Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel • Hacker News Board

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#181

Post by crankylinuxuser » Mon, Nov 20, 2017, 8:57 PM UTC

geon wrote: post #138

> https://youtu.be/c5hQ6WlioRE This has to be the worst possible way of sharing information; a video of 2 still images and a computer voice reading a text. Right up there with images inside a word document, inside an email.

I've seen a few of those before.

Some were CC text from CNN articles with random "war pictures". It was surreal - like a badly done brainwashing video. It had the eerie qualities of belonging as perverse art exhibit.

I have also seen these in "alt"/neonazi/kkk politics channels. There's not much worse than showing pictures of the KKK and black people while a robotic voice throws curse words and racial epithets. There isn't much else to say other than "WAT?"

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#182

Post by justinjlynn » Mon, Nov 20, 2017, 11:43 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #149

justinjlynn wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, I'd imagine the vast majority of the helpful information learned will be kept a proprietary secret.

I could imagine that shielding electronics from radiation could fall under military secret.

These days, once you get to the level where you can afford to develop them in the first place, there really isn't that much of a difference.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#183

Post by specialist » Tue, Nov 21, 2017, 2:13 AM UTC

eric-hu wrote: post #151

I long believed that nuclear power was the only energy source cleaner than fossil fuels and scalable enough to meet the energy demands of the world. While that might still be true in some sense, I now believe that humanity isn't ready for nuclear power. Besides the Fukushima and Chernobyl type issues with organizations skimping on design, there's still an outstanding problem of nuclear waste storage. The current nucl…

The ongoing failure to cleanup, mitigate the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is proof enough that we are not (yet?) mature enough to manage nuclear energy.

When the contaminates reach the Columbia River, every where downstream becomes uninhabitable. eg Portland OR.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#184

Post by Grue3 » Tue, Nov 21, 2017, 5:30 AM UTC

tigershark wrote: post #56

wiz21c wrote: post #38

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... reminds us that nuclear kills much less than regular earthquakes, car accidents, or air pollution due to the burning of fossil fuels...

Go and live there if you think that it is really harmless. I would rather not honestly after it took them 6 years just to get the first image of the corium after endless attempts.

Been near there just like a week ago (Tomioka town). Opened up for resettlement this year. Lots of damage from tsunami, but new buildings are being constructed and there are several functioning hotels and convenience stores. There's massive work going on to decontaminate the remaining areas by 2020. As long as you don't go inside of the nuclear station it should be ok.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#185

Post by bonesss » Tue, Nov 21, 2017, 8:18 AM UTC

wahern wrote: post #180

littlestymaar wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe all it'd take is a terrorist incident involving nuclear waste. There are so many radiologic sources out there, used for many purposes (medicine, gammagraphy), very dangerous[1] but taken with much less care than nuclear wastes from the nuclear power industry. Stuff like this [2] happen all the time … [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident [2] (in French) https://www.asn.fr/Controler/Actualite…

Or whatever happened in Russia within the past few weeks: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/10/nuclear-accide... I kinda agree with your point: terrorists already have considerable access, theoretically, to radioactive materials. In fact, the materials used for medicine and science are in many ways much more dangerous from a public health perspective given their short, energetic half-lives. The only substant…

Nuclear facilities aren't really dependent on market perception to keep their stock prices high - they sell power.

The terrorists won't do a better job of slandering fission than the oil & gas companies have done, and nuclear facilities and fuel storage make horrible terrorist targets. The facilities are explosion hardened by design, and spent fuel is essentially rocks. It would take a lot of work and explosives to make a weak, uninteresting, highly traceable, not too dangerous "dirty bomb". That requires supplies generally unavailable to terrorist cells, much less cells inside a nuclear nation. It also requires hazardous materials training and technical skills generally unavailable to terrorist organizations, much less embedded in a target area.

As has been the case for decades: the largest genuine threat from an action like that would be panic, and overreaction, from a riled up and ignorant population.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#186

Post by RobAley » Tue, Nov 21, 2017, 12:35 PM UTC

gizmo wrote: post #174

RobAley wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really say 0 deaths, because no one knows. We don't have good epidemiological models for wide-spread low-level dispersal such as was seen at Fukushima, we already know incidences of cancer and gene mutation don't scale linearly with exposure at low levels. There are also associated deaths from psychological factors of those who were evacuated, lost land / business etc. which will only become apparent in yea…

Deaths resulting from psychological factors involving those who were evacuated count when it comes to nuclear energy but not when it comes to dam failures? I don't think this kind of double standard is reasonable. Besides, I'm pretty sure you just copied the argument about low level exposure from the Fukushima disaster wikipedia page, but you conveniently left out the next sentence: "given the uncertain health effect…

I never said that such deaths form dam failures didn't count. The only reference I made to dams is that the model (physically traumatic & psych-related death) is well understood. Deaths due to low-level, widely dispersed radiation is not.

I'm afraid you were wrong to be "pretty sure" that I copied the argument from Wikipedia, I haven't read that page (until you pointed it out now). My comment comes from what I've picked up working for 10 years in epidemiology at Oxford. I didn't "conveniently" leave out the next sentence, and I wouldn't have quoted it anyway as its effectively tosh. There is no discernible increase expected on current models, but the current models are accepted (by most experts) not be useful predictors, as described in my initial post.

It's not "scare-mongering", it's being open to scientific discussion and exploration. Blind-adherence to your view-point doesn't help anyone but the nuclear industry.

Let's have open and honest debate. Even when that means we say "we don't know".

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#187

Post by wiz21c » Tue, Nov 21, 2017, 1:18 PM UTC

frik wrote: post #133

wiz21c wrote: post #38

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... reminds us that nuclear kills much less than regular earthquakes, car accidents, or air pollution due to the burning of fossil fuels...

> reminds us that nuclear kills much less than regular earthquakes Stupid comment. Would you relocated near Fukushima or Chernobyl? Maybe you should. You would educate yourself and change your mind. And you would have to life with the related health issues. (The same for evil greedy owners of such energy companies)

I work in a big city. It is polluted by cars, trucks, heating. That pollution kills 2 or 3 hundreds of people every year in that town. That scares me a lot more than the hypothetical explosion of the nuclear plant which I live 40km close...

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#188

Post by wiz21c » Tue, Nov 21, 2017, 1:23 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #99

nv-vn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being anti-nuclear is pretty much accepting the status quo though. Modern nuclear power is much, much more sustainable than coal, scales very well, and is very safe. If you believe in a quick solution for energy issues then you shouldn't halt all nuclear development and leave fossil fuels for the next couple decades.

Being anti-nuclear is pretty much accepting the status quo though. Elon Musk would disagree. If you believe in a quick solution for energy issues then you shouldn't halt all nuclear development and leave fossil fuels for the next couple decades. Nuclear plants take 30 years at least to get through planning and building. Gas fired plants or pump solar can be deployed within a year, Wind + Solar in even less time.

Also there was an interesting view on (against) nuclear by Naomi Klein :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLRikyCRu54

I like nuclear, but her view makes a lot of sense to me.

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#189

Post by nielsbot » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 12:30 AM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #149

justinjlynn wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, I'd imagine the vast majority of the helpful information learned will be kept a proprietary secret.

I could imagine that shielding electronics from radiation could fall under military secret.

Is that all that secret though? Can't you buy radiation-hardened versions of chips if you want to?

Re: Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

#190

Post by cocoablazing » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 1:18 PM UTC

petre wrote: post #128

cocoablazing wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving several EDGs and support system a couple kilometers is a small task in comparison to the design, qualification, construction, and training associated with a new power reactor design. There’s nothing very complicated about the EDG buses that supply safety-system components.

The cables from the diesel generators a couple of kilometers away could have been destroyed by the tsunami or another earthquake.

This isn’t relevant to the fact that upgrading safety and safety support systems is less costly and a smaller engineering task than designing a new reactor.

Upgrades to such systems, including flex interfaces, has occurred across the US fleet in the years following Fukushima, while exactly zero new reactors have been designed and built.

Sure, there are better designs for EDG siting and support system integration. This is completely besides the point. The point is, even moving the whole safety support system kilometers away is cheaper than designing a new reactor, which I think should be a pretty uncontroversial statement to engineers familiar with the complexity of license approval for power reactors.