Japan Nuclear Reactor Meltdown

[AuroraGlacialis]

Some updates:

The official numbers of radiation released are now closing in on the 50% mark compared to Chernobyl. The "1/10th of Chernobyl" figure is long past. Official numbers are already in the range of 30-40% and rising. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/wo...apan.html?_r=1 )

Officials admit now, that three cores have completely been molten in the event. No more talk about "partial meltdowns". ( 3 nuclear reactors melted down after quake, Japan confirms - CNN.com )

There is mounting evidence that the molten fuel undergoes surges of "recriticality", meaning a sustained chain reaction starts up, radiation and new elements are formed. Increased Iodine 131 levels (with a half life of only 8 days) are detected at times when the Iodine 131 from the original event should long have decayed. Also there are jumps in radiation and temperature in the cores ( Arnie Gundersen: "On-and-Off Recriticality Possible in Reactor 3" | EX-SKF - see also comments, Plutonium found near Fukushima shows nuclear “crisis is far from over” - Yahoo! News)

And the Japanese government openly talks about the very realistic possibility that reactors 1,2 and 3 had "melt-throughs" and not just melt downs. ( Melted Fuel at Fukushima May Have Leaked Through, Yomiuri Says - Bloomberg )

Oh and of course there is the "4 Sievert/h radioactive steam" coming from "a hole in the floor" in reactor 1 that was on the mainstream news last weekend.

Its not over till its over....

And on a halfway funny sidenote - France, THE land of atomic energy, possibly has to shut down 70% of its reactors if the heat waves in Europe continue (and they had to shut down a couple of them in winter, too). Probably not dangerous in itself, but this kind of pokes a hole in the climate/weather/environment independence of nuclear reactors, if during the time of massive energy need for air conditioning in summer they just cave in. But i guess solar power will be able to fill in for that lack in stability :P

[Aihwa]

Yay lets mislead people!


Frances water supplies are growing limited, so they have issues generating electricity during times of drought. (I believe they wanted to import from Germany, but since Germany's decided they want to live in 1950...)

"We shouldn't be alarmist, but we should be vigilant," French Energy Minister Eric Besson

Record Heat Costs France - WSJ.com

But I suppose quoting an article might weaken your position, so keep spreading that fear!

[AuroraGlacialis]

Ok, I can quote the article from a German newspaper if you wish:
Atomkraftwerke in Frankreich: Bei Hitze und Kälte läuft nichts mehr - taz.de

Dieses Kühlwasser stellt rund 60 Prozent des gesamten Wasservolumens dar, das aus Oberflächengewässern entnommen wird. Da das Kühlwasser anschließend wieder in die Flüsse zurückgeleitet wird, werden schnell die Grenzwerte überschritten, die für die Erwärmung des Flusswassers noch erlaubt sind. Atomkraftgegner wie Stéphane Lhomme vom Observatoire du nucléaire sieht hier die "Achillesferse" der französischen Atomstromproduktion: "Es besteht die Gefahr, dass 44 der 58 Reaktoren in Frankreich abgestellt werden müssen." Besonders kritisch sei die Situation bereits in den Anlagen von Golfech an der Garonne und Civaux an der Vienne.
Schwere Versorgungsengpässe dürften sich erst recht ergeben, weil Frankreich – entgegen einer auch kürzlich von Industrieminister Eric Besson wiederholten – seit 2004 netto mehr elektrischen Strom aus Deutschland bezieht, als es dorthin exportiert.

Short translation: cooling water for nuclear reactors constitutes 60% of all water taken from rivers and lakes in France. Current drought may lead to shutdown of 44 of 58 reactors to prevent overheating of rivers. This may lead to shortages in electricity because France imports more energy from Germany than it exports.
To get a full translation, you'll have to rely on google, as the post was about Fukushima and France was merely a sidecomment.

[Weyoun]

Well, I’ve been saying that nuclear power is not the answer for a good number of years now. The problem is that whenever I was asked why it’s not good I would explain the dangers of a meltdown and was seen as crazy because I had nothing to point to as a “real” example. I was always met with “a meltdown will never happen because there are too many safety protocols in place.” If you try to point out past events you’re met with “that was then this is now.” The fact is people thought it was perfectly safe until this happened.

I'd like to put things into perspective here. Because nuclear power is bad, but there is a lot worse.

Nuclear Plants: When Chernobyl happened, 51 people died from radiation sickness or cancer that's known to be directly caused by the accident, and many thousands were affected by increased radiation levels in the region and around the world. The estimates on the affected vary: some scientific studies suggest that around 6000 people suffered from thyroid cancer (treatable, so around 500 cancer deaths), others suggest 4000 cancer deaths, and reports by environmentalist organisations claim 200000 cancer deaths (but they have always been deceitful). Additionally, around 5000 of the decontamination workers at the plant died. So the Chernobyl disaster caused around 10000 deaths, including similar adverse effects for the wildlife in the region and the relocation of all the city residents because of the elevated radiation levels. (But also note that a lot of cities are constructed in rocky areas with high concentration of radon and have natural radiation levels higher than the residents of Pripyat would have experienced if they weren't relocated.)

Coal Plants: Coal ash that gets released in the air and then eventually gets into the ground water contains toxic elements such as lead and arsenic, which cause cancer, damage the nervous system, cause respiratory diseases, and it's also the largest source of mercury contamination of fish in the United States. There are also a few radioactive elements contained in coal ash, but they are the least of the troubles. Some studies estimate that 30000 people die from the coal plant pollution in the United States every year. And apart from poisoning us, they also poison the environment pretty badly. And don't forget that they contribute to the greenhouse effect and the global warming.

And Chernobyl was an accident. It was a disaster. Coal plants kill three times as much in the US each year as part of their normal mode of operation. Even if you take Greenpeace exaggerated numbers for Chernobyl as true, that's still one Chernobyl every six years in the US. If you live near a nuclear power plant there is a risk that the plant might suffer a meltdown and pollute the area, and be a danger for your health. If you live near a coal plant (I do) , the area is already polluted and your health is already suffering.

And there is one sad truth. For every nuclear power plant you close now, you're making the way for coal plants. You're hoping for solar or wind power, but instead you'd be getting... coal. Because coal has the lead, while solar and wind are just learning to walk.

----------------

There's another thing though. The reason those nuclear accidents happened is simple. Corporate greed, almost criminal negligence, short-sightedness and lack of interest in anything but the profit. There are nuclear power plant designs that are for all practical reasons completely safe from a meltdown, but nobody is building those, nobody is investing in research to increase the safety of the current plants either. These are good enough for the power companies to make money, why built safer? The one in Fukushima was too old and it should have been out of service decades ago, but no, it was still running. So again, why need safety when you can make money?

But this is not limited to nuclear power. Look at hydroelectric power. Huge areas of land are destroyed for building a hydroelectric dam, the damage to the environment is enormous. There are ways it could be avoided, but why do it when it isn't profitable? And sometimes, they would be careless enough to build an insecure dam right above settlements. Do you know that the biggest hydroelectric power accident in history killed 200000 people, drowning them? Quite disturbingly, solar power has cost more lives per GWh produced than nuclear power, and don't get me started on the pollution left in the manufacturing process by that same carelessness.

So it isn't nuclear power that's the problem, the problem is that we are careless and everything we do is messy, and we should change what we are building as much as how we are building it. We shouldn't replace nuclear power with solar, wind or other power, we should replace dirty and unsafe power with clean and safe power, and that could as well include nuclear.

The trouble with nuclear is that it's not renewable and it's not all that efficient, so we should replace it. Eventually. But rushing it means more coal pollution and more fossil fuels. Getting rid of fossil fuels should be our top priority.

I believe a lot more people are aware of this issue now because we have a great example to point to. Now that I’m older and have a better understanding of nuclear power I can see even more danger and upcoming issues. In the past I had no idea we had to store spent rods. There’s no environmentally safe way to dispose of this radioactive material. So if nuclear power is the future and we’re going to have a surplus of spent rods where are all of the spent rods going to go once we have billions of them?

The most dangerous parts of the waste decay fast, some of them are gone days after disposing, others months, and some a few years. It's plutonium that's hard to dispose of. But plutonium is not waste, it's wonderful fuel, it can be used in nuclear power plants, it can be used in spacecraft, etc.

[AuroraGlacialis]

I want to start off recommending the movie "Into eternity - the 100000 year project" again. It is a documentary about the long term nuclear waste storage facility in finland. This weeks episode of the radio show "unwelcome guests" features a shortened audio version. You can find it for download at: 558 - Into Eternity (Understanding The Ongoing Nuclear Wars) - UnwelcomeGuests
The first hour of the show are interviews with doctors talking about the dangers of radiation, if you do not want to hear them, you can download only the second hour featuring a cut short version of the movie as audio.

Now for the reply to the last post. You say you want to put things into perspective, I want to do the same.

I do not even want to go into the details of how many people died directly and indirectly from Chernobyl (the numbers go from 47 to a million, depending on if you trust the nuclear industry, the UN or russian scientists and doctors. And of coourse you are right, that coal power kills people too. It also destorys mountains and creates acid lakes. No one says we should build more coal plants and mines now. The idea behind getting rid of the nuclear menace is to replace it with something more benign and also to reduce the energy demand. If that is not done so, but companies go for coal or hydro again, they will have to be stopped from that, too.

You claim also that nuclear power is unsafe just because the plants are run by corporations that are greedy. Certainly that plays a role - getting rid of that concept will get you the label of "socialist" I would guess because the only way to change this is more governmental (or democratic) control. The problem with that is, as can be seen in Germany where there ARE a lot of regulations, that even this control is not working, people still make mistakes, try to save their asses and cover things up. Also the problem that we see here is that all these regulations cost. They cost a fracking lot of money. If you would put the state subsidies that go into the finding of nuclear waste storage, safety regulations, state safety programmes and plain tax subsidies - if you add all of that to the energy cost per kilowatt hour - the price of nuclear power would be far from cheap. Actually you could as well just get your power from biogas or windmills for that price. Or invest a bit into energy efficiency. So nuclear energy is either cheap or safe, but to have both is nearly impossible.

I agree that we have to change away from dirty and unsafe power, if possible to clean and safe power, but that cannot include nuclear, it cannot include fossil fuels and one has to be very careful about the "renewables", too. Reducing consumption is probably the least dirty and safest way to get rid of bad power plants. Just by stupid things like replacing old fridges, insulating houses or even just not using the air conditioning all the time several coal plants can be shut down.

You say that we should not "rush it". I think one cannot talk about rushing it here. It was evident about 30 years ago that nuclear power is dangerous (which is why many countries built almost no plants after the 1970ies) and the evidence for global warming is about that old too. The peak oil theory is even older. So one should assume that 30-40 years in the past should be enough and adding another 10-20 years now is also a generous thing - in that timeframe, a lot can be achieved if one really wants to. But of course "corporate greed" and wrongly placed budgets hinder that. If the US would spend only 1/10th of its military budget on subsidizing new forms of energy and energy efficiency programs, I think they would be carbon free within 20 years in the electricity sector. Of course if one wants to make a huge profit in that time, it wont work that way.

Now why do I say that nuclear power cannot be safe. Here I have to go back to the movie I mentioned before for some hints. Partly because of the problem of nuclear waste (which not only is plutonium, but also many other elements that are dangerous and radioactive for at least thousands of years) but also because of the projection into the future of what could happen in the world.

Consider that in the past century (about twice the lifetime of a nuclear plant) we had 2 world wars, a cold war with nuclear weapons threat, several big terrorism events, local wars, a big economic crisis in the 1930ies and a lot of economic instability in the past 20 years. There was at least one considerable meterorite impact in Tunguska, too. Add climate change to that which adds instability. Would you call this world a stable place where you can assume that in 20 or 40 years people will be able to care for these contraptions? What if a war breaks out, bombs go down over Europe or the middle east or China - and nuclear facilities are hit? What if economic crash happens to a country and it has to drastically cut funding to nuclear facilities, companies running them going bancrupt. Who will then make sure these are kept safe and deconstructed properly at the expense of millions of dollars? What if ocean levels rise, heat waves strike, solar storms knock out the grid? What if countries or cultures fail and disappear, if in that process documents get lost, emergency plans cannot be carried out and so on. Nuclear plants operate under the assumption that life goes on in the future as it does now - something that looking at history is a very bold speculation!

And one more thing. Fuskushima as well as Chernobyl are disasters, yes, but they have, one has to admit that, been handled comparatibly well. Imagine what would have happened if the Soviets would not have had thousands of workers they could order to do the cleanup, if they had not have had the resources to build that sarcophagus, if they had acted in a way that would not have contained the disaster? What if in Japan the explosions would have been a bit worse, if the teams would not have been able to cool the destroyed cores early enough, if the plant would have been even in a worse state because of a previous 10 year long recession? The point is that these two horrible and devastating disasters that left uninhabitable exclusion zones, caused and will cause many cancers are only on the scale they are and not a lot worse because many people worked hard, made the right decisions at the right times, spent a lot of effort, money and equipment, risked their lives and the lives of others to make it so. This cannot be taken as the regular case. Another example - imagine that Fukushima disaster would have striken a plant next to New York. Or Tokyo. Or Delhi. Or Calcotta. Or in the west of Germany. So frankly Chernobyl and Fukushima as horrible as they are are not the worst case scenario for a nuclear power disaster.

... and Fukushima is not over yet - news are coming in regularly and they are scary at times... we will know the full extent of this not until next year or even later.

EDIT: Just a remark about Plutonium being a good thing - the application as nuclear fuel make these reactors even more dangerous, as you either need to make MOX fuel or you need difficult fast neutron reactors that are more risky and less controllable - and all have the same problems I mentioned above for regular nuclear plants. In addition to that, any nuclear power application that involves plutonium by default enables the proliferation and expansion of nuclear weapons. There can be no nuclear weapon free, safer world without the end of plutonium producing nuclear plants.

[Weyoun]

What's the problem with MOX fuel?

Both pebble bed and molten salt reactors can also use reprocessed plutonium from the nuclear "waste". They are also passively safe, you can go bankrupt and just leave them. You can simply have the personnel walk out of the building. All right, there are always safety concerns (as with everything), but they are more or less engineering problems that can be solved or have already been solved, you don't depend on the personnel of the facility making a mistake or anything.

If something really catastrophic happens and destroys the reactor building leaving the fuel leaking, I'd be worried about the catastrophic thing, and not about the reactor. For example, look at the destructive force that brought down the Fukushima plant, and then look at the destruction and suffering it caused directly.

About the exclusion zones, aren't the radiation levels in Denver higher than those in Pripyat right now? I don't have the time to verify it now, but I'm almost certain they are. And if it isn't, certainly the natural radiation in Guarapari, Brazil is. And people live there, it's a popular tourist destination, etc. Same stuff in Ramsar in Iran.