... I'm not one of the "OMFG LOOK AT THE NUCLEAR ANGEL OF DEATH" people, but can we wait for this crisis to reach some resolution before we make loud proclamations either way?
The main information that concerns me right now is that there appears to be a consistent radiation leak of 400 mSv/h at the plant. While not Chernobyl by any measure, this is quite a bit of radiation, considering one's yearly dose limit is 1 mSv total.
This seems to contradict the extremely optimisitc reports that all is well, under control, and that no significant radiation leak has occurred.
[edit] One thing that optimistic reports consistently fail to address is the situation with the spent fuel pools. While not capable of melting down, from what I've read the pools are rapidly boiling dry and plant workers are struggling to maintain cooling on them. Left to its own devices the fuel will boil out the pool, light on fire, and then you have burning nuclear waste drifting directly into the atmosphere (after all, the buildings no longer have roofs). There is some speculation that the current radiation spike at the plant is not from any reactor but rather its spent fuel containment.
"considering one's yearly dose limit is 1 mSv total."
In Ramsar, Iran the background radition is around 200 mSv/Y (compared to a worldwide average of 2.4 mSv/Y) and _according to wikipedia_ this "high level of radiation does not seem to have caused ill effects on the residents of the area".
Call me confused.
Is the 1 mSv/Y total one of those made-up safety guidelines?
1 mSv is estimated to increase your odds of serious medical complications by 1/1,000,000. Not a significant amount, but one's regularly allowable dose should not be expected to cause health problems in the first place. Also, these limits are very conservatively set for various reasons - most of which I agree with (used to work in a nuclear facility).
So no, if you got blasted with 10 mSv all at once you shouldn't expect to vomit blood or fall over dead, but it's still a sizable amount of radiation.
Also, 400 mSv/h is 3,504,000 mSv/Y (aka 3504 Sv/Y, aka 17,000 times the radiation output in Ramsar, Iran). Of course, one doesn't expect this radiation leak to last for a whole year, but the dose rate does matter. Sucking in 400 mSv over an hour is many, many times worse than getting it over a matter of years or decades.
A typical CT scan will expose you to 10-15mSv. A dose of 100mSv infers a 1% lifetime cancer risk. The effects of doses as small as 1mSv are not known and are inferred by models.
The 1 mSv/Y guideline is based on a hypothesis that extrapolating downward from higher dosages that have well understood health effects we can infer the effects of lower dosages. They call this the Linear no-threshold model. It was chosen because it's the most conservative, safest option.
Scientists suspect that it's wrong though. We have DNA repair mechanisms that may catch many errors.
Possibly. The largest human study ever done on the effects of chronic low-level radiation found them to be beneficial.
The researcher involved proposed a radiation hormesis model, in which the body adapts to the destructive effects of radiation by upgrading its self-repair response. US regulatory groups adhere to a linear no-threshold model in which all radiation, regardless of how weak it may be, leads to cumulative damage. It's not a resolved issue however. The French Academy of Sciences & National Academy of Medicine, for one, cited the study linked below in an argument against the LNT model.
The physics and physiology of radiation exposure seem to be quite complicated. I can't really answer your question, I'm very far from qualified to do so, but again _according to Wikipedia_ the short term effect of 0.2 Sv per day, let alone a year, seems to fall into the "no effect" category[1]. And according to this[2] post on Boingboing, the long term effect may not be as bad as one might think either.
The effects listed in the Wikipedia article refer to acute radioation poisoning, i.e. what happens when radiation is so intense that it directly kills so many of your cells that your body can't cope.
Even if at 0.2 Sv/d none of that happens, you still have a very actual, massively increased risk of cancer and genetic defects in future children. To declare "no health issues", you most definitely want to stay several orders of magnitude below that
200 mSv/Y : so that is 20 R/Y in the old language? That can not cause any ill effects only in the very specific countries, like Soviet Union, North Korea, Iran, Libya... I guess people there are just more radiation resistant.
>... I'm not one of the "OMFG LOOK AT THE NUCLEAR ANGEL OF DEATH" people, but can we wait for this crisis to reach some resolution before we make loud proclamations either way?
Well you could see this as a calm article to balance those with cries of the nuclear angel because lets face it, they sure are making something of this.
It's not a calm article though - it's as bad as the ones proclaiming the death of nuclear and the upcoming atomic apocalypse... just in the complete opposite extreme.
Where one side is "fire! brimstone! death!" this side is "lalalalala NO PROBLEMS KEEP CALM CARRY ON". Both are unnecessary, unproductive, and dogmatic.
But the question isn't who is being extreme in which direction. The question is, who's right? If the facts in this article are accurate, then they're not being extreme, they're just plain right. If the facts aren't accurate, then they are wrong.
This isn't a "(D) say -10, (R) says 10, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle" situation. This is engineering and reality. If the worst "nuclear" injury that has occurred is a dose equivalent to a year of background radiation and another of 1/10th of a year, the right answer is that nothing resembling disaster has happened, heck nothing you could even notice without sensitive instruments has happened, and it's not an "extreme" to say so if it's true.
Applying the political template to the story is immediately a fail, at least in terms of understanding the truth.
The 400 mSv figure was a spike measured at one of the reactors, not ambient radiation in populated areas. In Shinjuku in Tokyo for example they measured 0.809µSv (note the µ) between 10 and 11 this morning, although the average for that period was about half that.
If there are no further blasts or fires I think things will be fine, but I don't know how much more damage the facility can take. Some of my friends and coworkers are evacuating Tokyo and I'm not sure they don't have the right idea...
Yes, the 400 mSv figure is at the plant - the front gates to be specific IIRC. If 400 mSv/h is measured in a populated area this would be a complete and absolute disaster - within a few hours people would be falling sick from radiation sickness, some will die in the short term from it, and you're now dealing with an incredibly large long tail of cancers in the future.
Even just measuring that level at the plant is alarming, though it currently poses little threat to the public. It does raise the question of whether or not they have it under as much control as we'd hope.
It was 11 mSv/hr at the front gate. The 400 mSv/hr figure was from literally right next to or inside the reactor. And this was a spike, mind you, not sustained for even an hour (as with the 0.809µSv/hr figure).
Enough articles "everything is fine" for my tastes circulating onto Hacker News, while instead the facts created more and more concerns. I think it's better to just wait, and hope, instead of blabling about things that even the top experts of the world are having an hard time to figure. There will be a time, in a few weeks, and hopefully after a disaster was avoided, to speculate about the real security of nuke power.
Sadly within a few weeks, armies of anti-nuclear campainers, writers, and politicians will have jumped on this and pumped it so through the roof that, even if everything in this article is correct most people won't listen. Look at Chernobyl or Three Mile Island (study after study found no major exposure by anyone).
The hysteria over this is caused by the anti-nuclear people and groups trying to use this as a case against nuclear power, blowing everything out of proportion before any facts are known.
I think a few articles calling for calm balances the shrieking cries of "meltdown imminent".
>Sadly within a few weeks, armies of anti-nuclear campainers, writers, and politicians will have jumped on this and pumped it so through the roof that, even if everything in this article is correct most people won't listen.
NYT, Guardian, Spiegel, Mother Jones, The Atlantic (every online publication there is), every news TV channel (except Al Jazeera). Greenpeace are all over the place with their campaigning.
The hysteria isn't imminent - it's happening right now. If people don't fight the campaign to stop nuclear energy, the factoids are going to dominate the discourse in many years to come.
"If people don't fight the campaign to stop nuclear energy, the factoids are going to dominate the discourse in many years to come."
I don't think it's fair to characterize the opposition's arguments so flippantly (as "factoids"). I'm far from an opponent of nuclear energy, but there are a lot of damned good reasons to be contemplative about a system where one bad day can injure thousands of people, and simultaneously make thousands of square miles of land unfit for human habitation for hundreds of years.
We (humans) seem to have a remarkably bad ability to correctly estimate the likelihood of "improbable" events. When that unfortunate trait crosses with the potential for out-sized, long-term impacts on the environment, it's right to be wary. It isn't totally irrational to argue that an extremely conservative position on risk is appropriate in that situation.
I deeply agree with that. At the same time, I believe it's time to forcefully put other energy sources to use, make them work and more generally give them their chance. I'd go as far as saying this would draw a lot of economical activity world-wide and get us out of the economical crisis for good.
In a way, I see this event as an opportunity. It's just been demonstrated that Nuclear Energy is safe enough (at least, that's how I see things) but I still believe we deserve greener energies.
Hang on, I'm confused. If you think nuclear energy is good, why should the others get a chance? Surely we should go with the best option (which obviously includes diversity, but ought to have the overall best as its main component.)
I don't mean to be rude, but this isn't a playground. Solar power will not get a complex if nuclear is chosen instead. Our way of life depends on energy, and just hoping other sources will work out seems naive at best.
>Solar power will not get a complex if nuclear is chosen instead.
I think we'll run out of economically extractable ore deposits of nuclear fuels a little before Sol goes supernova. Perhaps that's it.
Also, unless he edited, he said that Nuclear was "safe enough" not that it was the best option. Even if it were the best primary option I wouldn't want to rely on it exclusively; personally I consider that "renewable" sources are better. Fusion would appear to be the best if we can get it to work effectively but I'd still look to diversify to some extent.
I consider myself a leftie greenie politically, and I am pro nuclear (with some small reservations). It pisses me off no end to see the same people campaigning for action on climate change campaigning against the one proven at scale technology that can help us out of the climate change mess.
I'm not an environmentalist, but as a technology person, I'm extremely skeptical of claims that nuclear power can be safe, however well-designed the reactors are today. It's hard enough to tell whether my web server will be able to handle next year's traffic.
Nuclear power produces waste that is dangerous for thousands of years. How can anyone say, with a straight face, that they have a plan for that? All of us will be dead and every government in the world will have changed. Our current languages won't be spoken anymore. The location of the waste deposits will likely be forgotten. There is absolutely no way to predict what will happen to the waste, and it seems awfully selfish to foist that kind of problem on people in the future to solve our very short-term energy needs.
If there is a form of nuclear power that completely expends its fuel to the point where its demonstrably not dangerous TODAY, or if we can launch the waste into the sun, I'm all for it. But lets not pretend we can control the damage from things that will persist for thousands of years after we're dead.
Before saying that nuclear power isn't safe enough, consider where we get most of our electricity from today: coal. Coal may have been around a long time, but it is far more dangerous than nuclear power. The fly ash produced by coal burning often contains substantial concentrations of uranium (not too bad) and radium (very bad), as well as all sorts of other toxic but non-radioactive chemicals like lead.
Although there is a lot more net radiation coming from all the fly ash we produce that there is from our nuclear reactors, the EPA doesn't bother to treat fly ash as hazardous waste, so most people don't think it's scary. This means we already have a bunch of radioactive waste dumped into our landfills without much oversight at all.
While nuclear waste is very dangerous, there isn't a whole lot of it, and it's quite safe when it's stored properly in a radiation-sealed container. It doesn't end up in our landfills, or our air supply. It's a point source of pollution, which makes it much easier to take care of, and it is much nicer to leave future generations some concentrated, shielded radioactive waste in remote areas than to leave them tons of low-level waste in their water supply.
I'm an advocate of solar energy, and nuclear power is a hell of a lot less safe than I'd like. But as long as we're burning coal, we should be worried more about the risks of that, even though they may be less scary-seeming, because they truly are more dangerous.
Sure, but those hordes who designed it didn't spend time training him to set it up and run it correctly. Just face that it is a horrible analogy and move on.
I think it's something like saying, "I'm not a feminist, but I think women are people too.". Environmentalism, like feminism, tends to be associated with a lot of fringe people who believe crazy things, even if the mainstream of the movements are totally reasonable things. A lot of people see organizations like the Earth Liberation Front or whatever and thing that's what environmentalism is about, when it's really just about giving a shit about something we all need.
The reason they campaign against that is that they don't want us to continue running around in this stage of sin (technological development), but to return to grace (in this case back to working 18 hour days with a single failed harvest killing us).
Much of the hardcore environmental movement is using it as a substitute for religion, except in an even more insane way.
More like 4-12 hours per day depending on the age of the farm (startups take work), the quality of the land and the crop season. More hours during planting and harvesting, and almost nothing during the winter. The number didn't really depend on technology past a certain point of desperation (passed well before recorded history.) For example, the gothic cultures farmed before they borrowed the plow from the Romans. Post-plow they became richer instead of cutting back hours. No different than today.
There were many provisions for crop failure, including crop variety, raising animals, preserving food, fishing and trading with luckier regions. Like today.
Pro-agrarian looking to set the record straight. I'm also in favor of nuclear power!
I'm not advocating a 'return to grace', but you picked a rather selective definition of 'grace'. Looking further back (or elsewhere) than subsistence agriculture, hunter-gathering is potentially a pretty leisurely lifestyle: the 'original affluent society' (http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html).
Yes, turn on CNN or MSNBC right now, and all you will hear about is an imminent meltdown, and what it means for US nuclear power. This article is a drop of sanity in a sea of stupidity.
I agree that balance is good, and that in truth, nuclear power is very safe, but consider what happens if there is a major release of radioactivity. How is this article going to look then? I think you'd agree it would weaken the credibility of pro-nuclear campaigners.
Lying for the sake of truth is a bad idea.
As it stands, a meltdown is a definite possibility (not necessarily probable.) Perhaps a better stratergy would be to say "It might meltdown. In which case the reactor will be ruined, but no radioactivity will be released. Or the primary vessel might be damaged, in which case this would be a Chenobyl style disaster, except we have already evacuated the area as a precaution, so the estimated death toll would be 10 (or 100 or whatever.)"
I'd say people fear what they don't understand; having lots of people, especially scientists and politicians, say "there's nothing to worry about" only increases peoples' worry – especially when bits of the plant keep exploding.
This isn't lying, it's accurate according to the information that we have acquired over the last 60 years on the use of nuclear technology. Should these predictions turn out to be incorrect then the information we have needs to be updated. I'm hoping it turns out well, there are of course no guarantees but the chances of things going even further south are low.
Just a quick point of order: study after study on Chernobyl found major exposure by just about everyone. It was serious business. This is where, without any containment vessel at all, the fuel caught fire and the radioactive ash spread all over the place.
Yes there was exposure, certainly those 4000 children recieved high enough levels. However this is a far cry of hundreds of thousands of dangerous exposures, massive increases of cancer rates and birth defects that are still happening that most people think of.
I myself thought just that until recently after investigating it.
I was studying in Russia when Chernobyl occurred, and I dated a woman from northern Ukraine who was a teenager at the time of the accident. I saw the results of the accident firsthand - basically everyone under the age of 10 was affected - hair loss, skin rashes and nausea in the immediate years after, cancer and early death later.
But even so it isn't fair to judge the safety of nuclear power by Chernobyl. Chernobyl happened because the Soviet system had become incredibly incompetent, and technical decisions were being made by thugs.
The capitalist system quite often also becomes incredibly incompetent and has its technical decisions made by thugs. Tepco, the company that runs the Fukushima plant, has a long history of corruption, faked security reports and blatant incompetence.
What makes nuclear power unsafe is human error more than technical failure. That's the aspect the naive technocrats (like the guy who wrote this article) always ignore.
"Models predict that by 2065 about 16,000 (95% UI 3,400–72,000) cases of thyroid cancer and 25,000 (95% UI 11,000–59,000) cases of other cancers may be expected due to radiation from the accident, whereas several hundred million cancer cases are expected from other causes. Although these estimates are subject to considerable uncertainty, they provide an indication of the order of magnitude of the possible impact of the Chernobyl accident. It is unlikely that the cancer burden from the largest radiological accident to date could be detected by monitoring national cancer statistics. Indeed, results of analyses of time trends in cancer incidence and mortality in Europe do not, at present, indicate any increase in cancer rates—other than of thyroid cancer in the most contaminated regions—that can be clearly attributed to radiation from the Chernobyl accident."
What SOME reports are saying. You are cherry picking the lowest counts.
"But other reputable scientists researching the most radiation-contaminated areas of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine are not convinced. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, another UN agency, predicts 16,000 deaths from Chernobyl; an assessment by the Russian academy of sciences says there have been 60,000 deaths so far in Russia and an estimated 140,000 in Ukraine and Belarus.
Meanwhile, the Belarus national academy of sciences estimates 93,000 deaths so far and 270,000 cancers, and the Ukrainian national commission for radiation protection calculates 500,000 deaths so far."
Then again, I've understood that the worst casualty of Chernobyl was the roughly 200 000 babies who were needlessly aborted because of fears of radiation poisoning.
He's not right about TMI, either. The results of TMI are debated to this day with some studies claiming minimal or no adverse health affects and some studies claiming significant adverse health affects.
Of course you're right. But there is no indication in the OP that he has done that in any way. Nor amongst the literally dozens of identical claims regarding TMI I've seen on HN in the past few days.
People deserve to know if anything is currently wrong, throughout this event. If a public health problem does obtain, that doesn't make people who suggested it obtained before it did correct!
At Chernobyl, this actually happened inside the containment vessel and the resulting explosion ruptured the vessel, leading to a serious release of core radioactives – though this has had basically zero effect on the world in general nor even much impact on the area around Chernobyl.
Even just as a matter of rhetoric and persuasion, I think trying to argue that Chernobyl wasn't all that bad isn't the route you want to go in reassuring people.
I watched a documentary about Chernobyl yesterday (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiCXb1Nhd1o) an although it's obviously a little sensationalist/emotional I have a really hard time having any respect for people claiming it didn't have that much impact.
Fukushima is very different but I agree with others that we should wait at least a couple of weeks till we make any conclusions
Speaking of jumping to conclusions: Germany just started to shut down 7 nuclear power plants because of Fukushima...
Chernobyl wasn't as bad as has been made out to be. In total around 50 deaths are directly attributable to radiation exposure(firemen and resue workers). 4'000 children contracted thyroid cancer as a result but with nearly a 99% recovery rate. In terms of cancers or birth defects there have been no increases over the average in effected areas.
Seriously, study after study by various international organisations have come to the same conclusion.
In total around 50 deaths are directly attributable to radiation
I wonder how you can claim that when, depending on who you ask, the figure varies between 50, 50000 and "hundreds of thousands".
The figures you cite are from IAEA, which arguably is quite a biased source. Let's also not forget that it's very difficult to track and correlate the health of >600k people over 20+ years - even if you try to do it in best honesty.
As a counter-point, here's a study[1] that claims ~1 million deaths and according to wikipedia: "draws on previously classified post-Soviet records and reports by Eastern European scientists and medical experts that have largely been ignored by the IAEA and UNSCEAR".
I haven't read it, it may be fear mongering material. But then again, if really only 4050 people were affected, why is everyone making such a big deal about it?
>I haven't read it, it may be fear mongering material. But then again, if really only 4050 people were affected, why is everyone making such a big deal about it?
They're making a big deal for 2 reasons. First it WAS a big deal. What happened is nothing to sniff at. So making a big deal over Chernobyl is no problem.
Second, the problem is that the anti-nuclear movement is trying to make people believe that it was much worse than it was, in an attempt to use irrational fear to bolster resistance against nuclear.
These are people who have no problem with lies, to them the end justifies the means, they will do anything they can, including breaking laws to stop nuclear power. I've seen this in Ireland not only with nuclear but with the building of a gas plant, a small group of radicals broke into the facility numerous times doing whatever damage they could. And this was just for gas.
First it WAS a big deal. What happened is nothing to sniff at.
Sorry, but I think you're contradicting yourself here. First you say 4050 people affected and totaling "only" 90 deaths is not a big deal (which I would agree with) - and now you say the opposite?
If it was commonly agreed that the number of casualties was that low then I really don't get why even the pro-nuclear parties refer to it as the dramatic event that is to be avoided at all costs. Your average earthquake affects and kills more people than that...
Second, the problem is that the anti-nuclear movement [...] in an attempt to use irrational fear to bolster resistance against nuclear
I keep hearing that, but I'm really wondering what are the motivations here?
Yes, there are some environmental nut-jobs who will argue for the sake of it, but those are usually easy to spot. However, on top of that there is also a non-negligible number of more or less credible scientists and first-hand witnesses (doctors, nurses) who question the figure of ~4000 affected. When I see an interview with a nurse on TV who reports about entire villages in the area dying out because they can't make children without birth-defects, then I can't help but ask: Why should she make this up? Who is paying her to tell us lies?
And then, on the other side of the spectrum, we have a multi-billion dollar industry and entire countries depending on the perception that nuke plants are "safe enough".
I'm not claiming to have the definite answer. I just don't understand where people like you are taking their confidence from.
>I'm not claiming to have the definite answer. I just don't understand where people like you are taking their confidence from.
I get my confidence from my understanding of nuclear energy. I'm not a nuclear scientist, but if your even remotely technically inclined(or just make an effort to understand) the basics are not hard to learn.
Most people think it's beyond their ability to understand how nuclear works so they don't even try, it might as well be black magic to them. It's then really easy to scare them with nuclear horror stories, and no amount of facts can undo that because they haven't got the fundamentals to understand those facts.
Did you know that in 1957 there was a fire in a military nuclear reactor in the UK burning for 2 days before it was shut down? Much of this burned nuclear material was passing almost freely into the atmosphere with not a single dangerous dose of radiation.
Or in another accident in 1961 three operators were killed(not by radiation), one of which was stuck to the ceiling with debris from the initial explosion. The rescue team used meat hooks on sticks to retrieve the body(in parts), being able to spend less than 57 seconds in the area. The bodies were so radioactive that they had to be berried in lead caskets.
I'm not a nuclear scientist, but if your even remotely technically inclined(or just make an effort to understand) the basics are not hard to learn.
Oh, I think I do have a basic grasp.
However, I'm not sure how your two stories relate to either Chernobyl or a potential meltdown in Japan at all.
Are you trying to suggest that nuke plants are inherently harmless, because even fires can burn in them for 2 days without anything bad happening?
I guess it boils down to that I have a different understanding of the risks of nuclear plants - physics aside. People like you (sorry for generalizing) repeatedly claim that a meltdown is a normal and planned failure-mode. The core melts, the containment catches the radioactive blob, it cools down, all is well.
This sounds nice in theory. My problem is that it doesn't jibe at all with what we hear from japan these days. It doesn't sound like they're following a boring disaster-plan. It sounds more like they're pretty much in panic-mode. But perhaps this is just the media-spin, we'll know in a few weeks...
One could obviously argue about the term "much impact". Having cancer ia a pretty bad experience even if you survive. Same with abandoning your hometown etc.
And for years strawberries, mushrooms and deer were off limits on the food table. Sure maybe that pales compared to actual deaths, but it didn't help to endear nuclear power to my heart.
Of course other power sources pollute the environment, too, but they can be improved as well, for example by installing better filters.
The place has been just hit by an 8.9 earthquake and a tsunami. If I had to list reasons why not to go over there, my concern over likelihood of natural disasters is much higher than concern of nuclear accidents.
All else being equal, I wouldn't mind moving close to a nuclear plant. The thing is, power plants (in general) are built in less hospitable places. So it's never "equal" to begin with.
I already live not too far from a nuclear power plant, but I'd rather not live in a major earthquake zone.
I mean, this earthquake has already killed thousands (and there will be more earthquakes in the futures). The power plant? I think a few have died from the hydrogen explosions, but none from radiation poisoning.
The hysterics don't turn green until they're actually exposed to toxic waste. I think this is plain old hysteria; many environmentalists are all about nuclear power because the alternatives are coal, oil, or hunter/gatherer at 1/1000th the world's current population.
The alternative is to save energy. There is still much to gain with advanced technology. For example we drive all day with vehicels that have an overall efficiency factor of 3%. Huge waste is going on. It's a shame.
If there were ways to save large amounts while maintaining economic output, people would be doing them and making massive amounts of money from the savings.
There are ways to achieve a mean world GDP, or at least a standard of living similar to ours at a much lower rate of single-use resource consumption, but we're at a local optima. Civilization is a greedy search algorithm.
It's a matter of price. Labour ist very expensive and high taxed. Therefore you can get rich by developing technology saving labour. On the other hand energy is cheap, so there is no economical incentive to save energy. Image an opposite pricing. I bet we would have carbon cars weighing 300 kg and with 1l/km fuel consumption. Technologically possible today but not economically.
The situation in Germany is rather special in that the policy decision being made is to implement the first steps of a decade-old plan for phasing out nuclear reactors, which a previous (social democrat) administration had made and the current (conservative) one had cancelled – a very unpopular decision even before last Friday.
So the measures being taken are in fact neither hasty nor unplanned.
The National Geographic article, the author links to, states that
The effects of the Chernobyl catastrophe are still being felt today—whole towns
lie abandoned, and cancer rates in people living close to the affected areas
are abnormally high
then goes on to say that
But it turns out that the radioactive cloud may have a silver lining. Recent
studies suggest that the 19-mile (30-kilometer) "exclusion zone" set up around
the reactor has turned into a wildlife haven.
So basically, the accident at Chernobyl turned the area into a wildlife haven, because it was left to wild animals. If this were to mean that Chernobyl had a net positive effect, it would still contradict the author’s claim that there hasn’t been “much impact on the area around Chernobyl”.
It wasn't that bad at all. In every discussion about Charnobyl I link this (translation from Polish) http://goo.gl/Djbag
> So what Chernobyl has taught us?
> That nuclear energy is the safest source of energy currently available. The Chernobyl disaster was the worst we can imagine a nuclear power plant. In addition, Chernobyl defied every rule of safety. This property was one big scandal. But that's not all. Following the outbreak of the reactor were released into the atmosphere huge amounts of radioactive substances, which reached even to Antarctica. And what? And nothing. Killed 31 people - less cluttered than in January hall in Chorzow. Dangerously contaminated was less than a square kilometer of land.That's it!
How many cancers would you wager could be linked to emissions from a coal plant of comparable energy output? What if there was a tsunami and it blew up?
What if we took the average number of fatalities per gigawatt-hour generated for coal and compared that to the worst-case ever scenario for nuclear, Chernobyl? Does anyone have these figures? I think we could all really use them to put this whole thing in proper perspective.
Coal mining killed more than 6,000 people in China in 2004 (a typical year). Early deaths due to air pollution from coal combustion are measured in the tens of thousands per year in the United States.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe0809178
Chernobyl was the worst possible nuclear accident. It caused between 50 and 5000 early deaths. As a major industrial accident, it was only average. It pales in comparison to the 1984 Bhopal disaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
It took a long time to convince myself of this, but it really is quite obvious: because of the energy density difference of ~ 1,000,000 between fission and everything else, just about everything you'd care to measure about fission is going to be at least an order of magnitude better. That's because the amount of energy we're interested in is roughly constant, so the upper bound on destruction is roughly the same, but the material flows for fission are a million times smaller.
Actually, appropriate use of fission should increase the demand for energy somewhat, and this would be a very good thing.
I'm right there with you on this. I live in Tokyo and I still hope they build more reactors in Japan after this (no more GE Mark 1s though, please). There is no question that nuclear power is cleaner and safer than any fossil fuel-derived power-generation technology.
When an editorial is so desperate to take a contrarian view to what everyone else is saying it starts claiming Chernobyl didn't affect the area much (linking as supposed evidence to an article whose second page is entirely devoted to observed negative effects of the radiation on the wild animal population two decades later...) it's ill-researched sensationalism itself.
I realise The Register may have published the story before the relevant Japanese authorities abandoned their face-saving pretence that there weren't going to be any further problems, but that doesn't mean this kind of denialism masquerading as scientific counterargument deserves any more credence than the doomsday prophecies spreading elsewhere. Particularly when it's written by a layman masquerading as an authority whose last article was entitled "Balanced, neutral journalism is RUBBISH and that's a FACT" :-)
It is a curious social phenomena that people often want to believe the best possible interpretation even when the evidence shows that things are not going well at all. In this case denialism is probably a strategy to avoid panic, which could have even greater negative consequences.
Pretty jaw-dropping journalism, even by Register standards. Anyone trying to suggest that the situation at Fukushima is "under control" and is somehow a nuclear industry safety success story hasn't been paying close enough attention.
I don't get the impression the article suggests things are under control, more that the risks have been greatly exaggerated. The main points seem to be these:
1. The engineers working at the plant have more options they can fall back on to prevent a major radiation leak and the chances of a major leak is pretty unlikely due to the inherit characteristics of the reactors.
2. The reactors were pushed 5x beyond spec in an extraordinary event and have performed well even though they were designed 40+ years ago. This is a testament to the safety system design and technology in the reactors.
I guess you are right, but it's just as dishonest to present the situation as completely out of control and use Fukushima as an excuse to paint nuclear power as completely unsafe and dangerous. Which is what mainstream media has been mostly doing.
> an excuse to paint nuclear power as completely unsafe and dangerous
50 people sacrificing their lives so that anything even shittier would not happen "is safe and not dangerous"? I fail to imagine what you really find "unsafe and dangerous".
Then I guess people are stupid, aren't they, because of all the friends I know none of them would prefer having his/her house close to a nuclear plant, compared to having it close to a coal plant. And what do you know? These stupid people (including me) do have the power to vote, and I sure as hell would vote for nuclear power plants to be closed down were I given the chance to do so.
I live within 5 miles of two nuclear power plants and over 10 navy nuclear reactors. It doesn't bother me one bit. I'm actually thinking of moving closer to one of the power plants because rent is a little cheaper because people like you are irrationally afraid of it.
Look at Japan, right now 10,000 people are dead from a tsunamai/earthquake double punch and you are worried about the nuclear reactor? The one person killed in the reactor was killed by a crane falling, that could have happened at any industrial complex in an earthquake. There have been a few cases of radiation exposure, but I gaurentee you there where also some guys killed in the refineries that blew up. Not to mention only a few months ago we had a dozen guys die when an oil rig blew up. You need to put it in perspective and get a sense of scale.
In the 20 years I've lived by a nuclear power plant, nothing has gone wrong. The coal plant two counties over has had two major explosions, resulting in dozens of deaths, hundreds of injuries, and an exorbitant amount of property damage. So if we're going off of anecdotal evidence here, I'll take nuclear power. The closer the better.
So, you would prefer living near tens of square miles of moon-like wasteland created by ever-growing surface coal mines, eventually even having your house demolished to allow the mine grow more again, in order to feed that power plant?
(Please note that these images are very real, and we're going to need to extend either the mines or build some new nuclear plants, at least locally, in the Czech republic.)
In responding to jbri's comment bellow, as the "Reply" link doesn't show up for me on that one:
> Are you suggesting that because ignorant people think something is unsafe, that means that it actually is unsafe?
Yeah, this is what I'm saying, but isn't this what web 2.0 people were calling "wisdom of the crowds"? I guess back then it sounded cool, now it's just "return to technocracy" once more.
You can click the "link" button next to the comment header to get a reply box regardless.
Regarding this "wisdom of the crowds" crap, does the presence of a lynch mob indicate that someone was actually guilty? If masses of people swear by a medical treatment, does that magically mean it's not a placebo?
Crowds are dumb. The only time you want to follow the "wisdom of the crowd" is when the crowd is your marketable commodity.
> Crowds are dumb. The only time you want to follow the "wisdom of the crowd" is when the crowd is your marketable commodity.
We're settled, then, because this is where we disagree :)
I believe in the power of the people of taking decisions for themselves (even if the decisions are dumb), while you suggest than an informed elite should have the upper hand (if I read you correctly). I could go on and on about why I believe in what I said above (maybe the fact that I grew up under an authoritarian regime), but that doesn't belong in here, and I'm pretty sure you have your good reasons for believing in what you said.
If you're saying that mob rule has the power to irrationally stop nuclear power production, I agree with you.
If you're saying this is the way things ought to be, I'm not sure if I agree but I think you have a valid point about the democratic form of government.
If you're saying a dumb herd of people's panicky reactions to a scary situation actually mean nuclear power is more dangerous than other forms, you're dead wrong.
I don't think other people here understand which of these arguments you're making, either.
Yeap, you're right on the first 2 points I was trying to make.
Reguarding this
> If you're saying a dumb herd of people's panicky reactions to a scary situation actually mean nuclear power is more dangerous than other forms, you're dead wrong.
I didn't say that people's reaction to nuclear power changes it into something "dangerous", I was only saying that if people decide not to fund nuclear development anymore (say, by not allowing their Governments to subsidize said industry) then its voice should be listened to, even if to some it may sound "dumb" or "panicky". This is why I said that if the voice of the majority isn't listened to we're back to Technocracy, i.e. a small group of informed elite taking vital decisions for the rest of us.
Actually, it's a plutocracy. People don't listen to technocrats unless they have a good idea for generating wealth/power.
The reason you don't leave any serious decisions in the hands of the masses is because it leads to instability, which is the worst thing that can happen to a government.
In every form of government, you have a minority bloc which makes the most important decisions unilaterally. The remaining decisions are, depending on the visible form of government, passed on to various degrees to the public so that they may feel they are participating in the running of their country's affairs.
There is, of course, some give-and-take when a special interest group gains too much power, but those can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
The problem with these statistics is that you don't really know how many people died of seemingly unrelated diseases while exposure to (increased) radiation has triggered or magnified its development.
I'm not trying to blame radiation for everything. Just pointing out it's likely that these statistics do not convey the complete picture.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be concluding from this. The first link is just a list of profiles/interviews with various employees of the company (the newest being over a year old). Strictly speaking, it's possible that some of them are the same people working at the site at present, but this is a company with (according to the site) over 15,000 employees. That nobody on Reddit even bothered to run the site through an automatic translator is telling.
But more to the point, there is no indication of "people sacrificing their lives" unless you count the extremely hyperbolic assumption that everybody working at the site is automatically doomed.
> I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be concluding from this.
A day after the reddit comment the NyTimes had a front-page article on them: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16workers.html . The general tone of the article and of the people commenting on the article was that of "sacrifice", i.e. people putting their lives on the line for the benefits of the greater community.
> David Richardson, a professor of epidemiology at the university of North Carolina who has studied the long-term health risks for nuclear plant workers, told the BBC those at Fukushima would receive in an hour the same amount of radiation a US nuclear worker is exposed over an entire career.
To a non-specialist like me that sounds like "sacrifice".
Looking in awe at the fact that the plants are still standing after an earthquake "five times stronger than the older Fukushima plants had been designed to cope with" isn't the right way to look at this situation. Why were these plants built in a massively earthquake prone zone and not designed to avoid what is happening right now? If an earthquake this powerful was possible, the most sensitive pieces of infrastructure should have been designed to handle it. They clearly were not.
I'm no nuclear opponent... I believe that nuclear could very well be the only safe and scalable answer to the world's energy needs - but if we can't make the economics of building safer plants work, then nuclear is a nonstarter.
Proclamations like this that everything is and will be fine are really reckless at this point. Every day it seems like we are finding out that things are much worse than we had previously been told they are, and it looks as though they are still in the process of losing - not gaining - control at Fukushima.
How can you say they "clearly were not"? I think the opposite is quite clear - the main components survived the earthquake just fine.
The problem right now is the lack of power. The pumps are run on electric power, and as soon as the earthquake came the power plant itself shut down. So now you need external power to run the pumps. The power infrastructure failed and no other power plants could power these pumps. So they switched to backup generators, which were then wiped out by a tsunami. Then they switched to batteries (which worked fine, until they ran out). Then they brought in backup generators, which failed. Now we're onto pumping seawater in.
If sea wall had been 50' high instead of 30' high (estimates), the generators would have survived and we wouldn't be hearing about this. If the batteries were more than 8 hours we probably wouldn't be hearing about this. If the external generators worked, we wouldn't be hearing about this. Those are the only mistakes.
Compare that to Gen 4 reactors being designed today - no pumps required to circulate fluid. If anything we should be building new plants because if this had happened to a Gen 4 the fluid would be cooling the reactor even without power and none of this would have been a problem.
I suppose we can all have differing opinions on what an acceptable level of risk is, but leaking radiation, fuel storage ponds on fire, and a situation volatile enough to warrant a 30km exclusion zone says to me that the plant clearly was not designed to handle this kind of situation.
If the problem is the lack of power, then so be it - even more of a preventable problem that wasn't properly assured against.
I'm hopeful for the Gen 4 reactors (don't know much about them, but what I've read gives me the impression that they are a significant leap in the right direction in terms of safety.) But I don't think that this particular article is right in holding Fukushima up as some shining example of nuclear safety, especially so early.
Is dumping millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico an acceptable level of risk for you? I don't see you saying we should stop drilling for oil.
You can't fault him for not saying we should stop drilling for oil - this discussion is not about oil.
But since you brought it up, we should stop drilling for oil, particularly sea bed drilling, while operating with lax regulatory bodies and marginal penalties for non-compliance.
The batteries do not power the pumps, and were not designed to. The pumps draw far too much power for that - the batteries are to power the control systems and valves only.
I got as far as the second paragraph before I knew that this was article was of dubious accuracy:
"As the hot cores ceased to be cooled by the water which is used to extract power from them, control rods would have remained withdrawn and a runaway chain reaction could have ensued"
This is rubbish. The control rods in every nuclear reactor, going right back to the Chicago Pile, are fail-safe: if the power fails, they drop into the core, stopping fission. (In the case of a BWR like the Fukushima reactors, stored hydraulic pressure forces the control rods upward into the core).
Even without fission occuring though, the fuel rods continue to produce a great deal of heat through beta decay of the fission products (immediately after shutdown, heat is produced at around 7% of the operating power). This is why a meltdown can still occur, if this prodigious quantity of heat cannot be removed quickly enough.
I hope the pro-nuclear power people are right when they claim everything went according to plan. But forgive me if I am not used to "everything is under control" looking like this on TV (explosions, people in protection suits and gas masks, mass exodus).
The article dates back from yesterday, 1pm GMT. More evidence that there should be no conclusion drawn (one way or another for that matter) on nuclear energy safety or lack thereof before this whole catastrophe has fully unfolded.
Though the more recent developments would seem to point out that Quake + tsunami >> 1 minor radiation dose.
Regardless of whether or not the situation is under control, I think the triumph is more for the Japanese. I'm sure that if the plant were in Greece the fallout would have been much greater because everyone would have cut corners and not followed the safety procedures.
This article dramatically misses the point! Uranium is peaking. Oil has already peaked. If we intend to use reprocessing to conserve uranium, then we need to come up with new reactor designs that require less fossil fuel energy and less money to build.
The problem isn't that reactors are inherently unsafe, but that building new reactors without dramatically improving the underlying designs is inherently inefficient. This means that nuclear energy, when all insurance and other costs are included, does not present ANY savings over any other form of newly-built power plant.
The main cost argument in favor of nuclear power is that existing thirty-year old plants cost so little per year. This is an obvious diversionary trick. We paid off the bonds ages ago. My house is also the cheapest on the street if you don't include the mortgage.
The main argument in favor of nuclear power is that it provides reliable baseload energy, which must only be shut down once every fourteen months or so for refueling. This disaster is the proof that nuclear baseload energy is only as reliable as its safety investments and contigency planning. Fukushima is not the first plant to go silent forever.
The Fukushima disaster reminds me of what really happened to our I-35W bridge locally. Over thirty years ago, someone built bridge with gussets too thin. Over a decade ago, our state replaced its government bridge inspectors with a for-profit firm that promised it would "save money" through efficiency savings on labor. Seven years before the disaster, HNTB Corp. of Kansas City performed a bridge analysis to try to win the contract from URS. They found the under-sized gussets and demonstrated how the Minnesota Department of Transportation could use "supplemental plates" and a new "oversize gusset" to strengthen the bridge. HNTB never got the contract and improvements were never made. Later, URS had the option to either re-inspect the bridge or to brace the bridge as HNTB had suggested. They chose to re-inspect.
During court filings in the victims lawsuit, a URS bridge contractor stated in an internal e-mail that they chose not to determine the stresses on all the components in the bridge because "it was too much work."
The moral of the story is that saving money on engineering does not always save money. I could cite numerous similar examples, like the infamous Boeing 787 project that I was involved in as a Cray Inc. contractor.
Secondly, the real tragedies here are the high human health costs in cancer and birth defects, the economic cost of losing twenty percent of Japan's power indefinitely, and the outrageous modern day cost of building new reactors. Given those high costs and the ten year construction times, it is unlikely that these plants will be replaced by nuclear reactors even if we wiped Japan's collective memory.
Many geeks are easily swayed by scientific talk that ignores social variables and whole cost accounting. Remember Google's early motto, "Don't be evil!"
To those who insist that the Chernobyl accident was not a big deal, please feel free to go build a home in Pripyat, live there for a few years, and let us know how that works out for you.
I think it might be time for those who don't have a clue to stop talking about this. People are and will be diing because of what is happening now. Calling this "ok" and "safe" is borderline obscene.
Plus, as told in other comments, this article dates back to yesterday and recent news are less and less reassuring (e.g. the containment vessel is now broken in one reactor).
'People' have not died because of the reactor problems - there has been one reported fatality due to a crane accident. And do you have a source for "the containment vessel is now broken in one reactor"? A site linked elsewhere in these comments (http://mitnse.com/) reports that the suppression chamber in one reactor may be damaged but that's not 'the containment vessel'.
I agree with your desire to stop the FUD, but be careful you don't spread it yourself.
There was a reported death in another prefecture, when someone taped all their windows shut after hearing about it on the news. He forgot to turn off the gas and suffocated.
The central problem is still ignorance, unfamiliarity, and fear. People are more afraid of death and injury related to radiation exposure because it's not something they're familiar with. That causes people to incorrectly weigh the risks and tradeoffs involved.
If it is all designed for that, and they had to give up the reactors anyway, why don't they just wait and let the cores melt? Something doesn't add up in this optimistic scenario, it seems to me.
The worst case scenario of a nuclear reactor going wrong is much worse than any other alternative, however slim the chances of that happening may be. This fact is enough to be concerned about the safety of nuclear reactors.
Risk of death isn't the only issue. In a car accident you don't have to worry about cesium-137 rendering the area near the accident unusable by humans for 100 years or more.
Quantitatively, cars are extremely safe based on the number of drivers and the frequency with which they drive. If you put a billion people around Chernobyl during the accident the number of people dead would greatly outnumber the number dead from all car accidents throughout history.
Put another way, on average driving 100 million miles is safer than flying 100 million miles (contrary to popular belief that flying is safer than driving).
You can see the fallacy of "cars are dangerous" when you compare cars to motorcycles on that chart, because most people don't ride motorcycles so the probability of death for most people is lower than for a car.
Fukushima is extraordinarily safe for everyone living in Iceland. It is far less safe for everyone living in Japan.
The worst case in Japan would be a containment vessel blowing up from the pressure. That could kill the remaining workes on site and pose quite a messy cleanup problem, but already the 20 km evacuation zone could be seen as a bit of an overreaction.
However, that is not going to happen, because the containment is rather vented than letting it burst.
Anyway, the carnage and tragedy _actually having struck_ in form of the earthquake and tsunami _dwarf_ even the most horrible scenario at the nuclear plants.
While the mainstream media is busy selling the global nuclear angel of death scare to people, the techies are just as busy to convince everyone of the other extreme: absolutely everything is fine!!!
While there are certainly quite a few engineering victories to be claimed here, I would not call several explosions at a nuclear plant "nothing happened". Also, the earthquake did damage at least reactor 4, there are two approx. 8m² holes.
Differentiate between the building around the nuclear reactor, and the nucleaer reactor.
It's the difference between your house being blow away in a tornado while you are in a tornado shelter, and your tornado shelter being blown away in a tornado while you are in it. The first is bad news, but not a catastrophy. The latter is a catstrophy.
The main information that concerns me right now is that there appears to be a consistent radiation leak of 400 mSv/h at the plant. While not Chernobyl by any measure, this is quite a bit of radiation, considering one's yearly dose limit is 1 mSv total.
This seems to contradict the extremely optimisitc reports that all is well, under control, and that no significant radiation leak has occurred.
[edit] One thing that optimistic reports consistently fail to address is the situation with the spent fuel pools. While not capable of melting down, from what I've read the pools are rapidly boiling dry and plant workers are struggling to maintain cooling on them. Left to its own devices the fuel will boil out the pool, light on fire, and then you have burning nuclear waste drifting directly into the atmosphere (after all, the buildings no longer have roofs). There is some speculation that the current radiation spike at the plant is not from any reactor but rather its spent fuel containment.