Fukushima Decontamination Cost Estimated $50bn, With Questionable Effectiveness 221
AmiMoJo writes "Experts from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology studied the cost of decontamination for the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, estimating it at $50 billion. They estimate that decontamination in no-entry zones will cost up to 20 billion dollars, and in other areas, 31 billion dollars. It includes the cost of removing, transporting and storing radioactive waste such as contaminated soil. The central government has so far allocated about 11 billion dollars and the project is already substantially behind schedule. Meanwhile the effectiveness of the decontamination is being questioned. NHK compared data from before and after decontamination at 43 districts in 21 municipalities across Fukushima Prefecture. In 33 of the districts, or 77 percent of the total, radiation levels were still higher than the government-set standard of one millisievert per year. In areas near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, where decontamination has been carried out on an experimental basis, radiation levels remain 10 to 60 times higher than the official limit."
Stupid Standard (Score:2)
Whats the bet that most of these areas have been above 1mSv/yr since the solar system formed. How many of these 77% are actually contaminated and by how much?
LIES! all lies! (Score:2, Insightful)
Nuclear power is still the cheapest and best option there is! /greed
I mean... It's not like the power company has to pay that 50 billion right?
Nuclear is not a good option until it can be run completely seperated and insulated from the failings of humans and human greed. The money we've spent cleaning up the few nuclear problems we've had in the short time nuclear power has been around could have gone a long long LONG way to something much cleaner and safer.
How many wind farms could you build for just 50
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Nuclear is not a good option until it can be run completely seperated and insulated from the failings of humans and human greed.
Lets be honest here. Human greed didnt cause the earthquake which sent the tsunami at those reactors.
We might call it bad judgment as to location, but maybe there wasnt really a better location. After all, Japan has like 100 volcanoes...
Maybe they shouldnt have been in the nuclear game at all, but you cant determine that based on the hindsight of a single event having happened without going into the specifics of the event. The fact that a bad thing might happen isnt exactly an excuse not to do things.
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The money we've spent cleaning up the few nuclear problems we've had in the short time nuclear power has been around could have gone a long long LONG way to something much cleaner and safer.
We've spent a lot more than $50 billion on both renewable and safer nuclear energy technologies. It's not simply a matter of spending a little more money.
Cost of nuclear fission (Score:2)
When we evaluate algorithms we consider all cases, with probability and outcome. We should start doing that for nuclear power too.
But I am no optimist, it appears the objective is not cheap energy for everyone (or the focus would be on alternative reactor kinds and reactions), but poisoning the environment (a much more profitable scheme for those who control therapies).
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What we need to do is evaluate them in terms of deaths/gigawatt-hours. But even then nuclear comes out ahead of coal, hydro and wind. Only solar is ahead.
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That would give the Blue Screen of Death a whole new meaning.
So where are the fanboys now? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's an interesting exercise to look back at the comments posted here during the week of the disaster.
Another thing the fanboys cannot tell is the difference between not liking a 1970s era nuclear power plant run badly and not liking nuclear power in general. Calling for safer reactors is not cheering blindly for the team so is an enemy in their eyes.
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Like I commented above, this still makes the 'contaminated' areas have lower radiation exposure than somewhere like Denver. Not sure why everybody is so scared and up-in-arms. I'm no fanboy, but do I think nuclear is one of the safest power generating methods we have at our disposal.
Nice False Dilemma there.. (Score:2)
Saying something isn't bad by comparing it to something worse is a logical fallacy - false dilemma.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy/False_dilemma [wikipedia.org]
As I have said before on this topic, Nuclear technology may be one of the safest power generators IN THEORY, however our (as humans) implementation and management of nuclear power has been flawed in many cases. Running reactors over operating lifetimes, building them on the edge of the sea in an earthquake zone, etc.. Solar, hydro, wind, tidal, are all
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well, you still need to keep some facts straight.
the roofs and upper walls ("blow-out panels" ) had nothing to do with containment.
Containment in that kind of plant was by containment vessels, that's what was breached.
Yes, we need to get away from gen I and II reactor designs that are from the 50s.
However, note that total deaths was zero. The quaint containment system mostly contained things.
Well, no surprise really... (Score:2)
So, cleaning up after a Level 7* disaster is hard?
(*Only two ever recorded, the other being Chernobyl )
Not surprising, although perhaps they should be targeting 'hotspots' rather than trying to get the overall levels down to an unrealistically low score.
Of course, if only a small fraction of this amount had been spent on the plant before the accident, then it could have been avoided.
Whilst I'm generally for nuclear power, this is a sad example of why much higher standards should genuinely apply to nuclear t
Union of Concerned Scientists (Score:5, Interesting)
7 years of revenue (Score:2)
$50B sounds like a lot, but for perspective keep in mind that Fukushima I generated on the order of $800,000 worth of energy every HOUR. (Assumptions: 4 GW * $0.20/kWh.)
At that rate, $50B works out to about 7 years worth of energy production.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
This is dumb, insensitive, and offensive.
You know it, you admit it, and yet you use the monospaced font anyway.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
When you talk about technologies that have brought suffering, lots of suffering was caused in Japan (and other places) by incendiary bombs made with napalm, which is petroleum derived. Should Japan not use petroleum products either?
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Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
That statement is just as silly as if you said 'OH, well bullets kill, and are made of metal, maybe no one should use metal there either?!'
Well, that's pretty much the statement that you made.
I happen to live in Tokyo. The amount of actual damage from Fukushima is pretty small. They currently have a radius of 20 km from the plant closed off. That's not very big. Let's not forget that the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami killed over 30,000 people. No one has died as a result of the radiation from Fukushima to date and current estimates are that it's not going to be very many, even when you look at the lifetime increased risk from cancer.
The comparison to petroleum is reasonable. BP claims to have spent, so far, $11B cleaning up the Deepwater Horizon spill and may wind up spending $37B which is in the same ballpark as the Fukushima mess. Is it acceptable? No. There were a number of ways that the Fukushima disaster could have been avoided. However, in the scale of industrial accidents, it's not that far out of line and it's killed a lot fewer people than other notable disasters, like Bhopal, and in the context of the overall disaster, it simply grabs the most headlines.
Your statement "Japan had first hand experience with how deadly radiation is. They should know the risks better than anyone, and I think the risks weren't worth it." is just as silly as your original point and is just as silly as the statement you yourself called out as being silly.
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No-one has any idea how many people this disaster has, or will, cause. Just as the exact number of deaths and disabilities from the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan, or for that matter from the use of agent orange in Vietnam.
All I know is that I will NEVER trust people to run fission power stations as people cut corners and lie. They do so when government owned, and they do so when owned by a company.
TEPCO have consistently lied about the details of this problem, including denying leakage into the ocean, a
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"All I know is that I will NEVER trust people to run fission power stations as people cut corners and lie. They do so when government owned, and they do so when owned by a company."
You'd best get back in your cave then... Seeing as your more than likely trust people every day to provide food, clean water, medicines, transport, power and many other essential necessities. In every country there are people with the power to do you huge amounts of harm in ways that are far more subtle than by running a Nuclear
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Informative)
No-one has any idea how many people this disaster has, or will, cause.
Im pretty sure radiation experts know what the dosages were in, around, and at a distance from the plant, and it is well documented what levels of radiation do what to the human body.
There were two workers who went into the plant during the meltdown to access the core who got doses that could be described as "concerning"; they were treated at a hospital and I believe released the same day. Only 3 workers (including the two I mentioned) recieved a dose over 100mSv; Wikipedia notes [wikipedia.org]
In 2012 the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation stated that for typical background radiation levels (1-13 mSv per year) it's not possible to account for any health effects and for exposures under 100 mSv
The amount of hysteria here is unbelievable. For the record,
10 to 30 mSv -single full-body CT scan[17][18]
68 mSv -estimated maximum dose to evacuees who lived closest to the Fukushima I nuclear accidents
@ DodgyG33zaRe:Hmmm (Score:3)
No-one has any idea [of] the exact number of deaths and disabilities from the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan
Of course no-one knows the exact number, but the data is amenable to statistical analysis and the rules concerning dosages (such as here : www.hse.gov.uk/radiation/ionising/doses/) are based on extremely pessimistic interpretations of those statistics. The levels allowable even to regular nuclear workers are far below any that have been detected to have any effect whatever on a p
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Back in Ancient Greece I think, after an arch was finished being built, the master builder would stand underneath the arch while the supports were taken down. Kind of gives you a pretty good incentive to not fuck up when the quality of your work determines if you live or die. Perhaps we could reintroduce something similar to that, require that the owners of the construction company building the plant live within 1 mile of the plant for X years.
Funnily enough, the Ancient Greeks never discovered the arch. That is why their temple interiors were a forest of columns holding up beams.
As for the "owners of the construction company" living within one mile, you should think more of the designers and those who run the plant. In fact the people who run these plants do tend to live close by and think nothing of it, and as an engineer myself who has been involved in heavy engineering projects, no doubts about the integrity of my work, of the sort that
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This often causes me to go against the grain slightly but I don't believe that adding fuel to the fire is okay because someone added more fuel prior.
I disagree. Argument via reduction to absurdity is a valid and useful tool, especially for the sort of argument we're seeing in the comments to this story.
but when something goes wrong with a hydro dam, somewhere as far as Japan, you don't end up with radiation in the snow on the west coast of Canada.
But you do on occasion end up with a lot of dead people which is a considerably worse outcome than being able to detect slightly larger trace amounts of radioactive isotopes in Canadian snow. And hydroelectric dams displace more land than nuclear reactor accidents do.
I really do hope things aren't that bad as they say.
For people who make a career of crying "wolf", it almost never is as bad as they say.
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You say you don't want a nuclear plant next to you... Do you prefer a coal-fired plant? Oil-buning plant? Natural Gas? Wind Turbines (those things seem to be noisy like hell)? Want your backyard full of solar panels and still need a secondary power source? Want to live in a valley that will soon become a lake, courtesy of the new dam?
I'd love a miniature nuclear reactor for my neighborhood: free electricity and hot water, in essence.
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The amount of actual damage from Fukushima is pretty small.
Still leaking. Enjoy your radioactive seafood. Unfortunately, all the world's oceans are connected, so we all pay the price for Japan's failure. Even more unfortunately, there's shitloads of plants just like that one... here in the USA
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Enjoy your mercury contaminated seafood. Thanks coal fired power plants!
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The amount of actual damage from Fukushima is pretty small.
According the the government and mainstream media, however there's more than enough evidence that suggests they're completely full of shit.
You keep on sucking down those blue pills, though. We know; they're comforting. :)
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Go take a trip through NE Japan and tell me how Fukushima was the biggest problem. Compared to the rest of the damage from the tsunami, Fukushima was nothing.
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And the goal for renewable energy use won't be met. It won't be even close. German government knows this just fine - so the official target for renewable electricity
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In short, renewable energy in Germany is a total failure. It provides only feel-good feelings to fucking eco-hippies and not much more.
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Of course it is. What are you talking about?
Hydro received very little funding in the recent 10 years in Germany, almost all of the investments went into solar panels and wind generators. So it's only fair to compare them to nuclear.
All the current nuclear waste if properly reprocessed can be buried in a couple of Olympic swimming pools. We can then bury it in deep salt deposits or (my favorite) in ocean subduction trenches. Or we can just continue keeping it in temporary storage for the next couple of centuries. It's a NIMBY problem, not a fundam
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Classic hydro is not what people usually think when they talk about 'renewable'.
All people that use that newfangled thing called internet seem to disagree [google.com] with you.
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Maybe. But we don't build those because we don't know what to do with all the nuclear waste. We still have no idea what to do with the amount we already have! See 'environmental issues' above.
Solved problem. Dig a hole and bury it. Yucca Mountain would have worked just fine. The only technical issues identified were 10,000 years in the future. We don't hold anything else to that kind of standard. It was just politics, nuclear hysteria and NIMBYism.
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Yeah, paying 5 times more than nuclear is certainly an unqualified success.
Oh, and I really hope all those hippies get cancer from the new coal power plants that are being built.
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Fighting against new cancer-causing coal power plants? Nah, that's not fun at all.
As for "unqualified success" - how else would you call a program that is guaranteed to fail to meet its goals, while using many times more resources than alternatives?
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Not to be too cold about it, but isn't that what statistical significance requires?
I still prefer it to the "ready, fire, aim!" approach to policy.
The latter is how we got a bunch of shitty nuclear plants all over the planet. I'm not saying they're all crap, I'm just saying that a lot of them are.
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Yes, that's silly. Just as silly that because of the A-bomb they should not use nuclear powerplants, for exactly the same reasons.
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That essentially leaves us with geothermal (nice but only works in few areas), oil (doesn't have
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Another idea could also be not to build the traditional nuclear-plants that where designed for producing material for nuclear weapons..
Thorium reactors can be one alternative but there are more variants that can also be safe.
The point i'm trying to make is that there are ways to build reactors so they are basically impossible to go critical.. As long as the containment building can survive anything that we or nature can throw at it we are pretty much safe, talking about no need for human oversight or even e
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On the other hand, what are the alternatives?
Pebble-bed and thorium salt designs would be a good start. The nuclear "pros vs cons" argument has become far too polarized, with both so-called "sides" generally possessing flawed notions and failures to see big picture:
Inconvenient fact: Industry [run by MBA's] has repeatedly proven that it can't be trusted to safely maintain conventional reactor designs, and government (controlled by industry via regulatory-capture) has proven that it can't be trusted to regulate industry.
Inconvenient fact: We've done
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More people die in coal mining accidents every year than have died from reactor meltdowns in the last 20.
Maybe we should reconsider coal?
Source: [wikipedia.org] (modified to bullet form)
Comparing the historical safety record of civilian nuclear energy with other forms of electrical generation, Ball, Roberts, and Simpson, the IAEA, and the Paul Scherrer Institute found in separate studies that during the period from 1970 to 1992,
The thing is, coal is rarely as "exciting" or "spectacular" as nuclear: nuclear plants go down in a big way, and so when someone dies everyone sees it. Coal mining deaths (never mind the "on the job" coal plant deaths) are a fact of life, and noone notices that sort of thing.
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that a nuclear bomb and a nuclear reactor are only the same in that they have the same Joe Sixpack/media stigma attached to both of them. Here, let me use an analogy.
Not building a nuclear reactor in Japan because of the previous use of the atomic bomb due to concerns of insensitivity is roughly the same as the United States of America not building the Saturn V because the use of rocket propelled grenades against troops in Vietnam. Completely different devices for completely different ends.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you take X-Ray exams? Do you fly with an airplane? Do you eat bananas? You should start to get your facts straight. The effect of nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors are significantly different. We had very little real nuclear catastrophes and on total the casualties are low, if you need the info, Wikipedia can help you out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents [wikipedia.org]
Let's compare Deepwater Horizon to the Fukushima Daiichi.
Fatalities: 11 vs 0 (no significant increase in cancer risk projected, except two worker with added 10%)
Effect on Environment: the Gulf flora and fauna where almost fully eradicated vs minor radiation pollution, not more than some natural sources
If you think people should stop using nuclear power in japan. Well then start to advocate that all bordering the Gulf of Mexico to stop using cars.
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Well, nuclear causes less death's than any other energy-source..
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/ [forbes.com]
http://www.geekosystem.com/coal-oil-nuclear-deaths-chart/ [geekosystem.com]
Or you could do a google yourself on "number of deaths coal oil nuclear"
The thing with nuclear-power is that everything happens at the same place and affects more people in one go..... And i prefer something that kills ~90 people per year over for example Oil that kills ~36000 per year... Or natural g
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To start with you should read up on this. Radioactivity from coal-plants are actually quite high in comparison.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation [wikipedia.org]
And about the linked article.
To start with i do not believe their statement of 15CPS they stated since they said that this was about double the normal amount, but normal backround radioation is ~20-80CPM so they are off by a factor of altleast 80.
If it would really be 15CPS that would be 900CPM or about 9microseivert per hour and that would be quite
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Enriched uranium allows it to react faster to the decay which promotes more neutrons, which causes more decay, which causes even more neutrons,
and the process continues.
Chernobyl - This is also what happened in Japan due to the tsunami, just not a complete failure like Chernobyl (Thank god / science / whatever you believe in that's good)
What are you on about? The Fukushima reactors were scrammed minutes before the tsunami arrived, in response to the original earthquake. The meltdown was the result of the cooling system failure and the residual decay heat. Absolutely nothing like Chernobyl or an atomic weapon.
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It's like saying you were in a car crash. If you crash at 10 kmh/mph or 30 kmh/mph, you still crashed.
But the difference in speed is material. You ignore here material differences between the two accidents. Similarly, I could slip down the stairs. That's an "accident". So:
Chernobyl - accident.
Me slipping down stairs - accident.
Key difference - nobody is going to be that concerned about me.
Now, what highly alarming deduction am I supposed to be drawing here? You seemed to have difficulty articulating that.
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I don't think that's quite the same.
No offense, but your words indicate you aren't thinking. The previous poster gave a great example and all you can talk about is radioactivity.
The /only/ difference is the enrichment process and rate of decay.
And intent. One device is used to power cities. The other device is used to destroy cities and other infrastructure. Conflating the two is irrational.
I don't think it's more of a sensitivity thing as more as of 'Actually, we know exactly how devastating this is, not something simulated or based on statistic, we actually know first hand, and maybe shouldn't do this'
I take it you're not actually paying attention to the actual damage from Fukushima. I think there's a great case to be made to decommission or refurbish old nuclear plants to make them safer, but Fukushima demonstrates t
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Here we go again with the Chernobyl example. The reactor at Chernobyl wouldn't have been licensed in USA, Japan, France, UK, Canada, South Korea, etc. It doesn't have a containement vessel, which is a basic requirement by all modern countries regulatory bodies, it was operating with a positive feedback which is forbidden by all the regulatory bodies in modern countries, the staff wasn't trained properly to operate such a device badly designed and finally the bureaucratic administration was just not concerne
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Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
You should read a history book that wasn't written in the U.S. by a nuclear bomb apologist.
The negotiations for Japans surrender started before the bombs were dropped. It is stipulated that one of the reasons the bombs were used anyway was to demonstrate the power of them to scare Soviet.
Regardless of the reasons both the targets were selected because they had a large population around them surrounded by high ground for the extra oomph. There were stronger military targets that could have been chosen, the amount of civilian deaths were intentionally high.
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." - Dwight Eisenhower
"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons." - Admiral William D. Leahy
"...the Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945...up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped; ...if such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to drop the [atomic] bombs." - Herbert Hoover
"...when we didn't need to do it, and we knew we didn't need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn't need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs." - Brigadier General Carter Clarke
Don't get me wrong, I don't try to defend Japans atrocities during/before the war, I'm just saying that one atrocity doesn't justify another.
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The negotiations for Japans surrender started before the bombs were dropped.
No, they didn't. As the other replier noted, there were factions at this point. Some members of one faction were attempting negotiations for surrender, but they didn't have the authority to surrender. And if one looks at actual battles at the end of the war, where whole Japanese forces fought to the last few men, one doesn't see a propensity to surrender.
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To add to the not surrendering point, there were Japanese soldiers being found/recovered/captured from pacific islands well into the 1970's, ready to fight on in the service of the emperor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_holdout [wikipedia.org]
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The negotiations for Japans surrender started before the bombs were dropped.
Not credible ones. It took two bombs and six days after the second bomb for Japan to surrender.
It is stipulated that one of the reasons the bombs were used anyway was to demonstrate the power of them to scare Soviet.
This is one reason, but as usual complex decisions in the real world are taken for many reasons, including others such as shortening the end of the war in the Pacific.
There were stronger military targets that could have been chosen, the amount of civilian deaths were intentionally high.
BS
From Wikipedia: Hiroshima, was an embarkation port and industrial center that was the site of a major military headquarters; [Kyoto was purposely dropped from the list of targets because its low military value]. The city of Nagasaki had been one o
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A coup that failed and that wasn't predicted before the bombs were dropped. It was completely irrelevant to the justification for dropping the bombs.
As far as anyone could tell it was just as likely the overaggression of the bombs that caused the officers eagerness to not surrender.
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"overaggression of the bombs that caused the officers eagerness to not surrender"
In my youth, I read a great deal ( all my high school library had on the subject, plus some ) on WWII, This idea that the bombs lead to the offices not wanting to surrender distinctly does not match that reading. The Japanese were flying airplanes into ships, the pilots knowing/intending they would die in the effort.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze [wikipedia.org]
They created airplanes ( and ships, apparently ) specifically for suicide
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For clean-up outside the plant. Decomissioning the plan is extra. Paying compensation to ex-residents and farmers/fishermen affected is extra. Re-building towns that have been allowed to deteriorate is extra. Paying unemployment benefits is extra. Storing and disposing of the remaining waste is extra. Things like medical costs are as yet unknown, but will be extra. TEPCO has been pretty much nationalised with the government picking up the tab, so tax payers and energy consumers foot the bill.
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Japan is paying about that much per year for the additional LNG and coal they have to import in order to compensate for the missing nuclear energy
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it's not even as much as the fed reserve wastes in a month
The fed is printing $85 billion a month [bloomberg.com] just to keep the federal debt bubble from popping and bankrupting Earth.
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Picture a "blue marble" image of the earth from orbit, with the caption "FED: Wish you were here."
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As for the cost to clean up Fukushima? Can we PLEASE stop blaming nuclear power for what is in reality a case of corporate and government malfeasance please?
You can't separate the two. It wouldn't have been such a disaster if Fukushima were a geothermal/coal/gas plant. That's the point, no-one can be trusted to run nuclear power properly because they will always end up being cheap and lying. It's human nature, can't be avoided.
That isn't to say we shouldn't do anything dangerous, just that we should recognize that when there are better alternatives and the consequences of failure are dire we shouldn't be deploying those technologies on a large scale. Plus, it c
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As for the cost to clean up Fukushima? Can we PLEASE stop blaming nuclear power for what is in reality a case of corporate and government malfeasance please?
What malfeasance? Can we please stop blaming corporations and governments for what is in reality a natural disaster?
It was SUPPOSED to have been shut down years ago, it wasn't
That's because the new reactors that were to replace Fukushima all were canceled in the decade around 2000. You can't replace a reactor with nothing.
it was SUPPOSED to have been well maintained
And evidence indicates it was well maintained.
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I agree with your second point, but the "it was a natural disaster" part isn't a very good defense. Designing for safe shutdown and containment in case of a natural disaster is very much within the scope of nuclear engineering. A reactor isn't supposed to fail in this way even during a natural disaster, so if it does, something has gone wrong on the human side: either the design was not sufficient, the construction was faulty, operational procedures were insufficient, or some mixture of those causes.
In this
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Designing for safe shutdown and containment in case of a natural disaster is very much within the scope of nuclear engineering. A reactor isn't supposed to fail in this way even during a natural disaster
The Fukushima reactors were designed to fail in the way that they did. The whole point of encasing that reactor in a lot of concrete was to contain an uncontrolled meltdown. That negates the conclusion that something must have gone wrong on the human side.
There is a good argument to make here that the design had long been obsolete because Japanese society's tolerance for the risk of meltdowns has gone down greatly over the years. But the design of the reactors and their dependence on active cooling was k
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As for the cost to clean up Fukushima? Can we PLEASE stop blaming nuclear power for what is in reality a case of corporate and government malfeasance please?
You're confused. No one is "blaming" "nuclear power". Nuclear power is just a technology. People are blaming humans for being too irresponsible to handle it. Individual humans might be sufficiently responsible, but the system is not designed so as to place them in control. It is only designed to self-perpetuate and to make some rich people richer. Given these facts, using nuclear power is irresponsible. If you have a proposal for a system which will cause nuclear power to only be used responsibly, I'm inter
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$50bn buys a lot of wind turbines and container sized sodium batteries to even out the load.
To put this in scale, the U.S. Department of Energy commands a budget of $30 billion per year, $10 billion of which is for their Nuclear Security division.
In spite of all that, I'm still pro-nuclear. I just don't think that we are doing it right. The only dangerous stuff at the end of breeder reactor chains has a half-life of only 91 years or less. Everything else produced has such enormous half-lives thats its nearly harmless.
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If the regulators in Japan hadn't been so influenced by the utilities (as, unfortunately, they seem to be everywhere), the Fukushima reactors would have been shut down at the end of their operating life and been in cold shutdown at the time of the earthquake. Instead they were granted an extension and were running.
It just goes to show you that cheap usually isn't, as we all should know by now.
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This is a 50 billion dollar (or yen equivalent) public relations exercise. The government wants to look like it is actually doing something about an issue it has zero control over now.
The Japanese government doesn't want to admit the truth that these areas are going to remain uninhabitable for hundreds, if not, thousands of years - because it promised the Japanese people that they would be able to return to their homes. The technology doesn't exist to clean up all this contaminated land.
$50B will buy an awful lot of concrete. Concrete plains are rather habitable when you cover them with dirt.
Re:Huge waste of money (Score:5, Informative)
The cleaned areas have a radiation level of 1mS a year. To put that into perspective, people living in Denver [isis-online.org] get 11.8mS a year from natural sources. This area is NOT uninhabitable. Not that this makes TEPCO any less foolish...
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You are not comparing like with like. Background radiation in Denver is from things that are unlikely to get inside your body, so your skin and flesh protects your organs from the radiation. The radiation in Japan is from particulate matter released from the Fukushima nulcear plant and is very likely to get inside your body, via dust or by bioaccumulation in the food you eat, if you live there.
Once inside your body the radiation can damage the cells of your organs, sitting there for years or decades. That i
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Dose makes the poison. You are right to be concerned in that one has to reduce radioactive substances which bioaccumulate to lower concentrations than those radioactive substances that don't. But once you've done that, then that's it.
And the place might not be so good f
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Radon gas is quite lethal. I'm not sure what your point is.
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Radon gas can and does kill people regularly. If your basement starts to fill up with it you have to get it removed and the source capped, otherwise you will die.
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Radon actually is also a gamma ray emitter as well as a alpha emitter. As you say it's more dangerous because it is a gas which you breathe into your lungs. It has a half life of 3.8 days but is constantly being generated in many rocks and soils. It's heavier than air which is why it builds up in basements and is particularly dangerous there.
Alpha and beta decay are actually the most harmful types of radiation, but are attenuated by just about everything, and thus require cont
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There are places where the natural background radiation levels are ten to twenty times the official Japanese limit. And still people happily live there.
That's true, but I believe that these places rarely involve caesium, iodine and strontium. Isn't bioaccumulation the main issue here?