Japan earthquake + tsunami + nuclear problems

[DC]

We've done this dance before, DC.

Your behavior remains consistent.

so you cannot backup you claim. that was to be expected.

 

[Puppycow]

Update: Japan doubles Fukushima radiation leak estimate

Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (Nisa) now says 770,000 terabecquerels escaped into the atmosphere - more than double its earlier estimate of 370,000 terabecquerels.

Although the amount is just 15% of the total released at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 - the world's worst nuclear disaster - it suggests the contamination of the area around the plant is worse than first thought, says the BBC's Roland Buerk in Tokyo.
. . .
Meanwhile, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano has said more evacuations are being considered.

Going within 20km of the Fukushima plant is forbidden by law, with some towns further away also affected.

But monitoring shows the lie of the land and wind patterns may be causing a build-up of radiation in other areas too.

 

[Puppycow]

Japanese village's nuclear reality sets in slowly

Fukushima nuclear plant may have suffered 'melt-through', Japan admits

 

[Puppycow]

Japanese seniors volunteer for Fukushima 'suicide corps'

I'm impressed. The samurai spirit is not gone yet.

 

[r-j]

I've been revisiting threads about the 311 nuclear disasters, and it's quite educational. So many of the upbeat and positive spins put on the whole thing have vaporized like a giant containment building.

cement and burrying is only the last ditch solution when everything is lost. That does not yet seem to be the case.

It turns out that when you have reactors built on the ocean, there is no solution at all. The ideas and plans they have come up with so far reach decades into the future, and depend on so many things.

There can be no simple burial of this many faceted disaster.

Just to know what the problem is, technology has to be created, built and tested, the ruined structures have to be shored up, covered up, just to prevent another disaster in the near future, either from tsunami or quake. The ground has to be dammed and pumped to stop water from pouring into the ocean and ground, with a constant effort to prevent any loss of cooling for both the corium somewhere deep in the buildings basements, as well as the ruined spent fuel ponds.

Contamination has to be cleaned up just to be able to get a look into the disaster sites, massive amounts of effort will be required just to even see what has happened. Years from now they may be able to get an idea of where the nuclear material is. Then many more years to create a way to move it.

It's a huge problem, but the Japanese seem to be problem solving people, and committed to solutions, rather than blindly pretending it isn't that bad.

 

[Christian Klippel]

It turns out that when you have reactors built on the ocean, ...

Which ones were built on the ocean? Right: None of them! Goes to show how much effort you put into this topic, besides repeating stupid, fearmongerning non-arguments.

... with a constant effort to prevent ....

I hereby invite you to visit the part of Germany where i live. The Ruhr area. I will guide you through the "Revier" and show you quite some interesting stuff that coal mining is responsible for. Like the pumping of water out of the old mines. Which has to go on forever. Or the massive damages that occurred, are still occurring, and will continue to occur on building, streets, etc., due to the no longer used mine shafts underneath.

If you like i can show you some places were big holes appeared in the ground, out of the blue, were houses, cars, people, etc. fell in. Created by the after-effects of abandoned mine shafts.

Really, before saying something you really, really should take some time and educate yourself first. Your sheer ignorance is showing again, like in the other thread.

 

[Sword_Of_Truth]

So many of the upbeat and positive spins put on the whole thing have vaporized like a giant containment building.

Do you live in some parallel universe where every day is opposites day or something? Why else would you say "vaporized like something which is all but impossible to vaporize"?

This video shows ultra-high-speed video of a test wherein a 68,000 pound F-4 Phantom II fighter jet is placed on a rocket sled and slammed into a section of reactor containment at more than 500 miles per hour.



Did you notice which of the two vaporized? Did you notice that the wall didn't even move?

Here in Canada, we didn't have the resources for such spectacular brute force tests of our containment vessels. Instead, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. sent engineers to Normandy, France to conduct design performance studies on old Nazi coastal defenses vs. 14 and 15 inch battleship shells.

Bottom line; "giant containment vessels" do not vaporize. Period.

Unfortunately for you, despite illustrating and framing your own ignorance of the subject matter, what you said is relatively accurate. The "positive spins" have indeed held up just as a reactor containment vessel would even under extreme media-induced stress.

if everyone living in the exclusion zone (and other severely-contaminated areas) could be persuaded to give up driving (and to eschew smoking, which presents a massive lifetime risk of 100 in 1000 of causing lung cancer) then everyone could in theory be allowed to return with no additional loss of life to the impacts of radiation. The risks could simply be traded off each other. One could also make a strong case that people living in the Fukushima exclusion zone would still be better off statistically than those in heavily-polluted city centres, near coal-fired power stations and in industrial zones, which likely present higher carcinogenic risks.

Indeed, these risks were quantified and compared in a fascinating 2007 paper published in BMC Public Health journal (open access, h/t ColinG, [x]). In it the author looks at the comparative risks of obesity, smoking and exposure to radiation – in terms of ‘years of life lost’, a male smoker can expect to lose 10 years of life, an obese white male 1-4 years of life, as compared to an average 2.6 years of life lost for Japanese atomic bomb survivors who had experienced the highest doses (2.25 Gy – for gamma radiation such as released by an atomic bomb, sieverts and grays are roughly equivalent, so the dose can be thought of as 2,250 millisieverts; about ten times higher than current doses anywhere in the Fukushima exclusion zone).

An equally useful comparison made by the author considers whether air pollution in city centres, passive smoking or radiation contamination from the Chernobyl accident are more dangerous. He finds that living in a polluted city (e.g. London, as compared to lightly-polluted Inverness) yields 2.8% mortality (28 per 1000), passive smoking 1.7% mortality, whilst radiation exposure of 100 mSv in the Chernobyl zone yields a mortality risk of 0.4% (4 per 1000). This latter risk is clearly on the same scale as the US scientific committee which calculates a 3-7 per 1000 risk of mortality for 100 mSv, and obviously compares rather favourably with the 28 per 1000 mortality risk for living in a polluted area. This raises the intriguing possibility that – if these calculations are correct – lives would be saved by moving people out of central Tokyo and into the more contaminated areas of the Fukushima exclusion zone.​

 

[JihadJane]

In such a case, I would say "So what?"

It still took an earthquake powerful enough to knock the entire planet off its axis to crack the containment vessels of these reactors.

These reactors are proven safe by any reasonable definition of the term.

I see, so it would be reasonable definition if the reactors weren't actually located on planet Earth.


~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


'“Fukushima in recriticality”? — Iodine-131 detected in 4 locations: Tokyo, Iwate, Nagano, Niigata '


'Kyoto U. expert: Melted fuel may have sunk into ground — “We are now head to head with a situation that mankind has never faced before”'


'Dr. Koide: Massive amounts of radioactivity may again be released from Fukushima — Mentions “steam explosion” after melted fuel hits water'

Which ones were built on the ocean? Right: None of them! Goes to show how much effort you put into this topic, besides repeating stupid, fearmongerning non-arguments.

What a stupid comment- a sign of desperation? Fukishima power plant is built right next to the ocean and has poured huge amounts of radioactive pollution into it.

 

[Christian Klippel]

What a stupid comment- a sign of desperation? Fukishima power plant is built right next to the ocean and has poured huge amounts of radioactive pollution into it.

Reading comprehension problems much? Here, just for you i quote again what he wrote:

It turns out that when you have reactors built on the ocean, there is no solution at all.

Notice anything?

'Kyoto U. expert: Melted fuel may have sunk into ground — “We are now head to head with a situation that mankind has never faced before”'


'Dr. Koide: Massive amounts of radioactivity may again be released from Fukushima — Mentions “steam explosion” after melted fuel hits water'

And to help you with reading again: The operative words here are "may". Just in case you didn't notice. It is important because so far pretty much all of what the fearmongers have predicted since day one did not come true in the way they wanted.

Really, the more i hear the fearmongers and their followers, the more i come to the conclusion that these people actually want more catastrophic failures to happen. Just so that they can say "told you so, nukes are bad" afterwards. Are you one of them as well?

 

[r-j]

That stuff about " what the fearmongers have predicted since day one did not come true in the way they wanted" reminds me of another group of alarmists, who seem disappointed when things haven't warmed up as much as they seem to want.

Or "these people actually want more catastrophic failures to happen", that also seems descriptive of alarmers, who seem to delight in flooding, or heat waves, jumping up and down screaming "We told you so! We told you so!".

I say this because I can relate to what you seem to be saying. That some people actually seem to want disasters, just so they can be right.

Of course in the case of multiple reactor meltdowns, explosions and radioactive material being spread across a populated advanced nations food producing areas, that was actually what people were warning about for a long time.

Probably based on previous disasters. Or maybe just good old science and technology, which tells us of course there will be failures, and past experience tells us that of course there will be unexpected disasters.

What I did not know, until after this terrible Fukushima, is that Thorium could have been used for reactors, starting a long time ago, and that it's quite possible the reason it wasn't, is that when all this nuclear reactor jazz started, they wanted plutonium from the reactors.

Thorium reactors won't produce bomb materials. Thorium is also cheap and abundant.

I'm starting to think the nuclear disaster is much larger than anyone knew.

 

[Dr.Sid]

Still nuclear disaster is nothing compared to coal disaster.

 

[r-j]

But both seem to have the ability to harm people, but you can't prove it.

 

[shadron]

Thorium reactors won't produce bomb materials. Thorium is also cheap and abundant.

Wrong. Thorium reactors build up U233 as a byproduct, which can be continually removed from the fuel. U233 has the added advantage that it's natural decay doesn't create free neutrons, therefore it is suitable for the simple sort of gun bomb (like the Hiroshima bomb) built by bolting the fissiles onto a gun barrel; it doesn't require the more technological implosion process.

Not that I'm against thorium reactors myself, but I'm wondering why you want to paint such a rosey picture of them.

 

[r-j]

I'm probably being deluded by the Thorium supporters. It would be nice to have safe clean reactors for power you know. And it would be really nice if it cost less than coal.

 

[shadron]

I'm probably being deluded by the Thorium supporters. It would be nice to have safe clean reactors for power you know. And it would be really nice if it cost less than coal.

Yeah, and it would be nice if you could put it in the basements without it causing fires, and you could harvest catfish from the cooling tanks. But you can't. The world tends to be pretty harsh that way sometimes, and forces people to make tough choices.

 

[shadron]

I'm starting to think the nuclear disaster is much larger than anyone knew.

Care to expand upon that?

 

[shadron]

Fukishima power plant is built right next to the ocean and has poured huge amounts of radioactive pollution into it.

It has? What evidence of this do you have, JJ?

 

[portlandatheist]

....
'“Fukushima in recriticality”? — Iodine-131 detected in 4 locations: Tokyo, Iwate, Nagano, Niigata '

....

I find this very troubling if true but difficult to believe. Is it even possible the rods are still emitting fresh Iodine 131?

 

[shadron]

The date of the article is September 9, and it refers to articles published in June through August.

 

[r-j]

Care to expand upon that?

In a little while.