without ethics could fill their coffers.
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Ingesting very small amounts of Pu will (probably) not hurt you. The toxicity of Pu is grossly exaggerated. It is chemically toxic like most heavy metals, but there is nothing really special about its toxicity as a chemically. All isotopes of Pu are radioactive, the longer lived isotopes are less radioactive than the shorter lived isotopes. There is nothing special about the radioactivity from Pu 239 (half life of 24K years) that makes it more hazardous than any other radioactive material. If you are concer
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Pregnant women are warned to avoid seafood due to mercury contamination, mostly from coal power. That is not some sort of temporary precautionary measure, it applies for the foreseeable future. Now, name any food that any class of individual is warned away from due to nuclear contamination.
Pu is not a waste product of nuclear energy, it is a valuable fuel that we should be processing back into useful form. IF we did that, the true waste from nuclear power would decay to safe levels within 200-500 years. How
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Fast Breeders vs. Coal vs. Nuclear (Score:2)
Thank you! I think I've spotted another pro-nuclear weasel word! Pity I'm not a real specialist so I can't honestly be very clear about it but I'll give it my best:
"Burn" implies, in common language, to put something on fire until it is reduced to harmless ashes and smoke. (If you burn PVC plastic it can be nasty though.) But, if you'd burn something in a high-tech waste processing facility [wikipedia.org]
Can we give up on the Coal vs Nuclear distraction? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are going to say stuff like you do above in a public forum you really have a responsibility to say something tied to reality and know just a little bit about what you are talking about instead of just making shit up. When you are talking about a mercury threat a few orders of magnitude less than domestic light bulbs it really doesn't justify comparison with plutonium.
I'm aware that the plutonium is also usually very well contained so is usually also ignorable. We just happen to be discussing a situation where a significant amount of it may have escaped.
The "coal is dangerous" shit whenever nuclear is mentioned is getting very old. We all know it kills people, in fact there is almost a weekly death toll in direct mining accidents alone. However usually the comparison is brought up as a frankly very childish distraction along the lines of "little jimmy is being bad, why can't I be bad too". It's depressing and each time it is used I have to tell myself that the person who used it is a real human being and not just a juvenile lying weasel that thinks everyone else is stupid.
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Since we have to produce power somehow, why is it unreasonable to compare the hazards of different major power sources?
Flue gas scrubbers, while pretty good, aren't 100% effective - so some pollutants are still released. Not to mention CO2.
You have missed that it is a distraction (Score:2)
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People coming out with untrue statements (coal CO2 is actually depleted in C-14 compared with natural levels) is a different matter of course. As is deflecting legitimate criticism with a "he does it too" argument.
However I don't think you can assess a technology in isolation. Nuclear opponents like to point out the bad sides of nuclear as a direct argument as to why it shouldn't be used. If you look at it that way, why would you want something that has even a small risk of severe accidents? Seems obvious.
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"You're against nuclear, therefore you must be in favour of coal, which is even worse".
as if there are only two choices.
Obviously both coal and nuclear should therefore be phased out in favour of sustainable energy sources such as hydro, solar power, wind and solar photovoltaic.
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Plutonium and Uranium are non-volatile nuclear fuels. The only way they escape a nuclear reactor is a raging inferno capable of over 6000 F, a massive explosion that shatters the fuel rods and disperses the particles, or (to a much lesser extent) damaged fuel rods with exposed surfaces flacking the material into reactor water. Neither of these two fuels have escaped in any significant quantity.
The biggest concern with nuclear accidents isn't even the fuel, it's the fission by-products. Nuclear fuel is not v
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""fossil" fuels (albeit one from dead suns)."
Most of the atoms in your body came from dead stars. Without stars, the vast majority of the universe would be hydrogen (and I think, maybe, trace amounts of a few other 'light' elements were formed during the big bang) If you want to go down that ridiculous rhetorical route, we should kill you and bury you deep under ground so your 'dirty "fossil" fuel (albeit from dead suns)' body constituents can't pollute our environment. Except. . . oh wait, most of our envi
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Uranium is comparable to oil in the sense that once it's gone it's gone..
True enough, but why not make the best use of it while it's there? It's not as if U-235 is useful for much else. By the time it runs out we should have a better technology, but why penalise ourselves in the meantime by using polluting technologies like coal or immature and expensive technologies like solar? If you're going to refuse to use something because it might run out one day, then it's effectively *already* run out.
Re:Coal vs. Nuclear (Score:4, Informative)
But, there's one important difference - if used appropriately, every ton of Uranium has the energy equivalent of something on the order of a million tons of coal or oil. Also, don't forget about Thorium. Uranium is not the only nuclear fuel. Thorium is estimated to be at least 5 times more abundant than Uranium.
I've seen some analyses which estimate that, if we used fast breeder reactors (like the Integral Fast Reactor - search for that sometime, interesting reading) and Liquid Thorium Reactors, we have enough fuel supplies to last us at least 100,000 years. Also, both technologies solve the 'nuclear waste problem' by burning off the nuclear waste.
If we can extract Uranium cost-effectively from the ocean, we have enough Uranium to perhaps get us through a few billion years (and, over the course of a Billion years, more uranium will leach out of the earth's crust [there's all kind of uranium in the crust, but not concentrated enough for effective mining, but if it dissolves out, it might be recoverable] and into the oceans, making it an effectively renewable resource).
Nuclear power has it's challenges in terms of safety and economics. Fuel supply is not a real problem though. If you are *really* worried about a fuel supply which might run low in 100,000 years, I don't know what to tell you. I don't worry much about problems that far down the road.
The roadmap document confirms a meltdown. (Score:3, Insightful)
From the roadmap document:
"Current Status [2] (Units 1 to 3) High likelihood of
small leakage of steam containing radioactive
materials through the gap of PCV caused by
high temperature."
The only way the pressure containment vessel could have a hole all the way through it 'caused by high temperature', which is leaking to the atmosphere, is if some of the fuel has melted and pooled. Units two and three show atmospheric pressure in the reactor primary containment.
See: http://atmc.jp/plant/vessel/?n=3 and http://atmc.jp/plant/vessel/?n=2
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real info (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It's cooling down. (Score:5, Funny)
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Without sounding too Inconsiderate, quite a lot of their land was recently flattened by the tsunami, so should they lose 50 square miles due to Fukushima, they'll be able to cope by building more efficient housing.
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50? You've either missed just about everything in the media and are unaware that the amounts considered are a hell of a lot larger or are deliberately setting out to mislead people. There is a lot of the latter going on whenever nuclear is mentioned here. True, it's a annoying pimple on a nation in comparison the the tsunami but crippling to anyone that lived in the same area as the power plant. So yes, you do actually sound too Inconsiderate in a Glen Beck "I'm not sa
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You're absolutely right, I made a major cockup. What I had in my head was the 50mile exclusion zone around the plant, which is obviously quite a lot larger than 50 square miles. I stand both corrected and ashamed.
Option 3 (Score:3)
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No harm done =)
Let that be a lesson to other people on slashot - sometimes it is possible to be wrong and there's no harm in admitting it.
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As a Chernobyl class disaster with an exclusion zone with 18 mile radius that should be 30 miles, and counting only the land side of the circle of contamination, they stand to lose 1,400 sq miles of land for several centuries. The coastal land destroyed by the Tsunami, can be restored, and the Japanese people are very industrious and will get it done.
Currently, wind patterns have favored blowing the contamination out to sea, but as the seasons change, and they don't get a handle on the leaking radiation, a
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Too late...
I"ll bite. How much land was irradiated? And what's your evidence for your guess?
Even assuming that the nuclear fuel was burning and freely releasing fission products, prevailing weather patterns mean that most of Japan was completely unaffected by this problem. Well, other than losing the 6 GW of electricity
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Japan currently has an evacuation zone of 20km radius from the Fukushima area. That's about 225 square miles (it's on the coast). They would not evacuate such an area based only on unsubstantiated fear. The US is recommending 30 Km radius to military employees, 500 square miles.
Area flattened by the tsunami can be rebuilt right away (I hope they consider the possibility of another tsunami and build accordingly); area irradiated can't be resettled for awhile, years or possibly decades or more. They will ne
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They evacuated the exclusion zone because it would have been a PR disaster if some of the worst-case scenarios had happened and the press had said that all of those people could have been saved if they'd been evacuated early. Once it's completely under control, those people can return.
This is simple disaster management. You don't wait until something bad has happened before you start evacuating people, you evacuate them when the danger is only a potential. That way, if something does go wrong, you hav
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How awesome that Swedish civilization is finally reaching Slashdot too. Here in Finland we've been at the receiving and of you for a long time and it's just getting "better" all the time. Nowadays the required dogma is that we're a bunch of barbarians if we don't take it in deep when as young as possible while we're still soft and malleable so that we don't develop "attitude problems" by getting this idea that we might actually have a "right" not to suck it and love it.
But anyway, glad to see you're bringin
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Yeah, BP's spill hasn't got the whole world demanding that we review use of oil.
More accurately, there's no-one paying politicians to use it as an excuse to change national policy.
Re:FTFA (Score:4, Informative)
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Nor did Piper Alpha have any such effect...
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167 deaths are just an irrelevance, I'm sure. After all, it didn't cost anyone else any money, so who cares, right?
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The widespread consequences of the BP spill were economic damage rather than injuries. Is that worse than a large number of deaths in a small local area?
The Fukushima situation is less clear though, as we don't have a good idea of the effects of low-dose radiation. They could range from no injuries to a certain number of early deaths from cancer. I just find it interesting why certain hazards are practically ignored (e.g. fossil fuels, road accidents) while others receive major attention (nuclear power, pla
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Nuclear is a bit different in that there are other ways to generate electricity (but they suck in different ways), but there's really no practical substitute for oil at the moment, so I suspect oil accidents will cause a lot of heated debate but won't have a significant effect on its production overall.
I don't think Tepco's response has been too bad overall (though information isn't clear yet) - the plant was subjected to a challenge beyond its design basis, which is pretty much "no guarantees" territory. C
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Re:The supreme scrumpyolyness of delish! (Score:4, Interesting)
No, he posted to the story he meant to.
You'll see this kind of trolling, using brand new accounts and very very long off-topic or nonsensical posts whenever there is a story that may have implications that could negatively impact a corporation or industry sector. I believe they are intended to disrupt discussion of those stories. You'll see them very often in stories that discuss telecom companies or energy industry.
I believe they are paid trolls, from organizations like New Media Strategies (or their darker cousins) who, instead of astroturfing or writing positive things about their clients, exist only to disrupt serious discussions of things that could be construed to negatively impact their clients.
I could be wrong, but I've been seeing this pattern. You'll also see a pattern where an offtopic post is followed by a string of anonymous or very new accounts being very repetitive and responding to the original offtopic post, creating a long section that many people just won't bother to scroll through and will just abandon the potentially hot story.
Yes, I'm paranoid. I believe paranoia is an appropriate reaction to life circa 2011.
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Precisely. The manufactured FUD industry has been around for a long time, but really started taking off when the crackdown on tobacco came about.
Now with the internet, it gets a whole lot worse. The general population in the US isn't very well educated (we've been consistently lagging the rest of the developed world), and critical thinking isn't really at the top of the curriculum. It's both appalling and amazing how a few well placed psuedo-scientific articles/posts/etc. can turn the population against wel
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Add on that some pressure by the ecologists, when the left needed them to have half of the power, and bam, the device was taken down.
From an industriel point of view, it did produce electricity, it could have worked fine was it actually built up to spec. Too bad its burial means no progres