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."
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:No, thanks (Score:0, Insightful)
Your sarcasm is ill deserved.
Those reactors are 45 year old technology, took a direct tsunami hit right after an earthquake that was in the top 3 worst ever recorded, exploded, caught fire, and resulted in a grand total of... zero deaths.
Meanwhile, all other forms of cost-effective power generation are much more dangerous, killing far more people than nuclear technology, even including nuclear bombs! For example, the worst dam failure of all time, the Banqiao Dam [wikipedia.org] killed 171K people, about the same number that were killed by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
The worst nuclear disaster of all time, Chernobyl, killed only 31 people. For comparison, that's about 0.5% of the deaths attributed to coal mining [mit.edu] per year. The United States coal mining industry alone has about the same number of deaths per year [typepad.com] as the total deaths due to nuclear power, ever. That number by the way is 40 people [wikipedia.org]. That's like... 3 per decade.
Also, people generally forget that accidents aren't the only source of deaths related to power generation. The United States has gone to war multiple times to protect their interests in oil, leading to several hundred thousand more deaths.
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 [wikipedia.org] to shoot Iraqi citizens by their thousands.
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".
Re:Send in the robots (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Mitigating my ass. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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
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.
Re:It's cooling down. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 generation that they lost when the earthquake and tsunami screwed things up.
Re:No, thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's cooling down. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 have a load of inconvenienced people, not a load of dead people.
Some of that zone has been exposed to radioactive materials, but they all appear to be things with short half lives, so they'll quickly decay back to normal background radiation levels.
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.
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 __________?"