Japan earthquake + tsunami + nuclear problems

MattusMaximus said:
In an effort to educate people about radiation, since everyone's attention is focused on it now, I suggest you all take some time to calculate your own personal radiation dose. Once you go through that calculation and see all of the sources (both natural & artificial) that you're exposed to all the time, then you will see how much the media is hyping this stuff.

Knowledge is power, folks. Learn about radiation, and it will cease to be as scary as the media is making it sound. As I like to say: "Know nukes!" :)
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I find it weird that this calculator does not ask for smoking. Considering that it's on an EPA page, and the EPA does have a huge section of tobacco as radiation source.

Side note: Most people may be surprised that your 'normal' dose is higher if you live near a coal power plant compared to living near a nuclear power plant.

One of the post-docs in the group where I made my PhD did teach a radiation safety seminar (we work with x-ray sources), and in researching he found out about the alpha-emitters in tobacco, with a pretty high dose (the dose of the smoke of one cigarette is overlapping fairly well with the dose of one chest x-ray -- except that the error bars for the cigarette are naturally much higher). His comment: "If I had knew that, I would have stopped smoking 10 years earlier". Big rule of thumb: Never let alpha-emitters into your body.
 
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pipelineaudio said:
http://e.nikkei.com/e/fr/tnks/Nni20110312D12JFF03.htm

This says a meltdown caused the explosion. Is meltdown a nebulously defined term? I thought the explosion was caused by pressure from the heat of the reactor, but that the core containment was still intact
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If I remember this correctly.

The core was uncovered due to the cooling failure. This caused a dangerous increase in pressure.
It also caused the over heated water to react with one of the metals used in the construction, releasing hydrogen.
On releasing the gasses to relieve the pressure, the hydrogen exploded.
It is not possible to see 'inside' this type of reactor, so no-one knows exactly what is going on in the core, but there is most likely a partial meltdown of the core.
 
I do wonder why the nuclear problem is getting as much coverage as it is. Far more people have died so far from the quake and tsunami, far more damage has been done to the country. The reactor problems are serious, and should not have occured, but they are nowhere near as significant as the other problems. Even food and water are far more pressing an issue at this time.
 
a_unique_person said:
I do wonder why the nuclear problem is getting as much coverage as it is. Far more people have died so far from the quake and tsunami, far more damage has been done to the country. The reactor problems are serious, and should not have occured, but they are nowhere near as significant as the other problems. Even food and water are far more pressing an issue at this time.
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Because the consequences of a serious nuclear accident aren't confined to one country and can last for decades?
 
Utter crock -:mad: keep dragging up Chernobyl WHICH HAD NO CONTAINMENT DOME - fear mongering of the worst sort but you don't drag up the consequences of driving your fossil fueled car which has or burning coal for electricity which as someone pointed out earlier killed hundreds and now thousands in the short time this quake event has been on

long lasting consequences not confined to one country

Carbon is forever.......

http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0812/full/climate.2008.122.html

swallow much media hype lately ???? :garfield:
 
Just listened to CNN about distributing Potasium iodide as an "antidote" for radiation. OK, this is just wrong...it sounds as if taking the pill will prevent any radiation damage to a person. When a reactor operates, one of the more prevalent fission products is a radioactive isotope of iodine. Iodine will work its way into the food chain quickly and it will then go straight into one's thyroid. The potasium iodide is used to saturate one's thyroid with non radioactive iodine so that the radioactive iodine that gets into the food chain will pass through one's body and be excreted. THe radioactive iodine has a relatively short half life--8 days I think--so it would only be a threat for about 80 days.

ETA: When you read about people getting contaminated, don't think this is a really big issue. Most of the time, you can just wash contamination off with soap and water or just remove one's clothes and dispose of them. If a person is really covered in lots of radioactive debris, it would not be good, but there isn't enough release for that type of problem in general. Avoiding ingestion is the most important as radioactive material in one's body would cause the most damage to tissues.


glenn
 
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+1 - some common sense.

Yep - unlike mercury and other toxins which will have been released from the sediments in enormous quantities and will move up the food chain.
Mercury is very very persistent as are PCBs which will also have been disturbed and in local fishing waters which Japan relies on for part of it's food resources.

•••

anyone verify this??

The reactor was due for scrapping this month. What if they were already in the process of shutting it down and crucial maintenance wasn't carried out, so that the units failed. I hope more about those diesel generators will become known in the near future.
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if true it may explain a lot.
 
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macdoc said:
Utter crock -:mad: keep dragging up Chernobyl WHICH HAD NO CONTAINMENT DOME - fear mongering of the worst sort...
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Chernobyl? No need to shout.... It's not irrational to have have fears about the possibility of nuclear radiation escaping into the environment.

but you don't drag up the consequences of driving your fossil fueled car which has...
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I do, frequently. (Well, other people's cars, anyway, because I don't drive one.)

... or burning coal for electricity which as someone pointed out earlier...
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Unfortunately, that someone is a flamboyant, serial liar, so one never knows when he is telling the truth, though I assumed he was on this occasion.

I frequently "drag up" the consequences of burning coal for electricity.


...killed hundreds and now thousands in the short time this quake event has been on

long lasting consequences not confined to one country

Carbon is forever.......

http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0812/full/climate.2008.122.html

swallow much media hype lately ???? :garfield:
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No, have you? What's your preferred flavor? ;-)

Your post's tone is somewhat hyperbolic.

Did I claim that burning fossil fuels was a good idea with no long-term consequences?

Are you arguing that people all over the world are not also concerned about the global consequences of burning fossil fuels and that the media has been silent about that?

As an interested aside, do posters who are lamenting nuclear fear-mongering put as much energy into lamenting warmongering?
 
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Cutting through the dodging, all you are doing is fear mongering.

Containment worked under extremely adverse and rare conditions on old reactor designs. one of which was due to be decommissioned apparently

That's the message JJ - try it sometime instead of feeding irrational fears about the only technology with the potential to get rid of killer coal or at least reduce it's pernicious affects.
.....which really DOES need exposure for the dire consequences it's use engenders.
 
a_unique_person said:
I do wonder why the nuclear problem is getting as much coverage as it is. Far more people have died so far from the quake and tsunami, far more damage has been done to the country. The reactor problems are serious, and should not have occured, but they are nowhere near as significant as the other problems. Even food and water are far more pressing an issue at this time.
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It has the advantage of being a single story where as any attempt to describe the tsunami hits information overload.
 
macdoc said:
Utter crock -:mad: keep dragging up Chernobyl WHICH HAD NO CONTAINMENT DOME
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The problems with Chernobyl went far beyond the lack of a containment dome. The reactor went supercritical. It breached to containment vessel because it went supercritical. And it remained critical for some time after the lid of the containment vessel was blown off. Bits of fuel exploded out of the reactor, and the graphite moderator ignited while the reactor was still critical and exposed to air.

The chain reaction in these reactors was shut down long ago. They never went supercritical, they aren't critical now, and they cannot go critical. If the containment vessel is breached, it won't release anywhere near the same amount of radiation, because no chain reaction is occurring, and because there is no graphite moderator to catch fire and throw radioactive material high into the air.
 
Ziggurat said:
The problems with Chernobyl went far beyond the lack of a containment dome. The reactor went supercritical. It breached to containment vessel because it went supercritical. And it remained critical for some time after the lid of the containment vessel was blown off. Bits of fuel exploded out of the reactor, and the graphite moderator ignited while the reactor was still critical and exposed to air.

The chain reaction in these reactors was shut down long ago. They never went supercritical, they aren't critical now, and they cannot go critical. If the containment vessel is breached, it won't release anywhere near the same amount of radiation, because no chain reaction is occurring, and because there is no graphite moderator to catch fire and throw radioactive material high into the air.
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I think you meant prompt critical for Chernobyl. It was suspected to hit over 100 times its normal power. All reactors go supercritcal when they are starting up and raising power.

There is a possibility for the Japanese reactors to go supercritical again. It is highly unlikely, but is possible. The control rods were inserted into the bottom of the core and shutdown the reaction. However, if the fuel fell apart and the fuel pellets formed a critical configuration in the bottom of the vessel, it could go critical again if there were enough cold water to moderate and no rod to absorb the neutrons. If all this did occur, the critical pile of goo would probably heat up and pulse steam and then shut itself back down with loss of moderator and possibly pulse many times. It wouldn't likely do much more damage as it wouldn't maintain a critical configuration. This is the main reason they were injecting what I would image are very large amounts of boric acid into containment along with the sea water. The boron would ensure absorption of the neutrons and keep the pile of pellet subcritical.

glenn
 
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macdoc said:
Cutting through the dodging, all you are doing is fear mongering.

Containment worked under extremely adverse and rare conditions on old reactor designs. one of which was due to be decommissioned apparently

That's the message JJ - try it sometime instead of feeding irrational fears about the only technology with the potential to get rid of killer coal or at least reduce it's pernicious affects.
.....which really DOES need exposure for the dire consequences it's use engenders.
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If your aim is to educate, you're not going to get very far by jumping to erroneous conclusions and adopting an adversarial and stupidly patronizing attitude.

I am not your adversary, nor am I trying to feed fears. In case you didn't notice, perhaps temporarily blinded by the the fog of instant, automatic outrage ;), my response to a_unique_person's http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=6969365#post6969365 was a question:

JihadJane said:
Because the consequences of a serious nuclear accident aren't confined to one country and can last for decades?
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Perhaps your fear-mongering alarm is a bit oversensitive! I am genuinely trying to understand exactly what is going on with the reactors, as I'm sure many others are. Leaping straight into aggressive, polarized outrage doesn't help anyone. Calm down and remember, don't PANIC!!!!!!
 
The second explosion has occurred, so now there are 2 wrecked reactor buildings.
 
Some reality surfaces.... :garfield:

There was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity.
By “significant” I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on – say – a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation.
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you will also be reasonably well informed about nuclear reactors.....

http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/
 
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