The information coming out of Japan right now is very piecemeal and very incomplete. We are also depending on an organization without a stellar reputation when it comes to telling the truth[1], and a culture programmed to downplay very bad things. It has really pained me to see people rush to believe that everything is fine.
Conclusions at any stage of this crisis have been premature, but HN seems to want a heavy dose of finality to a crisis that isn't even over yet. Apparently people don't want it to be a big deal, but it's slowly turning into a big deal. It just is. Instead of big essays and conclusions about how the powers-that-be have it under control complete with inaccurate depictions of how a reactor works, why don't we focus on facts?
With that in mind, we do not know how bad it is. Anyone who says they do is lying to you. It isn't over, and it is a basic fact of logic that we will not be able to reflect on how bad this is or was until it is over.
At the risk of a neener-neener I told you so, I presented some of this viewpoint[2] on the self-aggrandizing risk management Ph.D.'s everything's fine piece, but my viewpoint was drowned out by people wanting to rush to a conclusion so they can put the crisis out of sight and out of mind.
Whether you like it or not, the beliefs of most intellectual engineer types is that the nuclear power plant dangers have been solved.
It's inconceivable (cue sound clip from Princess Bride) to most of us that extremely extensive and effective contingency plans are not in place.
The nuclear risk is obvious, and so any nuclear construction's main emphasis must be on handling all possible contingencies... right?
If Fukushima does end up being a "Big Deal" that is going to forcibly shift the world view of many many engineers and hackers. It will represent a piece of data that is fundamentally at odds with our view of the world.
The facts will eventually win out, but for the short term, it is necessary that we go through these cycles of disbelief and then shock. Because that's just reality.
I will be shocked if Fukushima causes serious harm to humans because until now it has been inconceivable to me that people making nuke plants could possibly underestimate the risks. If my inaccurate beliefs are shattered by the harsh reality of nuclear related deaths then... that's just how it will have to be. I'll have to eat my hat. I'm not looking forward to it.
In the meantime I have to go with what I know. Which is that this should not be an issue that threatens human life.
Is it even possible to handle all contingencies though? I don't know enough to do the maths, but when you've got
four different reactors
an earthquake
followed by a tsunami
followed by loss of electricity for the emergency pumps
followed by parts of the plant blowing up
followed by tons of dust getting in the way
followed by possibly more aftershocks
followed by possibly more tsunamis
followed by possible injuries to the personnel needed to run these operations
considering other equipment can break down
considering political pressures to make certain decisions
considering some of the physics/chemistry here may be entirely novel
...
Think of all the different permutations in those variables, just how many scenarios have been prepared for? It has to be more complicated than just 'if casing 1 fails, casing 2 will stop it, and if casing 2 fails, casing 3 is there'
The first 10 things you have listed there are entirely predictable. Indeed, the emergency procedures were designed to handle them and simply haven't coped.
They were unlucky that the tsunami was slightly worse than they had planned for, which washed away the diesel backup generators. Backups for those generators were quickly brought in, though.
OTOH, they have been very lucky that no aftershocks have caused any tsunamis (yet). If that happened right now then they are screwed.
I haven't seen any evidence of the last two occurring.
"what appears to have happened is the tsunami flooded the basements where these emergency diesel generator connections are at. So, even though they brought in mobile units, new emergency diesel generators, to hook them up to run the safety systems, the basements were flooded, where they needed to do the hook-up."
Yesterday I heard somebody who was responsible for a nuclear power plant in Europe speak on the radio (in Europe too). He said they were prepared for a malfunctioning valve, power outage etc. (predictable events) but they weren't actually prepared for the case that everything happens at once.
I wasn't saying those things were unpredictable, I meant that in combination they could result in so many different scenarios, I wonder if it's even feasible to have a plan for all of them.
The process of nuclear decay is well understood, so you can compute, given any mass of nuclear material, how much heat and for how long that mass will generate sitting in a pile by itself. You do that calculation in the presence of full moderation (all control rods inserted, below the critcial level) and without moderation (control rods out).
Now you design a thermal sink which can absorb that much heat indefinitely when either covered in soil or sitting out in free air (choose the option that has the worst heat conduction) Note that modern reactors like the Pebble Bed can't really do the whole core meltdown thing, but those that can you can design what is essentially a bucket of boron laced sand underneath them such that in the event hell breaks loose with the control rods out, the core will melt and diffuse into the sand which will drop it below critical and now you're solving for "non-critical pile turned off, how much heat from time 0 to n?"
Ok, now lets see what can cause this reactor design to cause any damage. Hmm, well its immune to anything that doesn't hit it directly and destroy the containment vessel.
So basically anything except a direct hit by an asteroid or perhaps a nuclear weapon.
Now if you look at Pebble Bed reactors they take the approach that the fuel itself is in self contained containment vessels, you can dump them out across the floor and they will cool off without doing anything else and without any radiation.
But to re-iterate what others have said, there is a security/hazard/value trade off, airplanes fall out of the sky all the time and yet people still fly, automobiles kill their occupants and yet people still drive, coal miners die trying to dig up coal and yet they keep mining.
Nuclear reactors are no different in this regard, they have a 'worst case' scenario (similar to a plane losing a wing at altitude but we're not all demanding that planes have a parachute under the seat cushion), if we only have to deal with worst case reactor scenarios during 9.0 earthquakes, I'm ok with that. I can understand if you aren't.
It will not be possible ever, to keep handling cases of escalating complexity one of top of other. When things get complex beyond certain level, a kill switch should be triggered. The Kill switch should not depend on If-else cases ...
In what sense is it true that "that hasn't helped"? Are you suggesting that if they'd kept the reactors running things would have been better?
Perhaps what you mean is "hasn't made the impact of a magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami zero". Honestly, I can't see that that's a reasonable thing to ask for.
It "hasn't helped" in the context of the post I was replying to.
The poster clearly thought that a kill switch would be some kind of magic button that would turn everything off and "make it safe". I'm pointing out that nuclear power stations don't work like that.
Clearly, it is a much better situation now than if they had been going when the tsunami hit.
And your response indicates compelete ignorance of both the situation and nuclear reactions.
There is no kill switch, if they had a "kill switch" and executed it right now, you'd be condemning all the reactors to meltdowns, and you'd be condemning the US Western Coast to dangerous levels of radiation.
The content of the fuel rods take DAYS to become non-radioactive enough for them to not need to be cooled constantly. The very problem that's occuring now is occuring because either the radioactive cesium and iodine is either at risk of not being cooled which will lead to a meltdown and release of them into the atmosphere, or a containment breach with largely the same impacts.
Hmm. What do you envision a "meltdown" to consist of? The system still has a fallback system in the event of a core meltdown that is designed to cool and manage the core without radiation release. Meltdown definitely does not equal to "release of them into the atmosphere".
I'm not overly familiar with this specific reactor design; but usually what happens is they seal the containment as the core melts, flooding the sump (where the slag would collect) with water to cool it down.
Right now they are trying to avoid that because a) there is always a risk of radiation leak from the containment and b) because the cleanup bill would catch quite a few more zeroes. The point is; meltdown is the final failure scenario, if they get to it, well, they get to it. But there is no fallback if something goes wrong at that point; so it is potentially better to try and control it at this stage, while you still have a fallback to implement.
Please don't be overly dramatic ("and you'd be condemning the US Western Coast to dangerous levels of radiation"); this is a bad situation. But at the moment there does not appear to be a major risk to the US Western Coast. As you say, best not to comment in too much depth if you don't know the details.
>The system still has a fallback system in the event of a core meltdown that is designed to cool and manage the core without radiation release.
What do you think is failing and is the entire cause for all of this concern. The fallback system is pumping water into the reactor to keep it cool. Those are the systems that have been failing and have failed (during the explosions/fires) and have caused the (temporary-ish) meltdowns in the last few days.
A full meltdown has the potential to release a significant amount of radiation. A full meltdown increases in possibility as the reactors become harder to control and cool due to explosions and containment failure. It probably doesn't pose a significant risk to CA, but they will receive some radiation if it were actually to experience complete failure.
Meltdown isn't binary. They're experiencing meltdown right now. By definition. That's what the release of radioactive material is. The question is, can they keep it under relative control and prevent further exposure of the still proceeding fuel rods.
They're experiencing meltdown right now. By definition. That's what the release of radioactive material is.
Not really; in this case "meltdown" refers to the actual process of core melting, it is not entirely clear but it does not appear much or any of the cores have melted. Certainly not to the stage I would refer to as a meltdown. They are still in a "struggling to cool it down" stage.
The release of radioactive material is not equatable to a meltdown - all manner of things can lead to such a release, meltdown is just one of them.
If they actually have a full core melt (to the point it drops out of the reactor vessel into the dry well), yes, the risk of release of radioactive material is heightened. But probably not to the level you envision, and it is certainly not a case of "if it melts it's game over".
Explosions within the reactor shell are extremely unlikely, even in the event of a core meltdown, because the system is specifically designed to stop such an event occurring (which is one reason it has not so far happened :)).
Note; containment failure has not occurred, as far as we know, at any stage. The reactors are not being "controlled", the process is stopping by itself. The reactors simply have to be kept cool while that happens.
What do you think is failing and is the entire cause for all of this concern.
There is a different system in such a case (or, rather, a different approach). Essentially they just flood it with water.
With the best will in the world; it is worth reading some of the more technical explanations rather than just the media. They explain the process and the issues much better - even Wikipedia has reasonable material (and is at least a place to start with links)
This is now the second time you've accused me of not knowing what I'm talking about and yet your only difference of opinion is my terminology as to whether it's a meltdown or whether the process of "oh shit, dump water on it" is controlled or not. In fact, most of the information I have on this topic was from spending most of Sunday re-reading Wikipedia on nuclear reactors, but thanks for assuming I watch or read ANY mainstream news.
QUOTE: "A meltdown occurs when a severe failure of a nuclear power plant system prevents proper cooling of the reactor core, to the extent that the nuclear fuel assemblies overheat and melt, either partially or completely"
That has occurred. That's not in dispute, unless I'm just completely 100% off base here. A quick Google search reveals that fuel rods in both reactors were not only uncovered by water at various points, but were also "exposed" which I presume to be through a containment failure, AND there are numerous reports that the parts of the rods have in fact melted.
As I said earlier, this constitutes a meltdown and greatly increases the severity and danger of the problem at hand. It's not a total meltdown, I already "disclaimered" that repeatedly. Those rods melting pose a large risk to containment efforts. If they melt, they can escape much more easily and that means radiation exposure on a much greater level, even if only for workers at the plant.
I don't mean to sound patronising or rude, if that is what came across sorry.
Whilst mostly you're correct, there are some fundamental problems with what you are saying.
It's definitely stretching the definition of a meltdown to refer to this event as such. It's still pretty much unknown if any melting has occurred, and to what extent it has done. Generally a meltdown is as I described it; where the situation is unrecoverable with the standard cooling and you are facing the situation of simple containment.
I suppose technically this could be seen as a partial meltdown; but the truth is that this situation is at the very edge of the margin for such a problem. A meltdown is not a binary thing, but in this case it is not really a meltdown, and that was my main point.
Right now it is absolutely recoverable, and based on the latest data #1 and #3 reactors will be fine from this point on. Certainly if they survive the next couple of days it will all be fine.
but were also "exposed" which I presume to be through a containment failure
No. If this were the case there would be a much serious issue :) It simply means the coolant level dropped so far that they were exposed to the air inside the container.
If they melt, they can escape much more easily and that means radiation exposure on a much greater level, even if only for workers at the plant.
Potentially... but bear in mind that radiation expulsion so far is relatively unrelated to the core; the radiation released so far is included in the steam that is being vented (and then the explosions push it right out). In a proper meltdown situation the risk is that an explosion releases actual core material into the wild, that would be a magnitude worse than the current situation.
At the moment I don't believe the rods are melting, they are being successfully cooled (and for the most part have been).
I don't know, maybe you're right but I continue to see, more and more, evidence that they did melt. I continue to see more and more people placing this between TMI and Chernobyl in severity...
It's never been 'inconceivable' that nuclear plants would fail. Nuclear energy was a risk nations were willing to take to keep you plugged in, making this post right now. You're faulting engineering that predates the microprocessor, at a power plant scheduled to be decommissioned soon, for failing in the two worst natural disasters (earthquake + tsunami) in Japan's modern history.
If society doesn't consider this comparatively small loss of life acceptable given the benefits, then society is stupid. But we already knew society is stupid, and terrible at risk analysis. If that weren't the case, we'd have many many more nuclear reactors, and no one would want to get in their cars, ever.
If anyone is stupid and terrible at risk analysis it's the people who still spew that party line. It was already stupid when there had been only one complete failure of nuclear plant safety, and it happened to the "bad guys" whom everyone could just assume must have been more stupid and careless than we "good guys" could ever possibly be. But fact is, people have acted stupid and careless handling nuclear plants everywhere, and a risk analysis that assumes all risks are foreseeable and perfect execution of safety measures is just incredibly idiotic.
Who claimed that nuclear safety and contingency planning handled every single forseeable risk? Who claimed that operators and officials react in a perfect manner during a crisis? I don't think anyone has. I certainly haven't. Putting words in other people's mouths is stupid (see, I can make oblique insults too).
The bottom line is that nuclear power is still safer than many activities/environments that regular people encounter on a daily basis, and is certainly safer and cleaner than other, much more prevalent sources of power generation. It's obviously not the safest or cleanest, but it's up there.
Can you say how many lives have been saved because of the nuclear power plants over the past 30-40 years? This would include cleaner air in the meantime, costs which were saved and re-deployed to social welfare programs, cheaper power for individuals and businesses, meaning cheaper goods and more money available to feed and house love ones and spend on health care, and hell, even more money to spend on the expensive construction codes which undoubtably saved many thousands of lives during this tragedy.
I really can't say how many lives are enhanced or saved by simply being more efficient. And I can't predict the future, so neither do I know if nuclear power will ultimately be our downfall. But the question is far more complex than "society considers the loss of life acceptable." Society makes these choices to support and sustain better (and more numerous) lives.
Calculate, how many lives are already saved and will be saved in future by nuclear reactors in comparison to other sources of energy. Calculate how many lives will be lost in worstests scenarios. Multiple number by probability and sum up.
For example:
* nuclear reactor can save 1000 lives per year in 100 years of it life with 0.9999 probability;
* in worstest case, with 0.0001 probability, it can kill 10000 humans per year in 1000 years.
0,0001 probability is too optimistic - we already have Chernobyl and few other smaller nuclear disasters while number of nuclear stations is much smaller than 1K.
Energy Source Death Rate (deaths per TWh)
Coal – world average 161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal – China 278
Coal – USA 15
Oil 36 (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas 4 (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass 12
Peat 12
Solar (rooftop) 0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
Wind 0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
Hydro 0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro - world including Banqiao) 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear 0.04 (5.9% of world energy)
Not trying to be contrary, just sharing what I have heard.
I don't know what you consider 'Serious Harm to Humans', but as of Sunday, there were an assumed 160 people with radiation exposure (9 confirmed).[0]
From what I remember on the news the other day, the reason for the failures of the plants was the fact that they had not conceived of an earthquake and tsunami of this magnitude. PM Kan said that there were adequate protections in place for the facilities, but the earthquake was beyond the conceived scope of the protection.
Also, while 20km from site 1 have been evacuated, they've needed to extend the radiation-affected area to 30km. Unfortunately, it's too wide of an area to evacuate, so they have told people to stay in their homes.
This is a very consequential difference: 被ばく does not mean radiation poisoning, it means radiation exposure. You can have sub-clinical (i.e. no impact to health) exposure. For example, if you've ever had a dental X-ray, you've been hibaku'ed.
So far, the only report of radiation poisoning which I've heard is a SDF member who was on-site when one of the steam explosions happened.
According to that, fatal poisoning starts at around 2 Sv. According to the BBC, levels in the surrounding area are 8 mSv per hour, so not enough for acute poisoning given the timings, though not at all good for you. For comparison, a chest x-ray is 60 µSv.
One spectacular outlier of a failure does not make a rule.
For the record, I wouldn't agree that all the nuclear power plant dangers have been solved, but they're a hell of a lot safer than most of the day-to-day activities most people engage in, and certainly safer (and cleaner!) than more prevalent electricity-generation schemes in use.
I don't know what happened in Bhopal, but the captain of the Exxon was drunk (not an engineering failure) BP didn't maintain their crap (management failure) and filling the Hindenburg with hydrogen was stupid, but happened because of political moves that made it impossible to get enough helium.
Hm, what are we supposed to learn? That everything might go badly? How can we apply that lesson to nuke reactors? By my count, 8 levels of failsafes have failed. How many more do you want? Reminds me of a Futurama episode where an oil tanker with 1,000 hulls crashes and spills. Fry exclaims, "Oh, if only we'd had the foresight to use 1,001 hulls, this would never have happened!"
Does nature just keep jacking up the pressure to beat every security measure? Of course not. Nature doesn't do arms races.
Nature's effect is finite and measurable... earthquakes are easily predictable in the long term... the terrible cost of radiation leak is easily predictable.
Like most other human efforts, the goal posts are pretty clear. Make nuke plants stronger than the strongest that nature is capable of producing.
A tsunami + earthquake in japan is not a surprise to anyone.
What is a surprise is that the people running the reactor consider it a surprise.
The reactor was designed to withstand an 8.2 quake - very, very strong. It withstood an 8.9 quake with no damage! That's the 7th strongest quake ever recorded, and 700% of the rated strength! The tsunami physically washed away the generators, but the battery backup was sufficient for new generators to be trucked in. (The new generators could not connect to the old water pumps, but that's not the fault of the plant's designers.)
I wonder where "8.2" came from in the engineering spec. and whether shooting for the ability to withstand a quake somewhere in the neighborhood of, say, the 10th largest is the right target. Maybe "the largest + 200%" is a better place to start? Of course, it costs more money.
but that's not the fault of the plant's designers
But it is a totally avoidable error. Not the plant's designers error, but a human error nonetheless. Why are we limiting our concerns over human error to just the people responsible for the original design? Surely there were organizations/contractors involved in developing replacement generators. Surely there are current plant safety and maintenance directors. Surely there is a complete nuclear regulatory agency.
> Maybe "the largest + 200%" is a better place to start? Of course, it costs more money.
Consider two possibilities.
One: design the reactor so that a magnitude-9 quake leaves it completely undamaged. Let's say that makes it cost $4B instead of $2B.
Two: design the reactor so that a magnitude-8.2 quake leaves it completely undamaged and a magnitude-9 quake (which might affect it, let's say, once per 200 years on average) makes it fail in a way that takes 100 lives and requires it to be completely rebuilt (to the same spec, let's say) at a cost of $2B.
Cost of option 1: $4B now. Nothing more. Cost of option 2: $2B now. $2B and 100 lives in another 200 years.
Suppose your discount parameter is 0.5% per year (much, much lower than just about any real person or institution uses). Then $2B + 100 lives in 200 years = $740M + 37 lives now.
Can you save 37 lives for $260M? Why yes, you can. Far more than 37 lives, in fact. If you do anything reasonable with $260M you may well save more than 37 lives just by (say) making everyone a little better off. (Wealth correlates with health.)
Therefore, option 2 is probably better.
Turning from hypothetical examples to the real world: $2B/$4B is probably an underestimate (in which case, the advantage of option 2 over option 1 is greater) and 100 lives is probably an overestimate (in which case, again the advantage of option 2 is greater).
On the other hand, the earthquake happened improbably early in the life of the plant. It is not an error to do things that work out well in almost all cases but badly when you get unlucky, when the alternative is something that works out (relatively) badly most of the time but well when you get unlucky.
I don't think we have anything that can stand a 9.7 quake (the biggest was 9.5 in Chile) and frankly it would properly cost so much money that it would be cheaper to produce the power by having humans run on threadmils.
It is also likely that the money could be better spend elsewhere (that is, it could same more lives) such as in improving road safety or to hire more police officers.
I think the lesson the poster was implying is that nuclear power is not safe, and cannot be made safe.
Also, I'm not sure what you define as "failsafes", but the conventional measurement is number of containment levels. This reactor had 3, while I believe more modern reactors have 4.
I was including the power generators. After the reactor went into automatic cooling (which actually worked), the backup diesel generators were destroyed in the tsunami, and although the battery backup-backup power worked, it ran out before power could be restored. Also, venting the coolant helped a bit but not enough, and flooding the reactor with seawater helped a lot, I think that's the point when everyone got optimistic.
"Whether you like it or not, the beliefs of most intellectual engineer types is that the nuclear power plant dangers have been solved."
This belief is basically it's own logical fallacy; the idea that because someone has figured out a theoretical solution to a problem, the issue is moot. I feel like I've posted this previously, but I can't find now so maybe not.
In the post-mortem this will probably be the lesson.
How many times are you going to hear:
"The issues were easily avoidable with proper upgrades, but it was decided that the cost of upgrading the plant was not justified given the low probability of an 8.9 earthquake"
"The issues were easily avoidable with proper upgrades, but it was decided that the cost of upgrading the plant was not justified given the low probability of an 8.9 earthquake"
And that decision may very well have been correct. If I don't buy a lottery ticket but the numbers I would have picked come up, that doesn't mean I made a mistake.
Who are most intellectual engineers ? I agree that most news seem to be conflicting, and very hard to understand for the layman, but I cannot possibly see how anyone can claim the issue has been solved when even the people with incentive to downplay the reality (Japanese gvt, TEPCO) say that the situation is increasingly worrying.
When you read nuclear news website (http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/), it seems the issue is potentially very serious, where the potentially become less and less uncertain rapidly. Given that this news website has the support of the world nuclear association, I would be inclined to trust them most than any general news channel out there (being tv/journals or of course Japanese gvt).
Indeed, and that goes both ways......just as several decades of extensive use of nuc lear power generation with practically no deaths in multiple countries has done absolutely nothing to quell some people's fears.
Any guess as to who understands the science better? But then, its not about science is it? And its certainly not about facts.
> several decades of extensive use of nuc lear power generation with practically no deaths in multiple countries
That actually hurt me physically to read.
Take Chernobyl. All of those kids that have developed and will develop thyroid cancer, the firefighters that knowingly sacrificed themselves to get the fire out (thereby directly saving more lives), the plant workers who killed themselves in order to minimize the effects, the liquidation workers who contracted cancer in the process of building the sarcophagus, and the babies being born -- even today! -- in the surrounding area prematurely and dying before even being able to comprehend where they are (which some doctors from that region blame on Chernobyl). Yeah, those deaths aren't practical at all. How can you be so obtuse?
Nothing wrenches my gut more than a child dying before being able to speak a single word. I'm actually tearing up that you dismiss such things as impractical statistically, in order to further your argument that us laymen have no idea what we're talking about when it comes to nuclear episodes.
You take relative figures and turn them into an absolute. In multiple comments, you have denied that nuclear power has ever had a disaster, and that "practically" anybody has died (whatever the hell that means). You might believe strongly in nuclear power, but you cannot erase or modify history.
Nuclear power is safe. It can also go horribly wrong, and we learned a lot from Chernobyl. Why does it have to be polar with you? It can be both.
Yeah, that always gets to me, too. And it is also funny how lots of these people try to downplay the effects of the Chernobyl disaster, if that's even possible. When it comes to the number of casualties they hurry up in bringing up the 4,000 mentioned in the IAEA report, which is like asking Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld of writing up about the effects of the Iraq mess.
Just today I was reading about how in one of counties of Romania (of which I am a citizen) the number of deaths caused by cancer is double the number of deaths caused by TBC (which used to be the number one killer before 1986) or diabetes. One might argue that this may be caused by a sudden change in the the conditions of living or anything related, but I can assure you that's not the case (if anything, heart-related deaths should have been on the number one spot). Of course, you won't see these cancer-related deaths taken into account in any of IAEA's reports.
I also have some sort of personal emotional involvement in all this, as one of my childhood playmates and best-friends died of leukemia in 1990. He was 5 when Chernobyl happened, but of course no-one can link his death to that disaster, can it? It doesn't matter that I can't even remember one case of my parents telling me about kids dying of cancer in the '50s or the '60s, because that just didn't happen (although child mortality was way higher back then). It all miraculously started to happen after Chernobyl.
bringing up the 4,000 mentioned in the IAEA report, which is like asking Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld of writing up about the effects of the Iraq mess
I wouldn't liken IAEA to Dick and Bush... It is the only credible international organisation assessing effects of nuclear energy and proliferation.
I think IAEA does superb job, unfortunately Japan haven't been very cooperative with them thus far.
But the nuclear power is already here and was for last 60 years. You can't put the genie back into bottle, unless we're going to have nuclear war and humankind will be reduced to stone age level, which incidentally is one of the things IAEA tries to prevent.
So we need to have responsible, transparent and safe nuclear power, and IAEA is the only organisation that tries to ensure that on a global level, IMHO.
That's what happens when a communist country plays with stuff that it has no business playing with. They never cared about the security because they assumed they could tell their slaves (ie. the soviet population) what they wanted to and because they controlled tv and radio. They only cared about the prestige for communism.
What happen in Chernobyl, while bad, cannot happen at these plants because we build them with the security measures that the communists should have built but didn't.
As for the radiation, normal power plants produce more every year than was released here (at least until yesterday).
And the number of people who died as a result of the quake is houndred of times higher than those who may die as a result of the radiation.
Not offering an opinion one way or the other, but just noting that there really are some facts here that are motivating people.
The piece that rationalist engineers (I am one of them) tend to gloss over is that the public has historically been lied to, by experts about the dangers and difficulties of nuclear power -- all nuclear technology, really. X rays for shoe sizing. Atmospheric weapons tests. Ed Teller. The downside to accidents is large, and there's not much trust anymore. Some, but not much.
These are the facts that are perhaps engaging people's fears.
Given this history, for some people, the bank of "expert credibility" is overdrawn already. The classic nerd technique of argument from expertise is ineffective.
If we shouldn't argue from expertise, what should we argue from? Cast members of Jersey Shore? Berry diet fad producers? PR persons? Our personal feelings? A magic 8 ball?
Seriously if they won't listen to experts (assuming that we can agree on whom the experts are), that is perhaps the best argument against democracy that I have ever heard.
...and none of this says anything about the facts that have been reported (most of which, you'll note, have not been pretty for pro-nuke advocates). Are the facts that have been reported wrong? If you don't have evidence that they aren't, this is just a "hunch", and not really worth serious consideration.
But, okay, as you wish. I have the crisis firmly in mind now. I will not "rush to believe that everything is fine" or anything.
So.
Do you have any advice about what action I should take next? I live twelve time zones away, am a citizen of a different country, and have only a passing acquaintance with nuclear engineering.
I can't accomplish anything useful by panicking. I can't change building codes from N years ago, I couldn't prosecute anyone in Japan for negligence even if I had any evidence of same (which I do not), I can't dictate to Japanese industry even if I knew what to do (which I obviously don't), I can't run the Japanese government, I can't even vote in Japan. Neither I nor anything else we know can stop radioactive elements from decaying, and I can't unwind time and stop the earthquake.
I suppose I can raise my blood pressure, and raise the blood pressure of everyone else I know, and we might even achieve mass hysteria. Is that really a good idea? Why? Like every citizen of the USA, I happen to have some experience with mass hysteria. It didn't turn out well in 2001. I'm not anxious to see more of it.
What would you like me to do, instead of waiting for events to unfold, staying away from certain portions of the Japanese coast, hoping that various Japanese nuclear engineers have done their duty well, and meanwhile focusing on other things?
Why do you have to act? What impetus is making you do something, whether it be conclude about the crisis so you can put it out of mind or fly over and pump seawater yourself or something? What is preventing you from doing absolutely nothing and still not forming a conclusion?
This is the meat of the entire thing, I think, and those upvoting you are feeling the same way, so let's have a Robin Williams/Matt Damon moment, okay?
YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING. RELAX AND WAIT.
YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING. RELAX AND WAIT.
YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING. RELAX AND WAIT.
This incessant urge to do something is making you draw conclusions early, too, and I worry that you're having a hard time seeing an alternate approach: do nothing, relax, go about your life, and wait for the big word on what's going on.
This isn't your fault, either. It's the media's, for setting an expectation of knowing about something before it's over and for moving on before the long-term ramifications are widely disseminated.
While it is true that there are many people attempting to call the crisis "over" without adequate evidence that this is the case, I think it is equally obvious that there are many people who are doing the opposite: namely, attempting to make the case that the crisis is far worse than the incomplete facts indicate.
I applaud your more measured approach, but I must say that, as someone who has read most of the stories and comments regarding this topic that have hit the front page, I do feel that you are decidedly in the minority. There are plenty of people rushing to call this a horrendous disaster, who are privy to the same limited information, and who are likewise doing very little to contribute to the discussion.
I mostly agree, but we have to assume the absolute worst and be rewarded with good news, rather than assume everything's fine and be surprised when a large number of Japanese citizens get thyroid cancer. Even though I think "oh my God, Chernobyl!" is uncalled for at this point, the fact is that the limited information doesn't change that we might be in a horrendous disaster (and arguably are).
The information we do have tells us it's bad; the information we don't have doesn't tell us how bad.
unless we're nuclear engineers, there is nothing we can do about the situation besides donate to relief organizations. with no productive actions to take, why should we assume anything?
Even though this is a Fairly Bad Thing, I think crafting an anti-nuclear agenda out of it is a poor move for society as a whole.
Nuclear power has overwhelmingly been shown to be safe, and something can be safe and have unexpected Big Deals at the same time. That's a non-binary attitude that this polarizing subject doesn't exactly favor, as shown by this thread in numerous places.
I mean, that's part of being human, isn't it? Nuclear power is safe. Humans build nuclear power. There will always be a human element...
If those are the only productive actions I can take to ensure this won't happen again, then I think I don't want this to not happen again. Not saying I want this to happen again, but nuclear power is still safer than most of the alternatives.
Of course, you're presenting a vastly incomplete list. We can also do things like:
3 - advocate extra layers of redundancy
4 - analyse what could have been done up-front to eliminate the possibility of this happening given the conditions of the earthquake+tsunami and implement the findings
5 - work to replace older nuclear reactors (with less-safe designs) with new reactors with state-of-the-art safety features
That might not be a bad idea. Not only would there be far fewer fatalities, but we'd be much less reliant on fossil fuels.
That, in turn, would not only forestall global warming, but possibly prevent some of the "hard crash" scenarios that could happen on the way down from the oil peak.
Unfortunately, getting rid of cars would probably be much harder than getting rid of nuclear power plants.
So I'd vote to start on something that's realistically accomplishable in the relatively near term: get rid of existing nuclear power plants, and keep new ones from being built.
Jobs would necessarily have to be much closer to home.
The onset of global warming and the oil peak are starting to prove that building economies around suburbs, highways, and long commutes is unsustainable anyway.
See this great documentary, "The End of Suburbia":
> Apparently people don't want it to be a big deal, but it's
> slowly turning into a big deal.
I think that people's reactions here are because they view this as the new beachhead in the 'nuclear is evil and will destroy the world' argument.
I think that the reality probably boils down to:
It's possible to do nuclear in a safe way. It's even possible
for humans to build such a system (i.e. the complexity
is not out-of-reach), but it's possible that (like economics)
this fails to take into account how illogical humans are (e.g.
cutting corners on something that is *really* dangerous).
I think a lot of the nuclear defensiveness attitude has to do with anti-leftist conspiracy bias. There are a lot of people that think that there are giant conspiracies run by environmentalists/hippies/peaceniks etc. that are blocking human progress, such as our ability to create nuclear power utopias. Forming your worldview around these types of ideologies can be uncomfortable when it clashes with reality.
I don't see that as a giant conspiracy, I'm just convinced that most people do not have the knowledge necessary to have a useful opinion, don't think much, are easily swayed when people make them scared and running a political campaign using fear to galvanize the population into support is very effective.
So no, it's not a giant conspiracy, it's just normal human fear of the unknown...
I'm not sure whether it's that "HN seems to want a heavy dose of finality..." or if we're just naturally inclined to want good news in the face of overwhelmingly bad news.
I keep on thinking of Akira Kurosawa's "Dreams..." (One of the segments deals with just this kind of scenario. The protagonist finds himself in hell after a nuclear disaster.) A horror like this has been in the cultural subconscious of Japan for decades. They always knew that there was a possibility of something like this, but they chose to gamble against it happening.
They didn't do it because they were foolish, or naive. They did their best to avert that disaster. The people had faith in the talent and skills of those engineers responsible.
It's our nature to want to see the good... even in a horror like this. (Especially a bunch of people who are willing to risk everything to start a business.)
Turns out the optimistic reports upvoted by hacker news were polyannish. There appear to be 2 borderline catastrophes right now -
1. In reactor 4 spent fuel rods are burning and radioactivity is being freely vented in to the air. NONE of the optimistic reports suggested this possibility but I see a prophetic article at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/world/asia/15fuel.html.
2. Reactor 2 has had an explosion that has damaged the core containment structure - something we were assured would not happen.
Why were engineers so optimistic, while the ground reality is so much worse? Probably the complexity of the system escapes us and look at small parts of the issue and assume they are under control. In reality many things are interacting and the combination can overwhelm defences. For eg. as water is being routed to reactors 1, 2 and 3 to prevent meltdowns, the spent fuel rods are overheating.
Yes, the upbeat reaction to Fukushima outside Japan has been disturbing. The fact that it would be hard to equal Chernobyl doesn't diminish the reality that this is easily the second-worst disaster in the history of nuclear power. People have been killed, and the entire complex is effectively trashed. One reactor at TMI took 14 years and a billion dollars to clean up; Fukushima is going to be a nightmare to set right even if things don't get worse.
Of course, this is assuming that things aren't worse than the official statements let on. The sordid history of the Japanese nuclear industry, including falsification of safety records at Fukushima, doesn't inspire confidence. Japanese nuclear officials are notoriously slippery in front of the press, and the lack of reliable information from Fukushima has been very frustrating. No one really knows what's going on there, and every time the officials claim to have it under control another building explodes.
In Ukraine, Chernobyl related benefits and programs are still funded by 5-7 percentage of government spending each year. In Belarus, government spending on Chernobyl reached 22.3 percent of the national budget in 1991, declining gradually to 6.1 percent in 2002. Total spending by Belarus on Chernobyl from 1991 through 2003 was more than US $13 billion. (Chernobyl Forum, 2006)
The area around Chernobyl was also very lightly populated compared to Japan.
In Japan live over 100 million people, in an area the size of California.
If the Fukushima disaster grows anywhere near the scale of Chernobyl, the damage (both economically and in terms of human life) will likely be much, much greater.
Not the best comparison; California is fairly sparsely populated, with concentrations in the SF and LA/SD areas. Being an island nation (well, a several-island nation), you'd expect Japan to be a bit more dense.
Consider that the population density of Japan is less than a third that of a somewhat average-density city like Austin, TX, and is even less dense than that of the state of New Jersey.
There is no evidence to suggest that Dai-ichi is actually a "disaster," let alone one anywhere near the scale of Chernobyl. Do you even know anything about the design of the plant at Chernobyl? Orders of magnitude less safe than even these pretty-old Dai-ichi reactors.
"Not the best comparison; California is fairly sparsely populated, with concentrations in the SF and LA/SD areas. Being an island nation (well, a several-island nation), you'd expect Japan to be a bit more dense.
Consider that the population density of Japan is less than a third that of a somewhat average-density city like Austin, TX, and is even less dense than that of the state of New Jersey."
If Austin or New Jersey had either the area or population close to that of Japan, maybe these would be relevant comparisons.
If you want to compare cities, try comparing New York to Tokyo, which at least are somewhat comparable. Though even there, Tokyo is far more populous, while NYC is far more densely populated.
"There is no evidence to suggest that Dai-ichi is actually a "disaster""
I guess you've been reading different news than than I have. What I've been reading says three of the reactors have exploded and a fourth has caught fire. There have already been reports of radiation leaks and at least 160 people have been exposed to radiation (so far). Sounds like a "disaster" to me.
Now, whether it escalates to the scale of Chernobyl (or larger) remains to be seen.
If Austin or New Jersey had either the area or population close to that of Japan, maybe these would be relevant comparisons.
Ok, let's reframe: I shouldn't even have bothered. Comparing the population density of a country like Japan to a state like California (as you originally did) is meaningless.
I guess you've been reading different news than than I have. What I've been reading says three of the reactors have exploded and a fourth has caught fire.
Then you've read wrong, or at least drawn the wrong conclusions from it. I haven't read up on the 3rd explosion, but two of them were "cosmetic" in nature and only affected the building structure around the reactors (the purpose of the structure is to keep weather out and is not designed to keep nuclear material in). Neither of the reactors "exploded." Yes, there were explosions at the reactors, but those are two very different things.
I still don't agree that this is a disaster by many reckonings of the term, but I recognize that people are free to define the severity to invoke it as they wish. I just happen to disagree.
Now, whether it escalates to the scale of Chernobyl (or larger) remains to be seen.
According to the IAEA (2005), the radiation contamination from the radioactive fallout exposed up to 6 million people in the surrounding area (including Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia) with radiation.
Well put. This is a highly chaotic situation unfolding as we speak. If any of that fuel catches fire, those of us sitting on our couches in silicon valley may very get a nice early spring gift from jet stream.
Even if AT THIS POINT the chances of such a fire are <1% (which quite frankly seems optimistic) we should be very very concerned...
Software engineers especially, but engineers in general, have a tendency to love complex machines. But engineers of all kinds SHOULD know best: that there are ALWAYS bugs, and where you least expect them.
We ought to put aside the politics here: whether you like nuclear power or you don't: we've all been very much dependent on it, and benefited from it greatly. It's impact on life is different, but not clearly better or worse than other sources.
Let's hope the engineers on the ground in Japan are getting very very creative.
"those of us sitting on our couches in silicon valley may very get a nice early spring gift from jet stream."
This brings up a question I've been wanting to ask since the ordeal started. How much do we know about the severity of radioactivity being spread to Hawaii, California or countries outside of Japan?
Assuming worst case scenarios, are the citizens of Hawaii in real danger of poisoning? Should neighboring countries be stocking up on potassium iodine?
Well in a worse case scenario, which is not as bad as chernobyl then the answer is no, they dont really have anything to worry about. Chernobyl has actually killed very few people or cases of cancer. The death toll directly killed by the accident was around 50, with 4000 affected by radiation.
We have endless reports from international agencies not just WHO, in these reports they find NO evidence of any increase of congenital malformations, those reports claiming 50,000 people handicapped after the disaster are plain wrong. The reports also state that as a direct result of the accident 4000 children got thyroid cancer, of which the recovery rate was almost 99%.
Anti-nuclear groups have hyped up Chernobyl to such an extent that many people have an irrational fear of nuclear energy.
Those statistics are bullshit. I agree that people have irrational fears about nukes but quoting back bogus stats at them doesn't really help. We'll never have good data about Chernobyl because the autocratic Soviet government not only made it impossible to obtain at the time actively suppressed info to spin the global media and to keep the affected population calm and controllable. There is a large body of evidence that hundreds of thousands of people were 'affected' by the radiation. Given that tracking the effects of radiation exposure is challenging under the best of circumstances, will never know how many or to what extent. But we can definitely say that those WHO numbers are garbage, and it strains the imagination to think the real numbers aren't a lot worse.
Wow is that conspiracy theory talk, you have any facts to back that up?
We have endless reports from international agencies. Cover-up? I doubt it. Ukraine and Belarus want aid and help, have no interest in covering up, and it’s difficult to believe in an international nuclear industry driven cover-up taking in all those UN agencies.
and so on, the list really is endless, you can click through for hours.
What is this "large body of evidence" you speak of? It would be nice to have some reports by reputable scientists but all you've done is spew conspiracy hystaria.
Ugh, just for the historical record: no, it is not "conspiracy theory talk". It's the simple observation that without reasonably accurate data, valid analysis cannot be done. We don't have most of the data pertaining to Chernobyl, and we never will. That is mainly because the USSR was a totalitarian state with rigorous information control systems, and it didn't like to be embarrassed by its nuclear oopsie-daisy.
Good scientists--those of the WHO included--do their best with what data they have, and don't make claims that can't be backed up by data. Because there isn't enough data to support it, there will never be a comprehensive scientific analysis of the real impact of the Chernobyl event... at least until we get some kind of time machine tech.
Until then, you can't KNOW the impact of Chernobyl. Sorry, but you just have to GUESS. I realize that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but that's how life works a lot of the time.
So my point wasn't "I know the real Chernobyl outcome in its entirety! It was baaaaad, man!" It was, "nobody knows the real Chernobyl outcome; we only know some partial results that we've been able to piece together, mostly many years after the fact from inconsistent data." (And that my personal hunch is that there was probably a lot of negative impact to humans which could not be captured in reports such as the ones you cite.)
Well, at least one of the 2 possibilities is closer to the worst case since radioactivity levels are 500x (400 mill-sievert, from 800 u-sievert) what they were a few hours ago.
Where are you getting the milli from? Kyodo reports 8000 micro sievert. So it's an ~5.5x increase from the previous high-water-mark of 1,500 microsievert.
Stop it! This is the proper time to panic and disregard any empirical evidence. The Sky-Is-Falling crowd has needed this release of pure panicgasm for a long time, don't ruin it for them.
Well, just cross your fingers and pray, it may get worse, if you are lucky. I get the distinct feeling that you want there to be a nuclear catastrophe....most detractors are content with imagining (and genuinely believing) that there have been several catastrophes in our past. But you seem drawn to want an actual catastrophe.
Am I wrong? If you could somehow magically snap your fingers and make nuclear power 100% safe, would you do it?
That fourth reactor had been turned off and was under refurbishment for months before the earthquake and tsunami hit the plant on Friday. But the plant contains spent fuel rods that were removed from the reactor, and experts guessed that the pool containing those rods had run dry, allowing the rods to overheat and catch fire.
I think a big part of it is we've had it drilled into us that fears of nuclear meltdowns are irrational. That people are just misinformed & scared of something they can't see or possibly understand. And we like to think we're smarter than the general population.
But clearly no one knows how bad this situation is going to get.
How many major nuclear disasters have there been in the last, say, 50 years? Three mile island and Chernobyl are the two big ones that everyone knows about, and considering that people are saying that this is the third largest [EDIT: actually the second largest, at this point], I take that as an endorsement of nuclear power. As compared with coal, oil, natural gas, and so forth, which function by spewing pollutants into the environment continuously, during normal operation.
Yes, I would be thrilled if we switched entirely to solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric power sources, but nuclear power isn't anywhere near as disastrous as the people strongly against it would like us to believe. It's also not as safe as a lot of people would like to think, but, by and large, it is fairly safe.
You've got a good link there, but the wrong anchor. The anchor you are looking for was #Failure_hazard, and possibly a better link would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam#1975_Flood . 26,000 dead in the flooding and 145,000 dead due to subsequent epidemics.
If some of you anti-nuclear types get frustrated that I and others are not rushing out to forswear nuclear forever and ever amen, it's not because we don't understand the risks. It's because we don't ignore a death just because it happened in a non-radioactive flood or a non-radioactive coal mining accident and didn't involve any OMGRadiation!!1!. Nor are deaths caused by nuclear issues magically worse than being killed in a flood or a coal mining accident. Dead is dead. Someone who wants to be seen caring waves around their fashionable concerns and waits for congratulations from their peers; an engineer who wants to care considers the costs and benefits of the whole system, and doesn't simply assume either is zero without evidence. Regardless of how bad this particular crisis may become, it still nets out that people are dying every year because we're too cowardly to look at nuclear head on and use more of it and less of the even-more dangerous other technologies we are using, so that we can feel good about our irrational fear of OMGRadiation!!1!.
The problem with hydro is that you can't build it where you need the power (unless geography - or real estate - is uncannily nice to you)
Most of Brazil depends on a single hydro facility with endless miles of aluminum wires crossing the southeast part of the country. If anything serious fails there, the country pretty much stops.
Renewables like solar, hydro, biomass, and wind have their place, but you don't generate solar during night, you may want to spare your water during a drought, you may need to eat the biomass and you may have days without wind. Nuclear too has its place. Technology is a tool we should wield with reason, not passion.
It should be noted, though, that solar thermal plants can indeed generate electricity during the night, by collecting heat in reservoirs to later produce steam, be them water or molten salt[1] heat reservoirs.
I generally see people talking about how safe the new reactor designs are, and how it's a tragedy that people are so afraid of nuclear that they won't let them be built. The reactors in Japan are 40-year-old designs. You can't compare them on the same level. It's like saying that people in favor of nuclear power claim that Chernobyl never happened because 'safe nuclear' == 'never was a reactor that was unsafe ever built.'
Add to that the fact that the other reactors there have stood up to a 9.1 quake with about 600 aftershocks -- ranging from mild to "I'm a pretty decent disaster all by myself" -- A sizable tidal wave and numerous fires with hydrogen explosions.
This could definitely have been far, far worse by now.
You might be surprised to discover that a 40 year old life is fairly standard in nuclear power plants[1], in fact some countries hope to keep their plants active for closer to 60 years. At close to $7B+ investment in just the building phase of a modern nuclear plant and close to 7-10 years construction time per plant[2], the limited lifetime of the plant does start to become a concern in the financial sense though.
I'm not balking at the age and saying that the place is 'falling apart.' I'm saying that they were designed 40 years ago, and that it's possible that we've learned things since then and can build better plants (starting at the design phase). I'm no expert though, so I'm making no claims.
>Well, we're seeing them being proven wrong yet again. How much more proof are they going to need? How many more nuclear disasters is it going to take?
You've had one and a half. TMI had no ill effects on health, Chernobyl was caused by Soviet incompetence, and Fukushima is the result of an earthquake 7 times more powerful than it was designed to survive. Compare that to the damage caused by oil spills alone.
No power source that is economically viable on a large scale is 100% safe, including nuclear. They do their damndest, but sometimes it fails. There were some design flaws in Fukushima, namely the placement of the backup generators and the height of the tsunami barriers, but the precipitating earthquake was still the strongest in 1200 years. It looks like the containment vessel on the #4 reactor has been breached, and that's very, very bad. Still, the only people injured were those injured by the hydrogen explosions, not by radiation. There's been a few people (~12) who suffered radiation exposure, I believe all plant workers.
Is this event bad? Yes. Could it be another Chernobyl? Probably not. Reactor 4 is on fire, and is releasing radiation into the atmosphere, but on nowhere near the scale that Chernobyl did.
Most of the "optimism" yesterday was based on what had actually occurred: the coolant had failed, #1 was flooded, and #3 had encountered the same problems. Both reactors had hydrogen explosions outside of the containment vessel that didn't compromise them. No significant radiation had been released.
Today is a different story. We'll keep an eye on things and see how they progress, but the optimism was based on the situation at #1 and #3, not the yet-to-happen situation at #2 and #4.
"the precipitating earthquake was still the strongest in 1200 years"
People keep mentioning this as if that matters. The fact is that it happened, and there's really no telling when future natural disasters will strike any given nuclear plant. All we know is that they can happen and that if disasters on this scale do happen, nuclear reactors are not up to surviving them.
"Reactor 4 is on fire, and is releasing radiation into the atmosphere, but on nowhere near the scale that Chernobyl did."
Yet.
But this disaster may be far from over.
"There's been a few people (~12) who suffered radiation exposure, I believe all plant workers."
That's not what I'm hearing. From a former nuclear industry executive and whistleblower interviewed recently on Democracy Now:
"they talk about 160 people that have been contaminated. That’s all they’ve tested. Basically, everything they’re testing is coming up contaminated in that inner couple of miles around the plant. You’ve got radiation being detected 60 miles to the north in a Navy helicopter, a hundred miles to the east on a Navy aircraft carrier. So, it’s not clear to me that that cloud is not looping around and affecting Japan."
As far as contamination goes, my information is ~12 hours out of date, so I won't argue that point. I will point out, however, that it's not the level of radiation that matters, but the specific isotopes causing it. Radioactive Iodine, for example, is particularly dangerous because it has a relatively long half-life and naturally concentrates in the lymph nodes. Shorter-lived isotopes, like N-16, will contribute to high radiation levels but not have any real health effects.
As for this not being on the same scale as Chernobyl, I doubt even a full, uncontained meltdown would be as bad as that. Chernobyl made heavy use of graphite, which burned for a long time, spewing long-lived fallout everywhere. Fukushima I uses a different design, with less inherent risk.
and Fukushima is the result of an earthquake 7 times more powerful than it was designed to survive
Actually the reactors came out of the earthquake quite well! It was that pesky tsunami taking out the backup generators to power the cooling systems that's really causing all these problems. And even then, new generators were brought in to fix the problem caused by the tsunami, but somehow nobody thought to check to make sure the new generators were compatible with the plant's power system before trucking them in. Oops.
It was a perfect storm. The plant shut down, as it should have, and the batteries operated properly. However, the tsunami submerged the diesel backups, and the rest of the power grid had been knocked out by the earthquake, so they couldn't use external power.
The mobile generators deal was a fuckup, plain and simple. I think, had they known what the price of failure was, they would have found a way to make it work. I think they were overconfident in the safety systems they had in place.
> how many more nuclear disasters is it going to take?
Indeed....please provide us with the list of nuclear disasters, it should be an easy exercise judging by the tone of confidence in your post. Just for fun, throw in some stats on deaths per kwh of electrcity.
PREDICTION: you will not respond to this, because there have been no nuclear disasters. And no one disputes that in practice, nuclear is the safest form of power statistically. If you want to assert that nuclear power is incredibly powerful and dangerous, that is one thing, but trying to pass off potential disaster as reality, is a but disingenuous.
You can't simultaneously accuse your OP of being disingenuous about nuclear power (which he is, and I agree), then claim there have been no nuclear disasters, because that is probably more disingenuous than the original claim. That's just not true.
Are we working with the same definition of the word disaster? Even bloody Wikipedia, which I'd hardly call the tome of truth, calls Chernobyl a disaster[1]. Human life, property damage (ask Belarus), worldwide fallout...you don't get to rewrite what disaster means so that nuclear power keeps an untarnished image. There has been at least one. Debatably -- and I don't care to get into it -- there could now be as many as three.
There's a parallel with airliner crashes. More people die every day on highways, but an airliner going down is a very serious thing because there are hundreds of lives suddenly ended. So it was with Chernobyl: due to a catastrophic failure of engineering, humanity, and government, dozens of peoples' lives suddenly ended. You can argue that tens of thousands of lives are now in jeopardy due to the radiological effects. That is a disaster, regardless of any pro/anti-nuclear agenda.
I was speaking about disaster in an absolute sense, not a relative one. When you only have ten or so incidents to go by, then Chernobyl and three mile island are going to be called disasters, as far as nuclear disasters go. In terms of real disasters, when measured in human deaths, they are tiny footnotes in history, statistically irrelevant.
Hundreds of people die every year, just mining coal. How many people have died from nuclear power generators in their entire history? Disingenuous indeed.
There are a lot of relevant statistics in that document, such as the thousands of thyroid cancer cases directly attributed to the radiation exposure, not to mention the tens of firefighters that died saving the rest of the world. I would hate to live in your world, where there's a threshold of death to call something a disaster -- you are really minimizing the effects on hundreds of thousands (potentially millions) of people, simply because they haven't died yet or at all. How about getting uprooted from their homes and lives?
Just as I pointed out with my airliner analogy, the deaths from mining coal are over time, and many probably attributable to basic industrial accidents. Black lung has kind of been figured out, hasn't it? Five hundred coal miners didn't wake up on a Tuesday and die from coal poisoning, and as a result we're not talking about a disaster that needs investigation with coal power production.
I agree that nuclear power is statistically safe, but you are really skewing facts and doing a great disservice to less-educated readers about the (real) dangers of nuclear power, and calling it science elsewhere in this thread. This isn't a binary proposition -- something can be really safe and have the occasional Big Deal. Just like air travel.
Solar and wind are not always there when you need them, so you need some source of electricity that is. Current ways to store power (batteries, pumping water uphill) are too expensive.
Those are not comparable power sources. They cannot substitute for fossil or nuclear plants, because they are way too expensive and do not provide 24/7 power without even more expensive batteries.
Actually, thermal solar plants can produce electricity 24/7 just fine. They can store heat in water or (more efficiently) molten salt up in a tower and use it to later generate power at a reliable rate.
Spain is known to be investing heavily on concentrating solar power.
Those are great they just don't generate a lot of power though. The biggest one so far peaks at 60MW while your standard nuclear or fossil power plant generates 1000MW consistently. You'd need at least 20 of these to replace just one coal plant. That makes it what, 5 times more expensive than nuclear / fossil? Not even the USA can afford to go 100% renewable with a price like that.
"That makes it what, 5 times more expensive than nuclear / fossil?"
I'm not sure that's an accurate assessment, given that solar will probably become much cheaper as more solar plants are built.
And, as we're seeing with the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters, the real price of nuclear could be much higher than just the price of a power plant.
What would be your price tag on the lives lost in or ruined by these nuclear disasters? (not to mention the economic cost stemming from the areas being contaminated by nuclear fallout)
"Not even the USA can afford to go 100% renewable with a price like that."
Of course they could. They could start by giving fewer handouts to the rich in terms of bailouts and tax breaks. Then they could cut the military budget so that the US no longer spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined. And they could legalize drugs, and get rid of the War on Drugs, cut spending on filling prisons with people who commit victimless crimes, etc.
All together that would make for many trillions saved (plus a handy profit on taxing legal drugs). Then the US could easily afford to go 100% solar (and probably much more), without any of the risks of nuclear.
I understand that there are many political reasons why none of these things are going to happen in the US any time soon (though some estimates put legalization of pot on 10 year horizon, when the baby boomers start withdrawing from the political scene, and as the younger generation is far less afraid of pot). But it's not like these things couldn't happen.
It's all a matter of political will.
If there's one good thing that's come out of this latest nuclear disaster is that it's starting to wake people up to the true dangers and costs of nuclear power. Hopefully they won't need many more such lessons before they get the point.
"Just for fun, throw in some stats on deaths per kwh of electrcity."
How many kwh of electricity is your life worth?
How many kwh or electricity are the nearly 1 million people who died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster worth? [1]
And I'd love to hear you show me a list of solar array or wind farm accidents that prove nuclear power is safer than either.
If Chernobyl or the Fukushima plants were solar arrays or wind farms, how much environmental damage and cost in human suffering would there have been were they to have been destroyed?
I'm looking forward to hearing you sing about how nuclear is the "safest form of power statistically" if the radioactive cloud from Fukushima ever winds up floating over your home town.
---
[1] "Nearly one million people around the world died from exposure to radiation released by the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl reactor, finds a new book from the New York Academy of Sciences"
Solar array and wind farms kill people too. The by-products of mining and industrial production are often dangerous and result in disease. Solar cells in particular require lots of energy to create.
Is your home off the grid? Have you really considered the compromises that have to be made to live entirely(electric, heating, cooling, transport) from wind and solar? It's not easy, it demands changes to all aspects of ones lifestyle and has a significant price.
"The by-products of mining and industrial production are often dangerous and result in disease"
How does that compare to the hazards of mining radioactive ore and the hazards from storing and transporting nuclear waste?
"Have you really considered the compromises that have to be made to live entirely(electric, heating, cooling, transport) from wind and solar?"
These compromises aren't necessarily all bad. For instance, if the impact to transport means that we'll have to live on goods made locally and not be able to commute as far to work, that could make for stronger, more pleasant, and more sustainable communities and economic systems.
"It's not easy, it demands changes to all aspects of ones lifestyle and has a significant price."
Does that price approach dying of radiation poisoning from a Chernobyl-style disaster? Or how about having your children be born with all sorts of mutations caused by radiation? Or of poisoning the environment with nuclear waste?
> For instance, if the impact to transport means that we'll have to live on goods made locally and not be able to commute as far to work, that could make for stronger, more pleasant, and more sustainable communities and economic systems.
Good luck getting the rare earths from China for all those green technologies if you have to get them from local sources. The one big US mine was shutdown. The reason?
"In 1998, chemical processing at the mine was stopped after a series of wastewater leaks. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water carrying radioactive waste spilled into and around Ivanpah Dry Lake."
But it's okay because, currently, we get all those rare elements from China, where you don't hear about the pollution and accidents. Of course, China is saying that they don't want to share with everyone else any more, so that may change soon.
I'd like to know just how many tons of rare earths we have to import from China to run wind farms.
And why couldn't solar panels be developed without them?
Why not put a few tens or hundreds of billions (a tiny fraction compared to TARP or how much the US spends on the military) in to research in to these technologies to make them less dependent on rare earths?
But, as for the availability of rare earths outside China:
"As China slashes exports of rare earth elements, U.S. mine digs for more"
"Molycorp Inc., which owns the open mine, plans to dig out about 40,000 tons of dirt a year by 2014, up 1,200% from the current rate of about 3,000 tons.
The Colorado company is boosting production to meet an insatiable global appetite for rare earth elements..
The mine, about 16 miles from the Nevada border, has one of the world's largest deposits of rare earth elements outside Asia..
The company is spending more than $500 million to modernize and rebuild the 2,200-acre facility. The project is expected to create hundreds of permanent jobs and eventually produce rare earths at cheaper rates than mines in China."
"China's monopoly of the supply of strategic "rare earth" minerals will end when the Australian mining corporation Lynas brings a massive new refining plant in Malaysia into operation later this year...
The company has invested about $230 million in a refinery covering about 20 hectares which in September is due to start processing about 11,000 tonnes of rare earth oxide a year."
I take it you didn't read the link I posted, or you'd have noticed that the mine that released all that radioactive crap was owned by Molycorp Inc. Yes, the same one you're talking about.
Wind can't do base load power, either. Maybe someone will work that out by, I don't know, storing the energy in a flywheel or something. But they haven't done so yet. It's also dependent on our solar energy budget (as is solar, obviously). Conservation of energy is a pain, but no one knows how to violate it yet.
Why not put a few tens or hundreds of billions (a tiny fraction compared to TARP or how much the US spends on the military) in to research in to these technologies to make them less dependent on rare earths?
How do you know how much something like that would cost to develop?
Can you quote anything more credible than "The Environment News Service"?
Come on, do you expect to be taken seriously? Make a reasoned argument, I'm willing to listen. If you can quote any sort of a credible science agency that claims Chernobyl actually contributed to major death, I would consider it.
Historically, coal-fired power plants have been much more dangerous for humans than nuclear power plants. I think the record shows that nuclear power is on the whole pretty safe.
Regarding proof: I don't think anything has been proven, yet, except that there have been a lot of powerful forces at work with this disaster.
Alternative explanation: Being a pessimist is not productive. Woo-hoo, you were something in the ballpark of right. Is the world better because of it? If you look at every situation and assume the worst, you'll be right sometimes, but you'll never accomplish anything.
You're conflating the question of nuclear engineers preparing for the worst with question of whether, given two possible scenarios, we should just assume the worst (and, as implied by the GP, suggest that there is something defective with people who didn't make the negative assumption). The differences are incalculable.
However, nuclear power generation is serious. Things happen very fast and can turn nasty in milliseconds if you don't pay attention, if you don't understand what is happening, if you don't know what you are doing and if you don't have the right tools at hand to deal with whatever is going on.
One thing I learned in school is that you respect any machine bigger than you.
I have no idea why things went so completely wrong there. I always assumed people who design and build nuclear reactors do so in ways they can't fail. Now I am more inclined to believe they are happy to have plans B through G instead of having a really bulletproof plan A. It's certainly more impressive to list a long series of failsafe devices than just having a very unimpressive core that can cool itself in the event of an emergency.
It appears they were much less respectful than they should have been. Some people may end up paying with their lives.
I'll step in and defend nuclear power. This crisis looks horrible and might even lead to multiple core melts with containment breach. But let's not forget this was a horrible natural disaster first. We engineers never said a meltdown could never happen but that we have done everything possible to minimize the risk. I can predict that the amount of lives lost and property damaged due to this accident will pale when compared to other forms of energy including coal, gas or oil when things go wrong -- a price we pay every single day and is so common it hardly registers as news. What was cost of the BP oil spill? Read your local news for local gas explosions, oil spills, injured workers, etc. People are killed in the coal industry every single year. These are such every day occurrences they don't even register unless many people are killed or it involves barrels of oil. This accident is like a plane crash that draws attention to the horrors of flight when things go wrong -- but we still fly and flying is orders of magnitude safer then getting in your car.
All energy sources have risks and I believe that nuclear can be safe and reliable and better than any of the alternatives. In the end we will build nuclear power plants because there is no other large scale source of energy that can power an industrial civilization. (If you think so-called green energy and solar power can save us you need to learn some math. You are an environmentalist dupe). Need I remind all the ambitious hackers on HN that computers and the internet do not run on pixie dust -- it is running on oil, gas, coal and, yes, nuclear power right now. We know that at some point the oil will run out or become too expensive to mine. At that point its nuclear or turn off the lights and the drastic drop in living standards that implies.
This accident will teach us a lot about how to design and build reactors and nuclear power stations and maybe will delay the construction of those new plants which would be the real tragedy of this accident. We need to start building them now.
It's instructive that we've already engineered ways of preventing the problems TEPCO is experiencing at their Fukushima. Many newer reactor designs have a passive residual heat removal system that removes decay heat even without electrical power to run cooling pumps.
Good answer. I actually don't know the figures, but I know what sort of argument it would take to convince me: some numbers showing that nuclear power production takes a substantially higher toll on life and health than other forms of energy production, measured by kWh. This number determines whether producing the same amount of power by other means is going to save people, or kill people. (Yes, it's not out of the question that environmentalist activism kills people. Good intentions don't protect from bad consequences.) Maybe the people who advocate stopping nuclear power should cite their acceptable figures of death toll per kWh produced, and then we can compare with oil and coal. Emotional arguments only get us so far.
As regarding sustainable energy, here's my favorite book on the subject: http://withouthotair.com . It takes the approach I like: "let's just sit down and calculate".
From the Japanese Prime Minister and Chief Cabinet Secretary. My source is NHK World (Japan News):
People up to 30km from Dai-ichi (number-1) plant are being asked to remain indoors. ALL people within 20km of PLANT 1 are being asked to evacuate.
The Japanese Govt. have asked the Japanese people to act calmly. (My comment: Watch the stock market now.)
Here we go (information for PLANT 1 - Dai-ichi):
Number 4 reactor: is on fire. There has been a hydrogen explosion there. There was an implosion of the building structure. Radiation is being released into the environment. Note reactor 4 was not in operation, but the fire has caused spent fuel to heat up generating hydrogen.
Number 2 reactor: there was a blast 30 minutes after number 4's explosion. A hole/crack (trans?) has been observed in the reactor. Radioactive material has been released to the environment.
At 10:22am between reactor 2 and 3, 30milliSievert and at reactor 4, 100 milliSievert. At reactor 3 the reading was 400 MILLI Sieverts. Note MILLI, not micro.
They believe the fire at reactor number 4 is likely the main cause of the dramatic increase in radiation.
The roof of a containment facility for spent fuel has also been damaged. It is possible that a leak exists there too.
> A hole has been observed in the reactor. Radioactive
> material has been released to the environment.
I was just watching the press conference, and I could have sworn they said that the hole was in the reactor housing, and that little to no radiation was being released from this reactor. I was only paying half-attention though.
I agree that the information was highly confusing. I also thought I heard this, but what I wrote is I believe correct nonetheless. :-(
The english translation is very poor. Yesterday they used the phrase: "there is a small chance of a massive release of radioactive material". The correct translation was in fact, "there is little chance that there has been any substantial release of radioactive material"
You seem to be somewhat misinformed about Dr. Josef Oehman. You are correct, he does not have a PhD in Nuclear Engineering. And yes, he is currently teaching English in Japan. He is not a English Teacher by training, he is a research scientist "working on working on product development processes with MIT's Lean Advancement Initiative and the MIT-KFUPM Center for Clean Water and Energy." His undergraduate schooling is in Mechanical Engineering (looks like a focus on process design).
To be honest, the scorn you are heaping on English Teachers is misplaced to begin with, but if you're going to mock him, mock him as "Mr. Research Scientist". It's more accurate, and since you seem to be concerned with accuracy and titles, it would be appropriate.
Which facts that he posted were inaccurate? And note that I'm not talking about his opinions based on the facts, but rather the facts that he used as evidence?
UPDATE: I'm not trying to be snarky here. I'm very interested in this situation and want a clearer picture of it, and it would be nice if someone who understands the complexities of this matter would comment, as the facts in the original post (which is now being slammed) seemed to indicate at the very least cautious optimism.
(FYI, the post that was originally on the FP has moved here: http://mitnse.com/)
Apparently at least reactor 1 at Dai-ichi (which was the primary one to make trouble at the time he wrote the text, AFAIR) is too old a model to have the "core catcher" that he was saying would contain the corium in the case of a full meltdown.
I could be wrong, but based on news this morning it was my understanding that it in fact had a concrete "tertiary" containment including a dry and wet-well.
There were apparently some minor inaccuracies in what he wrote, which were pointed out by HN readers.
I keep hearing about seawater being pumped into the reactor chamber but apparently the chamber is still very hot. Where is all this seawater going? Steam? How big is this chamber?
EDIT: Also I've heard of at least two explosions. Does this mean that containment vessels are compromised? What exactly exploded?
The water heats up, building pressure, and then they vent some steam to try and lower the pressure (and then, obviously, have to re-add water). The explosions happen because the steam separates into Hydrogen & Oxygen due to a reaction, and once outside that is an explosive mix.
The chamber is pretty large, several meters deep around the core.
The explosions are as a result of the release of the hydrogen/oxygen mix - which does not take much to catch - but they occurred outside the pressure vessel. Such a situations is technically planned for, the building structure "fails outward" allowing the blast out and away from the pressure containment. It is relatively unlikely to damage the integrity of the vessel in such a situation; they are very very strong pieces of kit (at three mile island the explosion took place inside the vessel and I believe it did not compromise its integrity).
At this stage is somewhat unclear but it appears that the third explosion has damaged one of the pressure vessels. However the technical explanations I am seeing are stating that it hasn't compromised the integrity of the containment; instead it appears to be saying that parts of the mechanism inside the containment are damaged (in this case the "torus" which is used as an emergency pressure relief system).
This is actually, though, a significant problem, if true, because it could affect what happens if it finally does meltdown (as I mention in another comment, my working knowledge of this form of reactor is incomplete, but IIRC the torus also forms part of the final emergency response to a meltdown).
Bottom line is; at this stage we know there have been 3 hydrogen explosions at 3 of the units, and one fire at another of the reactors. But it is still unclear the level of damage and risk with each unit - TEPCO (and indeed Japanese companies in general) tend to play down or not discuss details and risk publicly. Take this fire; no one really picked it up until it was out - at which point TEPCO appear to have started mentioning it.
If I had to lay a claim I suspect that reactor 2 at this stage will probably meltdown; loss of the torus is significant enough that it raises the risk of what they are currently doing (i.e. trying to cool the core).
Whilst I can't claim to know the answer to your question, my guess/understanding is that it goes around the circuit and condenses in the heat exchange. It is then recycled.
Some steam is lost when they vent hydrogen, presumably.
Regarding the explosions, according to http://mitnse.com/, the Fukushima explosion occured in the ventilation system, outside of all containment vessels.
Just a note - all radiation levels reported from around the plant are measured in milli(m)/micro(u)-sieverts(Sv) per hour. For comparison, the worldwide average background radiation level is approx. 0.274 uSv/h, and the usa recommended continuous occupational limit is 5.71 uSv/h. For example, the highest level I've seen reported is 400 mSv/h, or 70000x the recommended limit. Info from wikipedia.
I've seen lots of things reported, but I'm always leery of things that have gone through two or three languages to get to us. We've all played that translation party where things get translated into gibberish. I'm going to have to take it with a grain of salt when people get their news from the French embassy (which, last I knew, was not known for nuclear expertise, but feel free to prove me wrong).
Kyodo News (http://english.kyodonews.jp/) are reporting that radiation levels in Chiba are twice to 4 times normal level and 33 times normal level in Utsunomiya, Tochigi.
Japan's warning that all people within 30 kilometers from Fukushima should stay indoors and that the radioactive winds may reach Tokyo in as little as 8 hours
Conclusions at any stage of this crisis have been premature, but HN seems to want a heavy dose of finality to a crisis that isn't even over yet. Apparently people don't want it to be a big deal, but it's slowly turning into a big deal. It just is. Instead of big essays and conclusions about how the powers-that-be have it under control complete with inaccurate depictions of how a reactor works, why don't we focus on facts?
With that in mind, we do not know how bad it is. Anyone who says they do is lying to you. It isn't over, and it is a basic fact of logic that we will not be able to reflect on how bad this is or was until it is over.
At the risk of a neener-neener I told you so, I presented some of this viewpoint[2] on the self-aggrandizing risk management Ph.D.'s everything's fine piece, but my viewpoint was drowned out by people wanting to rush to a conclusion so they can put the crisis out of sight and out of mind.
[1]: http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/06/17/tokyo.s...
[2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2319305