New Radioactive Water Leak At Fukushima: 300 Tons and Growing 198
AmiMoJo tips this news from the BBC:
"Radioactive water has leaked from a storage tank into the ground at Japan's Fukushima plant, operator TEPCO says. Officials described the leak as a level-one incident — the lowest level — on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES), which measures nuclear events. This is the first time that Japan has declared such an event since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. A puddle of the contaminated water was emitting 100 millisieverts an hour of radiation, equivalent to five year's maximum exposure for a site worker. In addition up to 300 tonnes a day of contaminated water is leaking from reactors buildings into the sea."
There was a significant leak back in April as well.
Radioactive ooze! (Score:3, Funny)
It's florescent fucking green! Do you know what that means?! It means it's toxic radioactive ooze!! Fucking OOZE!
Not nearly as reactive as this FUD however.
Re:Radioactive ooze! (Score:4, Funny)
Officials described the leak as a level-one incident — the lowest level — on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES)
first, i'd like to point out that the lowest level for nuclear leaks is LEVEL 0 - NO FREAKING LEAK.
Second, to the parent post - heroes in a half shell. turtle power!
Re:Radioactive ooze! (Score:4, Informative)
nice guess but no. Level 0 is called "deviation", an event with no safety concern. Something might break or leak or even trip the reactor offline but with no danger or threat to anyone's safety.
homer simpson makes level 3's all the time (Score:3)
homer simpson makes level 3's all the time
Simpsons is right (Score:2)
...because with all that radioactive water dumping into the Pacific, any fish from that ocean will start absorbing radioactive elements. Bart's three-eyed fish will seem tame in comparison, because at least you can see the problem.
Even better? Radiation is cumulative, so propensity for tissue damage rises with each exposure and the radioactive elements build up in the animal's body. There is no safe level of radiation exposure (source: Hellen Cadicott [globalresearch.ca])
Still even better? Expect the higher-order fish (the
Not reassuring, actually (Score:4, Funny)
Officials described the leak as a level-one incident — the lowest level — on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES)
The fact that its reported as a Level 1 incident is not reassuring, actually.
The International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) seems to be highly subjective [wikipedia.org] :-
And also, under Criticisms :-
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It's moot now: they've upgraded it to Level 3.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23776345 [bbc.co.uk]
Re:Radioactive ooze! (Score:5, Informative)
Level 0 is called "deviation", an event with no safety concern.
"TOKYO, Aug 20 (Reuters) - Contaminated water with dangerously high levels of radiation is leaking from a storage tank at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, the most serious setback to the clean up of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.
The storage tank breach of about 300 tonnes of water is separate from contaminated water leaks reported in recent weeks, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co said on Tuesday.
The latest leak is so contaminated that a person standing half a metre (1 ft 8 inches) away would, within an hour, receive a radiation dose five times the average annual global limit for nuclear workers. After 10 hours, a worker in that proximity to the leak would develop radiation sickness with symptoms including nausea and a drop in white blood cells.
"That is a huge amount of radiation. The situation is getting worse," said Michiaki Furukawa, who is professor emeritus at Nagoya University and a nuclear chemist."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/20/japan-fukushima-leak-idUSL4N0GL16I20130820 [reuters.com]
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
While it's sad that children now have to start dealing with a lifetime of the effects thyroid cancer causes, especially when the whole situation was preventable, here's how I expect this to be reported on in some sectors of the press:
"ONOZ! WTF!? Kiddies haz cansur! Newclear powah is bad! Reactorz, what r u doin? Shhhtap!" ...or something along that kind of intelligence level. I'm still pretty impressed by the level of punishment a badly designed,badly sited, badly maintained nuclear reactor complex could t
Re:Fly Ash (Score:2)
Some of us have a disregard for "Clean Coal" as well.
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Re:Radioactive ooze! (Score:5, Insightful)
I heard a thing a while ago about coal-burning plants emitting more hard radiation from their smoke stacks than nuclear plants leak in real-life operation
Perhaps you heard this [scientificamerican.com]. But you can't just conclude on that alone that coal is bad. It is possible to scrub the output of the smokestacks. Coal ash is even easier to keep contained.
Despite the sarcastic tone, everyone, even you, realizes nuclear power is dangerous. It might seem that the main question is, are the benefits worth the dangers? On balance, the answer seems to be yes, nuclear is worth doing. But hang on. Costs and benefits should be the big question, but sadly there are some other factors to consider. Given human failings, which is the safer power source? Nuclear power can be generated safely, but will it? Such is the pressure to make a profit that operators will cut corners on safety to save a few dollars. We have careful analysis and fairly good consensus on the measures that must be taken to operate a nuclear power plant with reasonable safety, and then that all gets thrown out the window when a plant is built on the coast, with a wall that is not high enough. They gambled that a tsunami of enough magnitude to top the inadequate wall they built would not happen during the plant's lifetime. They were wrong.
It's even worse than that. The owners deliberately fudged the data on tsunamis. They had enough information to know that they needed a higher wall. Instead, they took a fool's course. They leaned hard on the engineers to approve a lower height for the wall. At a plant further south, the chief engineer bravely fought back and refused to authorize a wall he knew would not be adequate. The owners, being greedy fools, complained bitterly about the additional expense, and threatened to fire the engineer for not "cooperating". This kind of unfair pressure is very common in our capitalist systems. Might as well threaten to fire the universe for not being nice enough. Today, the result is that that other plant came through the tsunami intact. But it didn't matter, because Fukushima, where the engineers bowed to the pressure, failed spectacularly and now the entire nuclear power industry is teetering on the edge.
The owners did not trouble to understand the scope of the gamble they were taking on behalf of everyone, and it was their responsiblity to understand. Then, having upped the risk of a nuclear disaster to unacceptable levels that we the public would never have agreed to had we known, they went further. They skimped on the design and maintenance of various backup systems. Diesel powered emergency generators were located below what the water level would be if a tsunami should top the wall. If a tsunami happened, disaster was guaranteed.
I'm still pretty impressed by the level of punishment a badly designed,badly sited, badly maintained nuclear reactor complex could take
I'm not impressed. Ultimately, it couldn't take the punishment. Almost isn't good enough, not with something as dangerous as nuclear power.
Another bit of deliberate blindness too often paraded here is ignoring alternative power. When compared to only coal, nuclear looks pretty good. But coal is a low standard to beat. How does nuclear power stack up against solar, wind, and water? Not so well.
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Another factor to take into consideration is the scope of a potential disaster. If Indian Point [wikipedia.org] was to melt down and create an exclusion zone a little smaller than Chernobyl it would mean the evacuation of 8 million people in New York and closure of one of the World's biggest financial centers. Now the odds are incredibly small that this could happen but it's worth weighing this vs going with coal which causes a larger constant amount of damage every year. Assuming of course you must pick between nuclear an
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Okay, I'll say this again: deaths are not a good measure of safety.
The "nuclear power causes fewer deaths" has been another popular but wrong argument. By that measure, Hurricane Andrew, which killed only 39 people, was a smaller disaster than many passenger airplane crashes that you've probably never heard of.
If instead you look at how much land has been rendered useless for decades, perhaps even centuries, nuclear stands out as by far the worst. There has never been an "exclusion zone" created for
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Poor reporting does not diminish their suffering. You are just trying to distract from the issue. Coal is a red herring, no-one is seriously suggesting coal as the alternative and Japan wouldn't be using more of it if it had been a planned, gradual move away from nuclear.
My mother had thyroid cancer. As well as needing medication for life she can't absorb calcium any more, so her bones are brittle and teeth started to fall out. It is a very survivable but not at all trivial illness, and like all serious ill
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Coal is a red herring, no-one is seriously suggesting coal as the alternative and Japan wouldn't be using more of it if it had been a planned, gradual move away from nuclear.
Is it? If we're not using Nuclear and we're not using Coal, what are we realistically switching to?
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Germany is doing pretty well with wind and solar. Japan has massive hydro and thermal resources, as well as offshore wind. Although it isn't very green the US is now using a lot of natural gas too, if we are simply talking about alternatives that are less bad than coal.
As I said, if they had been given time to manage the transition it could have happened cleanly.
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Furthermore the dummies you are quoting can't even spell N-E-W-K-Y-O-U-L-E-R.
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I'm still pretty impressed by the level of punishment a badly designed,badly sited, badly maintained nuclear reactor complex could take before things started getting out of control.
That's like being pretty impressed that the kid almost survived the drive-by shooting.
Now get off my lawn. And while you're at it, GTFO my world, or fix your stupid broken attitude.
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No this is proof that our diagnostic skills are improving.
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/health/healthguide/esn-thyroid-cancer-ess.html
when you test everyone in a population you will find more cases of a illnes than would be "normal"
this is called “increased diagnostic scrutiny.”
Re:Radioactive ooze! (Score:5, Funny)
Well hey on the bright side the turtles won't have to go far to find a ninja master!
the 3 eye fish will get them before they can make (Score:2)
the 3 eye fish will get them before they can make it very far.
Re:Radioactive ooze! (Score:5, Interesting)
Not nearly as reactive as this FUD however.
Interesting choice of words.
Why would you consider information about a radioactive leak which includes very bio-active beta-emitters to be FUD? The BBC article from TFA doesn't even identify bioaccumulation as the biggest risk factor in this current leak, despite strontium 90 being one of the beta emitters detected in the puddles.
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Why does it have to be toxic? Can't we have radioactive nontoxic ooze? Maybe if you irradiate some green playdough and get it wet?
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Works out to (Score:2)
Good thing it's a big ocean. Pity it's such a small island.
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Re: Two Different 300 Tonnes(es) (Score:2)
Its confusing, but from the report it actually sounds like theres 300 tonnes total of the 'stand near a puddle for an hour to get your annual dose' stuff and 300 tonnes per day leaking of the less radioactive waste water they're using to keep the ponds of spent reactor rods cool.
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Thanks..... who the heck measures a liquid by weight?
But.... 75,000 gallons is a pittance, given that there are 326,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons [howstuffworks.com] on earth. So, that's 12 trillion years worth.....
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if we're talking about water, weight and volume are near equivalent in both the sane and ridiculous measurement systems used by the world.
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So, you are saying that we should only be concerned when they dump enough toxic waste into the ocean so that it will more or less immediately affect everyone on earth?
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Thanks..... who the heck measures a liquid by weight?
It's done all the time in motorsport, as weight (or more technically mass) doesn't vary with temperature.
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Yes, it's done in aviation as well, for similar reasons. However, when I pull into a petrol station, I don't say "ten kilograms, please".
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...approx. 75k gals per day. or not quite enough to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool.
Question: Where does all this water come from? It's been leaking for years, isn't it empty yet? Have they got some weird infinite source of water?
Hope that works (Score:2)
They just keep adding fresh. They are near the ocean, not infinite, but they can keep topping it up for as long as they can find new heroes to run the hose.
Good News! (Score:5, Funny)
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Reminds me of the old " The solution to pollution is through dilution"
mix it all up with sea water, and no one will ever notice... well maybe the three eyed fish. but those are just perks.
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Some pollutants do, indeed, dilute almost as neatly as a chem101 'concentrations of mixtures' exercise (some even better, if some quirk of the enviromnet causes them to form a nice insoluble, biologically inactive, precipate somewhere that nobody cares about). Others (most notoriously some of the nastier lipid soluble persistent organics) get hoovered up by the small fry and shunted in
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Keep your eyes on those geiger counters, kids. Tick tick tickety means run your ass outta there.
So.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Should I apologize to my kid before or after he's old enough to understand that humanity has no future?
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nonsense, we can extend and beef up the grid.
smarter countries are making heavy investment in nuclear power and R&D.
Happened years ago (Score:2)
Already been done by Carter, Reagan and Thatcher. It's just been a dead cat bounce since then with reactors living out their lifetime and nearly nothing being built. With a technology like that unless you keep on building stuff continuously you slide backwards because you've got to train a new bunch to build each reactor.
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Did you happen to see the story about Germany's renewable energy that was posted today? Turns out coal isn't the only other way of generating electricity.
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If you care, sign the petition:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-united-states-petition-un-and-japan-seek-assistance-removing-spent-fuel-fukushima/LHSB04r0 [whitehouse.gov]
Godzilla (Score:3)
Heh (Score:2)
We've got 'leak' in the headline for three articles in a row. (If you have the same topics enabled as I do.)
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Hmm. Maybe this [scmp.com] will be next...
AHHHH We're ALL DEAD (Score:2)
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Except of course only ~300 tonnes of partially treated water IN TOTAL leaked (not 300 tonnes per day) and the leak has been stopped.
Sorry, that is incorrect. There are many much better stories about the leaks, but even this one mentioned (at the bottom):
Yes, they are pumping water out of a leaky tank into another one, but have only promised to remove the contaminated soil, nothing done on that yet. And the problem is that these plants are sinking, and there is ground water flowin
Multiply any radiation claims by 10x (Score:3)
International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (Score:2)
North US and state of human society in 2013 (Score:2)
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-09-19/fukushima-radiation-japan-irradiates-west-coast-north-america [zerohedge.com]
In any case. Look at what's happening on this planet now with governments, governments organizations (nsa, ...) their corporation overlords, etc. You get the point.
Shouldn't it make sense that the world unites and helps Japan fix this problem ? At least the countries that can. I mean radiation is a global problem, not Japanese problem just because it happened in Japan.
Sometimes I think we're so ignor
So call me paranoid (Score:2)
but does anyone else feel this may be leading to a very Godzilla like situation.
It's been upgraded to a Level 3 Event. (Score:5, Informative)
Each level is considered 10 times more severe than the level below, just like earthquake intensity scales.
I live less than 100 miles south the Fukushima plant.
On behalf of the people around me, I'd like to tell the Godzilla and Ninja Turtles-type of posters to go fuck yourselves. This isn't a fucking Internet meme to some of us.
Some of us who weren't killed or hurt in the earthquake or tsunami still have financial problems from the economic downturn in our businesses. We're not all in a position to just be able to pack up and move. We don't all live in trailers like some of you Godzilla-spouting fuckers.
Some of us have had to dig deeply into our savings.
To be honest, I'm more worried now than I was a year ago. We're back to trying to contain events instead of making any progress toward cleaning up and decontaminating.
I think a bigger problem is this:
How are they going to continue to find people willing to work at the plant? They quit after a while.
Would you work in a sealed decontamination suit and breathing gear outside in a heat index about 140F for about the same money the night shift kid-manager at Burger King makes? Just how smart and competent can someone like that be?
That's scary.
And the problem is not the engineers, it's the reckless, cost-cutting zealot-assholes from the accounting departments who become the presidents of utilities instead of engineers.
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I think any disasters on this scale ALL the directors of the companies should be directly involved in the clean up (read physically there doing the work) or simply executed publicly
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Thank you for your post. Some of us do empathize with your situation and would like to apologize on behalf of the twerps.
History shows again and again..... (Score:2)
... how nature points out the folly of man.
GO GO GODZILLIA!
Scale (Score:2)
300 tons (80,000 gallons) of water is approximately...
* A city swimming pool
* The amount they dropped on the ground
* The amount they are leaking into the ocean each day.
* The amount they are adding to the tank farm a day.
Wow!
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
"A puddle of the contaminated water was emitting 100 millisieverts an hour of radiation"
Wow! that's slightly more radiation than you'd get from a flight over the ocean! Let's all freak out!
"In addition up to 300 tonnes a day of contaminated water is leaking from reactors buildings into the sea"
You fail at conversions. 100millSiverts = ~2000 Sydney Australia to Los Angles flights (1 flight is around .05 milliSieverts or 50 microSieverts).
Re:useless article (Score:5, Informative)
Better check your arithmetic. It's giving off 100 mSv/hr = 876 Sv/yr (about 175x the fatal dose). If you flew in an airliner 24x7 you'd get 24 mSv/yr (a dose 36,500x smaller).
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I'm pretty tolerant of my neighbors, but 100 mSv/hr in the neighborhood would definitely be a deal breaker.
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different energies of radiation have different damage potential
The idea of the Sievert unit is that it's weighted according to damage to human health (the unweighted unit is a Gray). You're right about the internal/external thing though.
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I ain't going near it, how about you?
Re:useless article (Score:5, Informative)
In parts of the US background exposure is 1700 mrem or 17 mSv per year. So the 5 year background exposure is 85 mSv.
In the US the normal power plant exposure limit is 50 mSv per year, and under emergency conditions it can be raised to 250 mSv per year.
According to the news report 100 mSv/hr was right at the surface of the puddle.
So don't go there.
Re:useless article (Score:5, Informative)
Totally wrong on the puddle, not bothering with the rest.
http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/faqs/commercialflights.html [hps.org]
Nutshell:
"The corresponding annual effective dose, based on 700 hours of flight for subsonic aircraft and 300 hours for the Concorde, can be estimated at between 200 mrem for the least exposed routes and 500 mrem for the more exposed routes."
500 mrem is equal to 5 millisievert. So 100 msv is equal to 20 years of commercial airline employee exposure. In one hour.
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Re:useless article (Score:5, Insightful)
So yeah, if you decided, against all common sense, to bathe unprotected in the water leaking out of the reactor for an hour, then you would experience a statistically noticeable increase in cancer risk. Given that everyone knows there's radiation over there, nobody is doing this. That doesn't quite mean that it's 'safe' or 'trivial'... but it also doesn't mean you need to freak out and stop eating fish or anything.
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On the bright side, you can buy Fukushima real estate very cheap these days. Uh, what's the half-life of this stuff? Gotta do a present/future value calculation on that real estate investment.
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Re:I like fish (Score:5, Informative)
Things to consider:
A. How much radioactive water has actually leaked into the Pacific Ocean prior to the latest reports?
B. What is the true amount of radioactive water still leaking into the Pacific Ocean?
C. How long until the leaks are stopped?
D. Given A,B and C, what will be the total amount of radioactive water to be dispersed from the local site?
E. Given D, how may fish are likely to encounter this area, considering fish migrate thousands of miles?
F. Given E, How many predatory fish will each the contaminated fish, spreading radiation through the marine food chain?
G. What is the period of time the radiation will remain in the marine food chain?
I think I'll be testing my fish with a geiger counter for a while.
Re:I like fish (Score:4, Informative)
Things to consider: A. How much radioactive water has actually leaked into the Pacific Ocean prior to the latest reports? B. What is the true amount of radioactive water still leaking into the Pacific Ocean? C. How long until the leaks are stopped? D. Given A,B and C, what will be the total amount of radioactive water to be dispersed from the local site? E. Given D, how may fish are likely to encounter this area, considering fish migrate thousands of miles? F. Given E, How many predatory fish will each the contaminated fish, spreading radiation through the marine food chain? G. What is the period of time the radiation will remain in the marine food chain?
I think I'll be testing my fish with a geiger counter for a while.
H. Ignore A through G as you are probably more likely to win the lottery (even w/o every buying a ticket) than to suffer any ill effects from this unless you live in close proximity. And are more likely to get mercury poisoning than for this to affect you in any way.
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I think I'll be testing my fish with a geiger counter for a while.
Firstly, you'd be much better off testing your fish for mercury. This is a very widespread pollution problem, unlike this leak, and actually does harm a lot of people.
Secondly and more importantly, the spot price of Uranium only has to rise by about a factor of 5 before it becomes economically viable to extract uranium directly from seawater.
Re:I like fish (Score:5, Informative)
The first thing you should have asked is: What kind of radiation from what type of source?
"While it had been treated to reduce radioactive caesium, tests of the leaked water found it was still highly contaminated with beta-ray emitting substances including strontium, which has a half-life of about 30 years and can cause bone cancers."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-20/toxic-puddles-discovered-at-fukushima-nuclear-plant/4899844 [abc.net.au]
Enjoy your fish and osteosarcomas.
Re:I like fish (Score:5, Interesting)
300 tons of contaminated water doesn't seem like a lot when you consider there are (roughly) 784,430,000,000,000,000.00 tons of water in the pacific ocean alone. I think I'll still eat fish...
Make that 300 tons of contaminated water per day, something that Japan's environmental agency says has been happening since very soon after the initial accident in March of 2011. According to NPR [npr.org], the next plan is to dig a bunch of cooling pipes into the ground and create an underground "ice wall" to stop the contamination from flowing out in to the ocean. No, really
You can trivialize all you want, but if I were you I'd avoid eating the fish from anywhere near the Japanese coast, and anything that eats there during annual migrations. Could be bad for your health. Radioactivity builds up in plants and animals over time, and it's been pouring in for 2 1/2 years now.
If that isn't bad enough, a newly stated concern is the proximity of melted fuel in relation to the Tokyo aquifer that extends under the plant. If and when the corium reaches the Tokyo aquifer, there will be 40 million people in the Tokyo area without access to safe water.
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Now that's a cool solution.
There's nothing wrong with that so long as it isn't the only thing done. You only need to keep it frozen long enough to find the leak, seal it and dig/pump out the contaminated stuff.
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Crude oil tanks of the same vintage as this plant have clay or impermiable rock underneath and bund walls enclosing the surrounding area. I'm curious whether nuclear power plants have the same precautions in place but they failed or if they are not held to the same standard and don't have to be prepared for leaks.
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And of course TEPCO is still fighting not to pay out compensation to affected fishermen. Actually it will be the government, or rather the tax payer, who coughs up the money, since TEPCO is basically nationalized now. The government insures all nuclear plants because no commercial insurer will go near them.
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Re:The engineers responsible should be killed, slo (Score:4, Insightful)
Before you kill the engineers, I'd like to meet them. I didn't even know it was possible for mankind to create a 30 meter wave that can kill 18,000 people.
Oh, wait, you meant the engineers that designed the nuclear plant that withstood the largest earthquake ever to hit Japan and then the subsequent tsunami? Hmmm, maybe we should agree to disagree.
The nuke plant gets all the play, and it is an ongoing expensive headache, but there are 18,000 people who would have rather been in Fukushima that day.
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They weren't, as far as we know, acting with malice. I love how you armchair quarterback the plant design, but you have no strong words for the people who failed to protect actual human beings. It's a double-standard. The plant engineers haven't killed anyone - though even if a few die, they didn't allow people to live and work in the direct path of a tsunami.
Re:The engineers responsible should be killed, slo (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh, I KNEW there was going to be one of these comments here.... Guess what, I know you don't know this, but I feel it's important to pass this info on: NO MATTER HOW BAD YOU FEEL ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO DIED, THEY ARE DEAD.
People like you really piss me off because you seem to think that if all we do is throw a big pity party then the people who died in the tsunami will come back to life. But you have really BELIEVE they will, and only talk about them and absolutely nothing else. Guess what, it sucks that they died, it sucks hard, but there isn't a god damn thing you can do about, no matter how much you talk about it. But the people's friends and relatives DO have to deal with the nuclear issue. They DO have to deal with being kicked out of their homes for who knows how long. Unlike the dead people their situation can be changed(for better or worse). So yeah, unlike your self-righteous claims to the contrary, talking about the nuclear situation is in fact more productive than a constant pity party. Moron.
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You have me completely wrong. I see two fuckups:
a) a nuke plant was left vulnerable and unprotected.
b) 18,000 people were left vulnerable and unprotected.
Fuckup (a) left no one dead, but maybe a few injured. Sure, it's an ongoing problem and yes, life for the people affected sucks. But fuckup (b) was way, way, way, worse. As you said, nothing can bring those people back. They are never going home. Better to lose your home than to die. Fuckup (b) also meant hundreds of thousands of other structures were dest
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And at 300 tonnes per day it could leak until the end of time and not cause (after dilution) 18,000 additional deaths.
To call this a mole hill made into a mountain is to overemphasize it's size... after this is diluted into the ocean this does not even make mole hill status.
I wouldn't want to bath in the puddle before it leaks into the ocean. But bathing in the ocean more than a few hundreds of meters off shore would be safe.
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It was a 15m wave, and the plant was designed only to withstand 7.5m tsunami and magnitude 7.1 quakes. Both the tsunami and the quake damaged the plant. Japan had experienced larger tsunami and quakes before.
In fact the nuclear regulator warned TEPCO that defences were inadequate years before the disaster. The engineers knew there was a problem, they are not to blame. It is, as ever, the managers and profit motive.
Also, it's a slightly bizarre argument to say that because 18,000 other people died that someh
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Also, it's a slightly bizarre argument to say that because 18,000 other people died that somehow mitigates Fukushima.
It's not bizarre at all. It's not just the nuke plant that wasn't protected - it was the whole damn coast! If the engineers knew that the plant wasn't safe, then they "knew" that those people weren't safe. Screw the stupid plant - why weren't those people moved or protected? I'm not sure why you brought up Iraq or Africa - they weren't part of the same disaster. If you want to play the analogy game, then it's like worrying about some oil that spilled into the Persian Gulf during the Iraqi invasion. Sure, it
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Those towns were not built by a single entity, they developed over many years. There was no plan for safety from the start. Their initial location was chosen hundreds or even thousands of years ago, before such things were understood.
In actual fact the risks were understood which is why evacuation procedures were put in place. The problem is that the tsunami was not detected early enough and the evacuation message did not spread quickly enough. In other words an attempt was made to make those people safe, b
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My point is that people lack perspective. The nuke plant problem is serious when viewed in isolation, but minor compared to the disaster that hit the area. If the meltdown had happened without any accompanying natural disaster (like Chernobyl), then I would be a lot more likely to be critical of the engineers.
Sure, the plant was not adequately protected from the tsunami. Neither were 18,000 people. Which is the bigger error in judgement?
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It is not "increasingly" serious... this leak pales in comparison to the meltdown. It is ongoing, and it will be for 60 years. What, you think the rest of the tsunami damage magically cleaned itself up? The whole coast is scarred, not just this one oozing nuke plant.
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They approved a design that, in the failure of grid power, a generator fault would guarantee a meltdown.
Indeed. I remember as a kid with an interest in nuclear power in the 1980s, reading about the design of the GE Mark I Boiling Water Reactor [wikipedia.org] and boggling at the lack of a PWR-style containment building because the suppression torus "should be enough". But accidents always happen, I thought. What if some disaster caused a meltdown or explosion? Well, the article said, because there was no containment, the result of a meltdown would be unthinkable and therefore hasn't been investigated. Instead there would be
Re:The engineers responsible should be killed, slo (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
It is the BWR abortions that are inherently dangerous as hell. Prove that a safe proper PWR costs "too much". There are numerous PWRs operating in the US, France, and other countries. Many submarines and aircraft carriers have PWRs.
Re: (Score:2)
if made radioactive enough it will kill in short order both the pirates and their families, fences, collaborators and everybody else that comes into contact with the illegally begotten cash
And after a while and a few more exchanges, anyone else who happens to use that particular currency, which is kind of bad news if it's dollars or something.
And if you think that's only going to be "rich" people, you haven't thought very far. Or maybe you had.
Either this is a somewhat tasteless joke, or you're a psychopath.
Re: (Score:2)
Why don't you enlighten us, oh wise one.