TEPCO: Nearly All Nuclear Fuel Melted At Fukushima No. 3 Reactor 255
mdsolar (1045926) writes "Almost all of the nuclear fuel in the No. 3 reactor of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant melted within days of the March 11, 2011, disaster, according to a new estimate by Tokyo Electric Power Co. TEPCO originally estimated that about 60 percent of the nuclear fuel melted at the reactor. But the latest estimate released on Aug. 6 revealed that the fuel started to melt about six hours earlier than previously thought. TEPCO said most of the melted fuel likely dropped to the bottom of the containment unit from the pressure vessel after the disaster set off by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami."
So.. what? (Score:5, Insightful)
This article really doesn't explain why this finding matters. TEPCO themselves said they do not know how this will effect the decommissioning process for the reactor, if at all. The only thing that seems to be different is that they now believe some of the fuel is still inside the pressure vessel, and it's not clear that they didn't already know that to begin with. It doesn't seem like anything will really change until TEPCO actually sends people in to get a look at it.
Re:So.. what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe we can start to talk about nuclear risk more pragmatically.
Ha. Hahaha. Ha.
Yeah. Also, maybe we can go down to hell and make some snow angels. Then get on our swines and fly off to a peaceful middle east.
Is anybody surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
In case of a nuclear accident, the industry will always downplay and deny everything that is not perfectly obvious. Has always been, and probably will always be. This is the main reason I do not trust nuclear power that is run for profit.
Re:So.. what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Meh, it's an mdsolar submission - so the inference you're expected to draw from it is OMG TEH NUCULAR IS BAD!!ONEONE!
Tell me again how many people died as a result of radiation leaks at Fukushima.
And how many died as a result of the tsunami.
And compare & contrast the relative panic and news coverage of the two.
Bah.
Re:So.. what? (Score:5, Insightful)
eh. [wikipedia.org]
Any difference looks a lot smaller than the markup I've ended up paying for things like going through an energy co-op instead of straight from the generating company.
Those numbers are almost meaningless. The nuclear numbers for the most part don't include the cost of cleanup operations
like what happened in Japan or Chernobyl. They might include a little bit paid to the government for disaster recovery but that
would quickly get used up in a real disaster. Likewise coal doesn't include environmental damage and oil doesn't include all the
military needed to keep oil stable. Even solar and wind have some negative affects. We do need to talk about cost but we
need to talk about ALL the costs not just the operating costs but all the externalized costs as well.
Re:So.. what? (Score:5, Insightful)
The tsunami continues to be a very big deal in Japan. More so than the nuclear accident at the time, and rivalling it now. The thing is the tsunami happened and that was it. Things are being done to improve safety and rebuild, but for the people left alive there isn't much on-going danger.
Fukushima, on the other hand, continues to release contaminated material and water into the environment, continues to suck up vast amounts of money with no limit and no end in sight, and continues to prevent full clean-up and re-building in the areas around the plant.
Both were terrible tragedies, but in the end Fukushima is going to cost more and last a lot longer. It also lead to the discovery of problems at many other plants, and brought into question many of the assumptions that were made about safety. The tsunami raised safety questions too, but the solution is clear: stronger defences, earlier warnings, move away from some areas. The way forward for nuclear is not so clear, so there is still a lot of debating to be done.
Japanese people have a far better understanding of the issues than you give them credit for, and I'd go as far as to say many of them have a better understanding than you.
The man who saved Onagawa (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So.. what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe we should also talk about the costs then? Nuclear is EXPENSIVE.
No. Nuclear is an economy on a different scale than than non-renewables.
It costs more going in, but you get more coming out.
If we could just stop the unwarranted fear of the technology from dictating public policy, it'd be even more economical.
Re:So.. what? (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't need to talk about costs at all. Costs are measured in the monopoly money we call "currency", and subject as they are to the vagaries and panics of the financial classes, are not an indicator or metric which we should rely on when planning our energy policies.
We need to talk about watts, mega-watt hours, materials, hours of labour, and disposal of waste. We need to talk about physical things, things we know, understand, and can do in the physical world. Not about intellectual casino chips which are magicked in and out of existence like pixels in a video game.
Energy policy is a long game that humanity is playing with the forces of the natural world. Our (dysfunctional) systems of money are about as relevant as our spoken languages in this debate.
can not fail (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So.. what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, and maybe we can talk about about abortion pragmatically too . . .
The average member of the public has an emotional, visceral reaction to things such as GMO, global warming, nuclear power, et cetera. You might as well be talking about abortion, because Joe Sixpack doesn't understand things like nuclear physics, cost-benefit analysis, risk analysis, et cetera.
After September 11th, the average American was more worried about being personally harmed by terrorism than bad driving, even though outside of a few major cities, the risk of dying in a terrorist attack was almost non-existent.
That is why there is such a disconnect between the public and scientists (and the scientifically literate) on these matters. It's easier to scare someone about strangers molesting their children than it is about their children dying or having a worse life because of global warming, even though the former is a remote probability and the later is almost inevitable.
Re:I think this means (Score:5, Insightful)
That is incorrect. ... the surrounding power pillions failed, shutting off the plant from external power.
The mag 9.5 quake was 450 miles away.
Ar the place of the reactor the quake was not even mag 6
The plant itself was damaged by far enough to be unable to produce its own power and cool itself.
And then the Tsunami hi tits emergency power.
So, claiming the 'plant survived' a '.... how was your words? Ah: "This reactor survived one of the worst natural disasters ever recorded." '
No, it certainly did not. It is smoldering in its ashes.
Not only was it NOT EVEN HIT, by the 'worst natural disaster', but it got destroyed by its wake (1 thousand times weaker than the a actual disaster/quake)!! Or actually as wake implies by the water of the tsunami.
Even if there had not been a tsunami, the plant was destroyed. What is so fucking difficult in accepting that? Sure, the emergency diesel power likely had prevented a 'disaster'.
But the plant never would have gone online again.
Claiming 'it survived the biggest catastrophe in mankind' is bullshit, and is a disrespect to the dead of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, or the simple earth quakes of the last 100 years.
Google/Wikipedia for it. The official death toll is never even close to the 'unofficial' one. And all those quakes certainly qualify your brain dead definition of 'biggest disasters naturally recorded' ... Fukushima was no such thing yet. It will be in 30 or 50 years when the radiation death will start piling up.
Re:Idiot speaks: "So.. what?" (Score:2, Insightful)
Hmm, 1.3 billion cubic km of ocean, at 3 ppb uranium naturally...
So, the ocean has, as a matter of course, ~4 billion tons of uranium, of which 0.72% is U-235. So 28,000,000 tons of U-235 in the ocean naturally.
So, if the reactor in question had a MILLION TONS of fuel (trust me, it didn't), it increased the natural radioactivity on the oceans by less than 4%.
A more realistic number would be 0.001% for the increase.
And even that number is a generous overestimate.
Re:and the real bad news is... (Score:2, Insightful)
Since 'the incident' the police is knocking on doors of young couples living in the Fukushima area and in the fall out zones north east of it, telling the couples: " you know, you should consider to have no children" (Or move away to the far south or Hokkaido)
Can you actually show this, or is this just the latest of the tall tales making its rounds on the anti-nuclear blogosphere? And anyway, even if it did happen in some form, all it would show is that people are afraid and giving each other potentially poor advice. It doesn't show that they're at actual substantial risk of harm, otherwise you could go around telling everybody to stay indoors to prevent them from being run over by cars (you know, this we can actually show to happen [cdc.gov]).
In Chernobyl the death toll over all is estimated to be a million, roughly. /. posters claim it was 3 or 5 ...
Ugh, not that rag again. Yablokov's publication is a book [amazon.com], not a peer-reviewed scientific paper. It contains tons of errors [rationalwiki.org] and was translated and pushed onto the New York Academy of Sciences by known anti-nuclear crazies [janettesherman.com] who aren't above outright falsehoods (like their assertions that Fukushima killed 15000 people in US [radiation.org] in the initial 14 weeks after the accident, even though their data [imgur.com] is trivially shown to have been manipulated and utterly bogus [imgur.com]; Mangano is often seen publishing together with another crazie, Sherman, and they've even been torn a new one [youtube.com] by an avid linear-no-threshold-supporting researcher). The Yablokov publication has since been criticized by the NYAS [nyas.org] and they've distanced themselves from it. The short story is that the NYAS' reputation was co-opted as a vehicle to fluff up the credibility of an utterly bogus piece of non-scientific writing by anti-nuclear activists.
I witnessed 1986 about a few ten thousand ... it was news every day on TV. I really wonder how people in our days with straight face claim only a few people died.
Oh my, so if something's on TV, it is truth! Well fire the scientists then, obviously all we need to do to determine fact from fiction is to listen to the daily news cycle. Fox News will be pleased.
Luckily the initial disaster in Fukushima was far away from this. However the long term issues we only will know in 30 years ... plus.
Even assuming the fairly uncontended (mainly in anti-nuke cycles) linear-no-threshold dose response model, according to actual peer-reviewed studies [stanford.edu], on average we'd expect ~250 excess deaths over the years with an upper bound of ~2500 (and that's assuming no evacuations). Was the accident harmless? Certainly not. Should TEPCO be made to compensate people for their troubles? Absolutely! But this fear mongering using junk science is in no way different to global-warming deniers and 9/11 truthers simply ignoring scientific facts to meet their political agendas. Do be like them.
Re:Idiot speaks: "So.. what?" (Score:5, Insightful)
So you think all of the radioactive crap that got dumped into the ocean is going to be magically dispersed evenly throughout the globes oceans?
Or more likely it's going to bugger up seafood local to japan for decades to come.