... as always since 2011
sadly nothing new, layers of lies over more lies with some crunchy lies in between. Bon appetit!.
Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
71–80 of 265 posts
Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
#72Numbers would be good. How radioactive? Compared to background and something which we know to be dangerous?
Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
#73I think there are similarities between the nuclear power debate and the GMO debate. In both case, I think it's stupid to be fundamentally opposed to the technology/research itself. But in both case, the industry is so fucked up (lies, too close ties with control authority, ...) that I don't trust them at all. It seems to me this is partially a failure of our current economic system, where the incentives for the indus…
I can think of one thing, and no one will swallow it in our society: The engineers who work on nuclear plants must pledge their lives for its safety, and ritually kill themselves in the event of an incident. I'm perfectly serious, in that it's within the human experience and it would work. I also suspect our world society can't wrap its head around that kind of medieval pact, and I'm not even sure I want to live in t…
The "Fukushima 50" walked back into the plant after being ordered to evacuate. Not ritual suicide, but close: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_50
Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
#74I think there are similarities between the nuclear power debate and the GMO debate. In both case, I think it's stupid to be fundamentally opposed to the technology/research itself. But in both case, the industry is so fucked up (lies, too close ties with control authority, ...) that I don't trust them at all. It seems to me this is partially a failure of our current economic system, where the incentives for the indus…
I can think of one thing, and no one will swallow it in our society: The engineers who work on nuclear plants must pledge their lives for its safety, and ritually kill themselves in the event of an incident. I'm perfectly serious, in that it's within the human experience and it would work. I also suspect our world society can't wrap its head around that kind of medieval pact, and I'm not even sure I want to live in t…
If only there was a culture that had a centuries-old tradition of committing painful ritual suicide to atone for failures... I would totally trust those guys to safely run a nuclear plant...
Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can think of one thing, and no one will swallow it in our society: The engineers who work on nuclear plants must pledge their lives for its safety, and ritually kill themselves in the event of an incident. I'm perfectly serious, in that it's within the human experience and it would work. I also suspect our world society can't wrap its head around that kind of medieval pact, and I'm not even sure I want to live in t…
The "Fukushima 50" walked back into the plant after being ordered to evacuate. Not ritual suicide, but close: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_50
Thank you, that was the incident which sent me down this chain of thought. That was an act of true integrity.
Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
#76I think there are similarities between the nuclear power debate and the GMO debate. In both case, I think it's stupid to be fundamentally opposed to the technology/research itself. But in both case, the industry is so fucked up (lies, too close ties with control authority, ...) that I don't trust them at all. It seems to me this is partially a failure of our current economic system, where the incentives for the indus…
Regulatory capture is a big problem. One of the more bizarre twists in the Japanese nuclear story is that a program to develop robots that could remotely work inside damaged nuclear generating stations was canceled out of fear that it would send a message that nuclear power isn't safe.
Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
#77Honestly, internet snarkiness and 2 minute rages aside, I wonder what this will mean for us in the future. I wonder how US crops, the Australia climate, and Chinese drinking water quality will be affected. Is this so bad that Japan has essentially damned the entire region? Or are we going to see a mass die-off of fish around the world? It's just a really scary situation, and totally not cool.
I would expect something between slightly higher levels of radiation in fish (which might sum up if you eat it and might "surprisingly" lead to cancer) and an apocalyptic disaster that affects every creature on earth if TEPCO fucks up anything with the large number of fuel rods, which are still stored at Fukushima.
Um, let's try to keep things in perspective, please. This is very bad for the people that are near the plant, no question. But in global terms, the total amount of contaminated water that could potentially leak is miniscule. The Pacific Ocean is really, really big.
The article says that 400 metric tons of contaminated water are being added every day. Let's say that leakage rate goes on for 5 years. That's about a million metric tons of contaminated water.
The volume of the Pacific Ocean is about 660 million cubic kilometers. One cubic kilometer of water weighs about a billion metric tons; so the a million metric tons of radioactive water is one 660 billionth of the volume of the Pacific Ocean.
Now let's talk about the fuel rods. An accident involving those could potentially have effects similar to Chernobyl in terms of spreading radiation; but since there are four reactors at risk at Fukushima, we would expect the global effects to be about four times the global effect of Chernobyl. While the global effects of Chernobyl were certainly measurable, they hardly amounted to "an apocalyptic disaster", or even one fourth of one.
Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
By what standard do you see Fukushima as being worse? Number of casualties? Number of people who had their livelihood directly affected? The effect on the biosphere?
Let's just say that hundreds of people will work in extreme conditions (high radiation, damaged nuclear material, damaged buildings) for the next 20 years to keep this thing from collapsing/... before the next heavy earth quake hits.
... and the region around the plant has been quite severely affected: long term evacuation of inhabitants in some areas, kids can't play outside in others (and must take constant "precautions"), large scale decontamination needed (removal of top-soil, etc), fishermen not allowed to fish (it depends on the species and their feeding habits etc, some have shown no contamination, others are way, way, over the limits), many problems caused by loss of confidence (obvious huge drop in tourism, a very hard time selling farm produce, etc).
So sure, the number of people that started glowing green and exploded is small (:-), but the financial and social repercussions of the Fukushima incident are not small at all. "Number of people that died" isn't the only statistic to look at when evaluating such things...
Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
#79I think there are similarities between the nuclear power debate and the GMO debate. In both case, I think it's stupid to be fundamentally opposed to the technology/research itself. But in both case, the industry is so fucked up (lies, too close ties with control authority, ...) that I don't trust them at all. It seems to me this is partially a failure of our current economic system, where the incentives for the indus…
I can think of one thing, and no one will swallow it in our society: The engineers who work on nuclear plants must pledge their lives for its safety, and ritually kill themselves in the event of an incident. I'm perfectly serious, in that it's within the human experience and it would work. I also suspect our world society can't wrap its head around that kind of medieval pact, and I'm not even sure I want to live in t…
The real problem in this case has far less to do with the reactor design than the horribly mismanaged cleanup efforts.
Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can think of one thing, and no one will swallow it in our society: The engineers who work on nuclear plants must pledge their lives for its safety, and ritually kill themselves in the event of an incident. I'm perfectly serious, in that it's within the human experience and it would work. I also suspect our world society can't wrap its head around that kind of medieval pact, and I'm not even sure I want to live in t…
Mistakes aren't deterministic, they are largely probabilistic. While ritual suicide might make the victims of an accident feel better, they are ultimately unproductive - there are many classes of disastrous errors that have nothing to do with negligence. Not to mention also, even in incidents with a preventable cause, it is exceedingly rare for there to be a singular cause. Chernobyl, for example, was the culmination…
Things like nuclear meltdowns are black swan events, with a multitude of causes and guilt.
I'm not advocating ritual suicide, but I think it's worth noting that in the case of Fukushima, there is an easily identifiable single root cause to all the current problems: the fact that the backup diesel generators and the switchgear for them were sited behind a seawall that was overcome by the tsunami. If they had been on higher ground, none of this would have happened; there would have been a continuous supply of cooling water to the reactor cores and things would have shut down normally. The process that led to that siting of the backup generators should be fairly easily traceable, as compared to the design process for the entire reactor complex.