Endoscopic Exam of Fukushima Reactor 120
mdsolar writes with this excerpt from the Sydney Morning Herald: "Radiation-blurred images taken inside one of Japan's tsunami-hit nuclear reactors show steam, unidentified parts and rusty metal surfaces scarred by 10 months of exposure to heat and humidity. The photos — the first inside-look since the disaster — showed none of the reactor's melted fuel or its cooling water but confirmed stable temperatures and showed no major ruptures caused by the earthquake last March, said Junichi Matsumoto, spokesman for plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company." Here's a video.
Re:No sign of the fuel? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more a lack of confirmation than an actual problem.
It's like saying "Well, this telescope is aimed at the night sky, but it's not in focus so we can't see Jupiter" rather than "OMG, the planet Jupiter is missing from the Heavens!"
Sorry, I ran out of car analogies.
Re:No sign of the fuel? (Score:4, Insightful)
More to the point, what does this mean for the layman?
Was the fuel consumed in the disaster? Did the containment vessel melt and the fuel escape? What are the possibilities, for those whose science courses are quite a few years back? :)
Re:No sign of the fuel? (Score:5, Insightful)
"He said it would take more time and better technology to get to the melted fuel, most of which had fallen into an area the endoscope could not reach."
The current tools simply can't go where the fuel is, so they can't yet inspect it. They've confirmed there are no major breaches and are now looking over the information they've been able to gather to see what everything looks like inside. The fuel comment was a regret about the limitations of the tools they have to use, not so much a cause for alarm about anything being amiss.
Re:No sign of the fuel? (Score:5, Insightful)
http://fairewinds.com/content/cancer-risk-young-children-near-fukushima-daiichi-underestimated [fairewinds.com]
January 17, 2012 Arnie Gundersen - energy advisor with 39-years of nuclear power engineering experience -(Bachelor's and Master's Degrees in nuclear engineering)
Re:pravda.JP (Score:5, Insightful)
Look up "Banqiao dam failure" on wikipedia, or google it. 26k dead from flooding alone, more than 140k dead from secondary effects. Severe ecological effects and property damage as well. China's got a bad history when it comes to dams.
Even the most severe estimates for Chernobyl are a fraction as many dead, short and long term combined - the highest figure I've ever seen put forward was grossly inflated (the person posting it treated every additional cancer caused by the radiation as "fatal", see if you can spot the logical error there), and it still fell well short of Banqiao in deaths. Fukushima's repercussions aren't fully known yet (Chernobyl's are known because it's been twenty-five years), but there will be far fewer deaths than Chernobyl caused, even according to the people who think Tepco is downplaying the severity.
Other nuclear accidents have single digit fatalities (SL-1 comes to mind), or no fatalities at all. Three Mile Island was a zero casualty disaster, where nobody was killed or irradiated and the final cost was measured in dollar figures alone.
It isn't that nuke plants are intrinsically safe - they aren't. It's that we're so paranoid about nuclear safety we go out of the way when designing for failure, such that the actual damage done by a meltdown is a fraction of what it would be in a plant with few or no safety systems. If we built hydro dams the way we build nuclear plants they'd be incapable of killing anybody when they fail. But we don't. We don't built anything non-nuclear to nuclear-spec safety levels. Which means both the anti-nuke ninnies and the nuclear fanboys are wrong - the former for inflating the danger by pretending there are no adequate safeties and the later for pretending there are no risks.
Re:No sign of the fuel? (Score:1, Insightful)
Radioactivity is spread all over Japan -- the soil is radioactive.
Soil is radioactive anyway.
Watch this video (and lots of similar ones on YouTube) this is children's playground just outside of Tokyo, nowhere near Fuckupshima. The geiger counter shows 6.4 micro sieverts/h while the normal background level is in 0.1-0.3 range.
Since we know nothing about the calibration history of this dosimeter, whether the measurement has been rigged, or even whether the device can when used properly actually measure what it purports to measure, the actual number is meaningless.
To give an idea of the problem of using this device for the purpose of measuring biologically harmful radiation as in the video, try answering the question, who makes it? For example, it doesn't actually have a brand or logo on the front of the case. A Google search for "dp802i personal dosimeter" (the only legible markings on the case itself) came up with a number of Chinese resellers of the product, but no information as far as I could tell as to who actually makes it.
Re:pravda.JP (Score:4, Insightful)
A small irrigation dam in the hills above Fukushima city in Japan failed after the 2011 earthquake. Four people inspecting the dam at the time were drowned and a few houses below it were swept away, their occupants missing presumed drowned too. Google "Fujinuma dam collapse" for details.
It was an irrigation dam, not for power per se but it used the same technology other power dams use. That one incident directly killed more people and destroyed more homes than the Fukushima radiation releases have done to date.
Elsewhere a dam collapsed during flooding in Nigeria in September 2011, killing over a hundred people and destroying homes and property in its wake. It barely made the world news unlike the events at Fukushima.
Re:No sign of the fuel? (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, it's about as radioactive as Denver, Co..
Re:pravda.JP (Score:4, Insightful)
Solar power kills a number of people every year due to various causes such as installers falling off rooftops and electrocutions. Electrocutions and falling deaths during installations also kill a number of people working on wind power every year.
And how many people died during construction of the nuclear power plants? Not that I think this makes nuclear power special, rather that if you count installation deaths from one form of power generation system then you should from all the others too. Fair is fair. Building sites are hazardous places.
Re:No sign of the fuel? (Score:5, Insightful)
Show me one case where a melted core traveled 500 m into the earth. One. There isn't any. At Chernobyl there is a big blob of it that traveled a few meters within the building and froze before burning through the concrete floor. At three mile island it didn't leave containment. Give the China syndrome a rest. It ain't real. There are enough REAL dangers without making shit up.
Re:pravda.JP (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, it took a combination a flood bigger than the dam was designed to control and seriously under-designing the dam and shoddy construction of that design and operating it poorly and failure to evacuate the flood-prone regions in order to cause this many loss of lives.
Also, it took a combination of an earthquake bigger than the plant was designed to withstand and the biggest tsunami wave in recorded history and the backup pumps flooding and failing and still there was no radiation-caused loss of life at Fukushima.
So let's tally up the deaths then, shall we:
Direct deaths: Banqiao: 26.000 Fukushima: 0
Indirect deaths: Banqiao: 140.000 Fukushima: 0
No matter how anyone trembling in their pants at the thought of the invisible bogey-man radiation tries to spin it, nuclear power is safer than any other means of producing electricity we have - even when it goes badly wrong.
Re:No sign of the fuel? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's intellectual laziness and you damn well know it. Several cores melting down "near" each other doesn't make their individual blobs of melted fuel any hotter.