Fukushima Ocean Radiation Won't Quit 210
mdsolar writes with an update on how the oceans around Fukishima are doing. From the article: " The Fukushima disaster caused by far the largest discharge of radioactivity into the ocean ever seen. A new model presented by scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts estimates that 16.2 petabecquerels (1015 becquerels) of radioactive caesium leaked from the plant — roughly the same amount that went into the atmosphere. Most of that radioactivity dispersed across the Pacific Ocean, where it became diluted to extremely low levels. But in the region of the ocean near the plant, levels of caesium-137 have remained fixed at around 1,000 becquerels, a relatively high level compared to the natural background. Similarly, levels of radioactive caesium in bottom-dwelling fish remain pretty much unchanged more than 18 months after the accident."
The article suggests run-off from contaminated land and possibly a leak in the plant itself are to blame for the levels not dropping as expected.
I thought metric solved these issues (Score:2)
Someone needs to check the units on this article!
Re:I thought metric solved these issues (Score:5, Informative)
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More like somebody didn't understand exponentiation.
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Nope - it was merely copied and pasted without fixing it properly.
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> It just makes them harder to read for us non-nerds, so I always restore the numbers to normal size when I quote them.
I for one thank you, sir. You can't possibly imagine how many times I searched for notes at the bottom of the page, at the end of articles and everywhere, thinking those numbers were indexes to footnotes.
Re:I thought metric solved these issues (Score:5, Informative)
The USSR has dumped over 39PBq in to oceans intentionally .
The UK has dumped over 35PBq in to the oceans intentionally.
A total dumping over all countries of 85PBq is known (ignoring of course military dumping, etc)
So I assume by 'largest' they simply mean as a single event, certainly a lot more than that has been dumped, and there are single sights with more than that also..
While we are at it..
Weapons testing released 2,566,087 PBq also, just for reference (a lot of it not that far from Vegas..)
Chernobyl released 12,060 PBq
Also for reference, 1kg of coffee, and 1kg of granite also has around 1000 becquerels, the remaining number we are supposed to consider 'relatively high'
So here is hoping no one has granite kitchen tops, or drinks coffee regularly..
Yawn.
Re:I thought metric solved these issues (Score:4, Funny)
The petabecquerel is an imaginary thing like orgone energy, homeopathy, human reason and Canada.
Obligatory: http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120326002953/simpsons/images/8/87/Blinky_Art.png [nocookie.net]
Re:I thought metric solved these issues (Score:4, Funny)
Canada, tooi? I thought only Belgium was imaginary.
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Yes. Now Nebraska is a whole different' story. I've never met anyone from Nebraska.
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Not all of us are engineers, and we appreciate (proper) use of SI prefixes.
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... that is unless you're one of those assholes who likes to say a file is 16305067 bytes in length instead of just saying 16.3mb.
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One of the more difficult bits of the metric system is that it's case-sensitive. While bits and bytes are not SI units, it is customary to differentiate megabytes ("MB") from millibits ("mb").
Remember also that "K" is short for kelvin, while "k" ("kilo-") is the prefix for one thousand.
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16 305 067 bytes = 15.5497236 megabytes [google.it]
Yes, some jerk objects and wants to define 1M as 1000000 instead of 1024*1024 bytes: the file is in RAM. HA!
(whoever thought that mass memory could use different units than volatile memory, should have been tarred gzipped and feathered)
Engineering notation vs. scientific notation (Score:3, Insightful)
That's just the common ASCII-friendly version of scientific notation; the equivalent in engineering notation would be 16.2E+15 becquerels, as "engineering notation" differs from "scientific notation" in that while the latter uses the smallest exponent which gives a mantissa >= 1, the former uses the smallest exponent divisible by
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mdsolar writes (Score:4, Interesting)
Stopped reading right there. It's the Slashdot equivalent of "An article on Fox news..."
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Then you are an idiot. If you read the summary it seems interesting, and TFA backs it up.
Dismissing information out of hand simply because of the source is dumb.
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mdsolar is not known for disinformation.
He is known to have a company in the solar energy buisiness.
The two things have not much in common, imho.
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BS. This is not my first day on /. nor my first encounter with mdsolar's lies.
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Because Strontium isn't soluble in water and simply stayed inside of the containment.
Note: Fukushima isn't Chernobyl.
Re:mdsolar writes (Score:5, Informative)
You are being ridiculous. The article in question was published in nature, which is about as reputable and prestigious as it gets.
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AC wrote:
Exactly. "Radioactive material with half-life of 30 years not gone in 18 Monat, more at 11..."
TFS wrote:
... levels of caesium-137 have remained fixed at around 1,000 becquerels ...
IOW, we would expect levels of caesium-137 (with a half-life of 30 years) to be slowly declining yet measurements show the levels have remained constant. This is a puzzle.
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AC thinks particles go "oh, hey, it's my half-life" and flash into another element.
Isn't the half-life the halfway point between one and the other? And a legitimate question: is the conversion rate constant?
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It's exponential, following the formula [wikipedia.org] x(t)=x(0)*(1/2)^(t/h), where h is the half life, x(t) is the amount left at time t and x(0) is the initial amount -- you can see that at time t=h (that is, after an amount of time equal to the half-life), you have x(h)=x(0)*(1/2)^1, that is, the half the initial amount is left.
Note that this is a statistical property. Each atom has a fixed probability to decay at every instant; but if you have a lot of atoms,
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The conversion rate is not constant: that is why it is called half life.
You start with 1000 particles, after the half life of 30 years is over, you have 500, after another 30 years you habe 250 and after 90 years in total, you have 125.
(Excuse me for not using powers of two and show all ten steps from 1024)
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Isn't the half-life the halfway point between one and the other?
I'm not sure I quite undertand this question; between one and the other what? If you mean between one element (in this case Cs-137) and the one it decays into (in this case Ba-137) then no, that's a complete misundertandng of what a half-life is (more on what a half-life is below).
And a legitimate question: is the conversion rate constant?
No it isn't, the conversion rate (as measured by the activity of a sample) is proportional to the number of radioactive atoms that are present (because the more atoms you have the greter the chance that one of them will decay in a
I can haz... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I can haz... (Score:4)
Nah, the Third Angel, I'm guessing.
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In Japan, Godzilla haz you!
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But godzilla doesn't have any tentacles!
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unholy slashdot army (Score:2)
did they clone him first, then zombify him, or did they zombify him then clone him? Is such a thing even possible? Either way, an abomination against nature.
Radiaton source !Fukishima (Score:2)
That's where Japan is hiding its forty-meter battle robots, Godzilla, and crashed alien spaceships.
Not unexpected (Score:5, Informative)
It is expected to take the better part of this decade to even get at where the leaks are coming from, let alone stop them. The problem isn't going away any time soon.
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What may be expected? (Score:2)
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Was it ever figured out what was hidden in that shopjob? Did they ever make a statement when it was called out?
More than the Bikini Atoll tests? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a hard time believing the first sentence given all the nuclear weapon testing we've done in the Pacific.
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Mod parent up. I want an answer to this too.
Re:More than the Bikini Atoll tests? (Score:5, Informative)
Short version is that weapons are optimized to use the absolute minimum fissionable material and reactors are optimized for an engineering reasonable heat flux per sq meter.
The cost of building an ICBM to carry something "just 500 pounds heavier" is enormous. The motivation to make weapons lighter is intense.
On the other hand PWRs need to keep heat flux low enough to not boil at a sane flow rate, and BWRs REALLY need to stay in nucleate boiling mode. This means a reactor is insanely heavier than a weapon.
A normal human can pick up a modern weapons physics package. Well you have to be in .mil and lift weights occasionally, not your average people of walmart. But the point is the fun stuff is pretty light. A reactor core is made out of hundreds of modules each of which requires a rather heavy crane to lift individually.
Another way to put it is if you want to light it off, it needs well under 100 pounds of the fun stuff. But if you want to reliably extract a gigawatt or so for a couple decades, there's some thermodynamic and materials science reasons that ANYTHING that can transfer a GWt over the long term is gonna be tons. Doesn't matter if the heat came from U or Pu or coal, its gonna take tons of metal to reliably transfer that heat into water. Kinda like if you wanna fire, a match isn't all that big, but a GW class coal electrical power plant, which also uses fire, is really heavy.
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Not to mention - the more of that material that is released as energy the better, from a weapons perspective. A proper warhead wouldn't spew heavy elements all over the place.
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That was going to be my point, as well - the US and Russia did above ground nuclear bomb testing for years. I believe India's initial testing was above ground as well.
Re:More than the Bikini Atoll tests? (Score:5, Informative)
The lead-in sentence is certainly incorrect in its current, broad brush form. Immediately after a nuclear explosion the decay of short lived isotopes creates levels of radioactivity astronomically higher than a leaking civilian power plant. But those short lived isotopes rapidly disappear. Eventually you just have long-lived isotopes with half-lives of decades or longer.
Nuclear power reactors burn-up an astonishing large amount of fuel. The biggest fission yield of any nuclear test was no more than 15 megatons, which is the energy equivalent of 880 gigawatt-days (thermal) of nuclear reactor operation. Fukushima Da-ichi produced 29,891 gigawatt-days of power a year, a number 35 times larger. The amount of long-lived radioactivity (i.e. what you have left after several weeks) in Fukushima far exceeded any nuclear weapon.
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You completely neglect the fact that *all* the radionuclides of a nuclear bomb ends up in the ocean.
But only a small fraction (on the order of 3% give or take a factor of two) of that in Fukushima got out of the containments and of that only specific isotopes. And that's ignoring the obvious points that reactors #4 through #6 were unaffected (the spent fuel in the pool of reactor #4 is undamaged), the remainder accounts for less than half of the generation capacity and the fuel rods in the reactors had only
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Incorrect - at best, nuclear reactors burn 5% of the Uranium used, and that is best case scenario - average is more .5%. Only fast breeder reactors burn near 100% of their fuel and only a few exist and they are all considered experimental. They also require on-site fuel reprocessing, which brings up proliferation concerns (whether warranted or not).
The US is now obsessed with building a LMFBR (liquid metal fast breeder reactor) which converts U238 (aka nuclear waste) to fissionable plutonium through a chain
1000Bq per WHAT? (Score:5, Insightful)
Per kg, per cubic meter, per cubic foot?
If the writer of an article is incapable of determining how to write meaningful data, the article isn't worth anything at all. (S)He's just a parrot of whoever wrote the original and has no understanding of what this is about.
Re:1000Bq per WHAT? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, is it even water we're talking about or is it the ocean floor?
Fuck everything about the "news coverage" of Fukushima.
There is ZERO information you can gain from such rubbish that those retards keep puking out into the public even if you know what you're talking about. This isn't even propaganda, it's worse, it's just ignorant drivel designed to say something against nuclear power, by people who don't know the least what they are takling about, just what they want to be talking against.
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But is it "the ocean" or is the in fact the ocean floor - which would be much more plausible, as the water should have long been diluted to much lower levels.
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1000 Bq/kg water is save for humans? Hint: there is not such unit as Bq/kg.
How do you know that?
Anyway the fact that we use Bequerel in our days for measuring radioactivity is one case that everyone thinks radiation is harmless.
Bq is based on an old unit called Curie. 1 gram radium is radiating one Curie (Ci).
However 1 Ci is equivalent to 37 GBq ... so Bq is a very small unit, that is as if I wanted to measure the distance from London to New York in inches and then I say 1000 inches is not very much.
However
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There is no such unit as 1000Bq per kg?
You don't begin to see the extent of your ignorance, do you?
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The problem is that caesium-137 bio-accumulates in plants and fish. If you then eat said plants and fish, as the Japanese like to do on occasion, it gets in your body and sits there, slowly irradiating your organs. In that context 1000Bq/Kg is rather high.
Not if you knew about ocean dumping (Score:3)
You might think that the Fukushima disaster "caused by far the largest discharge of radioactivity into the ocean ever seen," but not if you weren't already aware of the over five decades' worth of ocean dumping of atomic waste.
Honestly.
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Since is says 'largest discharge', they are talking single event, not cumulative.
It still might not be true, but you shoudl be applying 5 decades of dumping.
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1000 becquerel isn't that much (Score:5, Informative)
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This is a common issue across Fennoscandia, which sits on the world's oldest rock. We have a lot of uranium deep in the crust and radon gas that fills basements comes from its natural decay.
It's one of the main reasons why most building permits nowadays require proper ventilation of basement levels. Radon in miniscule amounts as it seeps in is essentially harmless, but it tends to concentrate in unventilated areas.
Re:1000 becquerel isn't that much (Score:4, Insightful)
It is if you have an anti-nuclear agenda to push. Which many people do, for whatever reason.
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I wonder what would happen if they couldn't use any modern conveniences anymore? Most people would implode.
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Interesting... I know granite contains radioactive thorium, but had never heard of radon (which is a gas). Guess there are some [snopes.com]. Radon gas is much more likely to come from soil or along with natural gas. Fracking tends to bring it up, as well.
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1000 bq isn't that much. It might be much compared to the background radiation but to put it in context, recommended values in Sweden after Chernobyl is to not eat meat that radiates more than 1500 bq/kg. This radiation comes from Cesium-137 that mostly rained down over us. And 10 years after we could still kill game (mostly moose) with in excess of 4000 bq/kg. Many residential houses stand on granite that contains radon, and the limits for radiation from radon was 1000 bq/m^2,until 2009 when the EU lowered the limit to 200 bq/m^2. So.. We in Sweden lived with this kind of radiation for quite some time and we don't really consider this a problem. The halflife of Cesium-137 is about 30 years so the radiation is dropping steadily but slowly.
Yeah but radon is one of the main sources of lung cancer so it's far from harmless these levels. Some one in a foreign country that eats fish from there a couple of times a year probably wouldn't have much risk but a local eating it three to five times a week could be affected. I'd limit or avoid consumption of sea food from the area until the levels drop which is likely to be decades given the continued leaking and half life involved. This isn't anti nuke it's pro health so why take the risk if you can avo
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You forget though, that the values are cumulative, and that alpha particles INSIDE your body can cause quite a bit more damage.
Also, a bigger problem regarding radon is the fact that a lot of concrete was made from powdered granite. Thus you got concrete that contained radon in buildings. Concrete that was drilled in etc, and released dust containing radon, which got into lungs etc. And claiming that it's not been a big deal in Sweden is a big fucking lie. There's a reason many housing corporations perform
why? because it's still leaking... (Score:4, Informative)
It's no surpise that the sea is radiactive. Since the accedient there have been a series of leaks from the jury-rigged water purification setup:
December 2011
45 tons of water heavily contaminated with radioactive strontium escaped, of which 150 liters of water found its way into the ocean through a ditch connected with the beach
26 March 2012
80 litres radioactive water seeped into the ocean
5 April 2012
12.000 liters water with high levels of radioactive strontium escaped through a nearby sewer-system into the ocean
On top of that the contaminated water lying in the basements is leaking into the ground water and out to the ocean. TEPCO are building a wall to contain that, but it won't be finished until 2014.
It does not make sense. (Score:2)
It does notmmake sense to compare background radiation with polution from a nuclear desaster.
Background radiation is basically caused by stone and radon, bouncing of from yur clothes or skin. In case of radon you inhale it and exhale it and radiation hits the surface of your lung.
Polution from a nuclear desaster has dozens or hundrets of isotopes that get build into your metabolizm. That means your inner organs ore more precisely your cells get radiated and destructed from the inside.
That all has nothing to
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And that's why there is that concept called absorbed effective dose used to measure the biological effect of radioactivity (in sievert) - natural or otherwise. And using those, there is no question that Finland and Sweden must be evacuated in order to comply with the WHO rules setting a limit of 350mSv of absorbed effective lifetime dose, as the average there is 7mSv and 6mSv per person per year on average.
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and a counter to that is the US Navy Nuclear program which has not had ANY accidents in its history
(not counting losing material/ ships getting sunk/ deliberate sabotage).
Fukushima was more or less EOL right??? (and the designers drank to much saki when setting the tolerances)
Re:chernobyl - II (Score:5, Interesting)
Fukushima was more or less EOL right??? (and the designers drank to much saki when setting the tolerances)
Problem is Fukushima is not untypical of nuclear plants in Japan. It was thought to be fine when designed, based on the available knowledge and understanding at the time. It turns out that the earthquake did a fair bit of critical damage even before the tsunami arrived, and you just can't build a plant capable of surviving beyond a certain amount of lateral force/acceleration.
And yeah, the Navy didn't have any major accidents, just a few minor ones. The US military as a whole though is a catalogue of fuck-ups. No civilian nuclear programme in the entire world is free of serious accidents.
Re:chernobyl - II (Score:5, Interesting)
It was thought to be fine exactly until 1972, when the first studies revealed that the BWR Mark I was insufficient in case of a meltdown. That was before reactor #2 was even finished. It was definitely included in the 1975 WASH-1400 report. This report also said that floods and tsunamis are a major danger to a nuclear power plant and must be protected against.
The Japanese did nothing about either of those points, they didn't train their staff to handle emergency situations in a station blackout. They didn't do anything remotely compatible with European or American standards to ensure availablitity of emergency power. They didn't equip their containments with filtered vents, which have been implemented in Europe since 1988. They didn't equip the containment buildings with hydrogen recombiners - those were only required by law in 2012 in Japan. In Germany (and probably other countries as well) those are required since 1993.
Tokai and Onagawa were perpared for and hit by the tsunami without major damage. The problem was known, countermeasures were known, non were required by law.
How do you say "It's your own damn fault!" in Japanese?
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TEPCO has adequate emergency backup batteries, they just couldn't transport them the 40km from the depot to the plant due to the damage and on-going problems there.
I was in fact talking about earthquake damage anyway, something you conveniently ignored. Even if emergency power had been available it has recently emerged that the system was damaged in the quake anyway, before the tsunami arrived. No-one in the world has plants capable of surviving the kinds of forces that earthquake exerted, so if there was a
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If, as you say, "No-one in the world has plants capable of surviving the kinds of forces that earthquake exerted" then please explain to me why reactors #5 and #6 suffered no damage in relevant safety equipment(*) despite experiencing the exact same earthequake and being flooded by the exact same tsunami, that Fukushima Daini suffered no earthquake damage in relevant safety equipment, that Onagawa - closer to the epicenter - suffered no earthquake damage in relevant safety equipment?
(*) Reactor #6 had a Mar
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They tolerances where fine. The problem is a private company did not want to pay to dispose of the material when they where supposed to.
Re:chernobyl - II (Score:4, Interesting)
For the Navy, money and personell in not a factor. Maybe that has changed or slowly changing now but the engineering was already done and the operating procedures and safety measures are already in place. I used to be in the Navy as a reactor operator back in the mid 90's on an older sub. There was not much automation and technology in use back then. The only thing that had a microporessor was the reactor protection and alarm system and it was an 8088. All controls, sensors, and gauges were mechanical and/or discrete electronic and electric. All procedures, actions, limits, and methods of operation were in print form in the reactor plant manuals and scaled down copies of those were embedded in your brain through training. It is my understanding that the nuclear training pipeline has got "easier" for folks going through now. Much less demanding and a much higher percentage of people that start actually make it to the end. The Navy now relies less on the operators and more on the supervisors and technology than they did before. Maybe that is good in that it minimizes the human error part of it or maybe that is bad as the human error factor gets shouldered or concentrated onto less people instead of spread across everyone as a collaborative effort. Having an exceptional DEEP understanding of everything coupled with technology and strong supervision would be the most ideal but I guess there aren't enough people that can make it to meet that demand.
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and a counter to that is the US Navy Nuclear program which has not had ANY accidents in its history
It's probably not a coincidence that the US Navy is also a not-for-profit institution, and therefore has only minimal incentives to cut corners.
bullshit (Score:2)
The only reason US NAvy appears to have no accidents, is because of lack of transparancy and military secrecy.
For instance, in 22 May 1978 500 gallons of "hot" radioactive water escaped from the USS Puffer's primary coolant system into a shipyard.
http://oc.itgo.com/kitsap/nuclear/clymer.htm [itgo.com]
USS Thresher (Score:2)
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The Thresher went down because a brazed salt-water pipe burst, and the subsequent inability to blow the ballast tanks due to excessive moisture in the sub's high-pressure air flasks, which froze and plugged the flasks' flowpaths while passing through the valves.
The Thresher reactor scram (due to the leak shorting out electrical panels) was not the main cause of the sinking and loss of lives.
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No, it went down because of a high pressure water leak and poor design. The SCRAM worked perfectly as designed and the reactor has never been any trouble.
Re:chernobyl - II (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet nuclear still manages to be very much environmentally preferable to coal, even after taking such accidents into account!
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Modern coal plants right now only emmit CO2. And with sequestering as it is planned in the EU, they emmit nothing at all. ...
If you life in a country where coal plants emit dangerous poluttants I would suggest you talk to your representative instead of claiming nuclear would be more harmless.
But if you think it is, talk to your representative and let him exchange the local coal plant by a nuclear one
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That stuff was copied from the article.
1015 actually had the "15" in superscript, so it represented 10^15.
The comment about "background" probably refers to natural background radiation rather than natural background Caesium-137, although it's written badly enough that it isn't clear.
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My source [wikipedia.org] says it's more like 5400 Bq:
"... exposure due to the normal potassium content of the human body, 2.5 g per kg, or 175 grams in a 70 kg adult. This potassium will naturally generate 175 g × 31 Bq/g 5400 Bq of radioactive decays, constantly through the person's adult lifetime."
1000 Bq is about 67 BED (Banana-Equivalent Dose).
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You don't understand radiation, do you? The problem is not the absolute dose, it is the fact that it accumulates in fish and plants, which you then eat so that it accumulates in your organs.
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That would matter if we are talking about 1000bq. However, we are talking about 16000000000000000bq. (hence the importance of the peta- prefix)
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There is about 0.0000000000000000015% of the I-131 left that was originally emitted. In short: no.
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LOL the "one week or so" half life of I-131 explains why civil defense and .mil stockpiles only contained at most a month or two's iodine tablets to protect against thyroid cancer.... its just not a credible concern after a couple months.
Thats the cool thing about nuclear waste... 100% of the arsenic that came out of the smokestack of the coal plant "nearby" my house is still in the lake where the city gets its drinking water... oops. However virtually all the radioactive iodine the nuke plant "nearby" my
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Both are bad, the former 'can' be prevented. The latter, not so much...
Re:Seaweed safe to eat? (Score:5, Informative)
The latter can be prevented, but costs for plants that burn stuff are pretty steep. My father works for a burner-based power plant manufacturer (I've seen them make stuff ranging from burning coal to burning trash to burning the weird ass crap which is about 30% oil and 70% crushed rock), and one of the things he did was handle certification and maintenance of the new plants across EU that had to comply to rigorous norms.
For example, the main cause of acid rains of the past, SO2 and NOx emissions are currently ZERO on some modern burner plants. Reason for this is extreme degree of burning process control (i.e. they can create burning conditions where certain gasses do not form, instead burning process forms far less harmful gasses such as CO2). Particles nowadays can be handled by filters which also have near-100% efficiency for particles they're responsible for. Basically they get particles out of the exhaust air and store it in a solid form which is then taken away to the appropriate dump.
This stuff is really expensive though, so only new plants get the appropriate upgrades due to rigorous standards applied to them. Older plants still crap on the environment, same thing as old nuclear plants being far more risky when major disaster occurs then new ones.
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But it 'can' be prevented. Not so much the effects of a nuclear disaster.
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Actually those can be prevented just as well. Fukushima plant that blew up was a 1st gen 1960s plant. If it was upgraded to modern tech from today, it would likely not have suffered critical malfunctions that it did. Many of their backup systems are still from those times. Entire plant was in fact build to last magnitude 7 earthquake. It took a 9 and survived it. Only the tsunami that followed the disaster, killing over 30.000 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless managed to destroy its power ge
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Then you live in a world of your own, the world where engineers do not exist.
Fact is, engineers plan for disasters. Various disasters, big ones, small ones, medium ones, you name it, they likely have a plan for it on major power plant sites. Fukushima for example was planned to withstand a magnitude 7 earthquake and tsunami of certain height, both huge disasters. Problem was that it got hit by a hundred times stronger earthquake and a tsunami four times higher then their seawall. Other plants in the vicinit
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Kindly explain how "being able to prepare for accident" and "cleaning up after preparations were meant for something hundred times weaker because of a number of reasons and failed" are related?
Also, nothing else? Really?
Are you at all familiar with (from top of my head):
1. Long term toxicity from specific forms of power generation, such as for example oil shale in Estonia, where current waste deposits of heavily toxic cement*like substance are large enough to be visible from the Moon with NAKED EYE?
2. Long
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0.0000000000000000015%
Actually 1/1000 times of that (2^(-606/8))*100%.
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True, for some reason I estimated about 500 days since March 11 last year.
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The Russian cover didn't really help and had to be rebuilt and arguably still isn't very good. What would work is picking up the plant and moving it far inland, but that's a bit impractical. Most of the "armchair engineer" ideas are about as useful as the armchair engineer solutions for the gulf of mexico oil leak, in other words they would not work or would make the situation worse.
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Considering that Chernobyl had working reactors sitting next to the one that melted down up until 2000 I'd say that it worked good enough. And closure wasn't for technical reasons at all - it was a political decision taken under heavy pressure from EU.
What it wasn't good for was long term containment, because it was eroding faster then planned.