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Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'

#81

Post by samstave »

uptown wrote: post #66
kaybe wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's the reason. Without massive amounts of water for cooling it's not possible to use current technologies.

Interesting. The NSA facility is designed to use a massive amount of water daily (17 million gallons a day), and it is nowhere near an ocean. http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/massive-nsa-data-...

??? Yes, but that is not a reactor which will have catastrophic fallout if it stops getting cooling.

In fact, it would do the world a great service if the cooling failed there :-)

Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'

#82

Post by samatman »

veidr wrote: post #74
samatman wrote: post #50

Earlier 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…

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...

The idea is really old. In the Code of Hammurabi, a builder whose building collapses and kills someone is killed. If the building kills a son, the son of the builder is killed.

Simply having it around as a cultural trope ain't gonna do it. I'm talking about a voluntary pledge that assumes the force of law.

Turn it around: if an engineer thinks he can build a perfectly safe nuclear plant, why shouldn't he pledge his life? Similarly, if an engineer thinks she can't build a perfectly safe nuclear plant, that there is a significant risk she'll have to kill herself and leave her children motherless, would she agree to build it?

Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'

#83

Post by hansjorg »

samatman wrote: post #50
jre wrote: post #16

I 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…

Aren't engineers and other employees already committed just by the fact that they are living near the plant with their families?

What about getting that level of commitment from the owners? And if that's not practical, why not remove the profit incentive?

Maybe activities with as massive negative externalities as running nuclear plants should be run as non-profit organizations. Possibly as research institutions, with a strong anchoring in the surrounding local community.

Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'

#84

Post by niuzeta »

it's about time the three countries closest to Japan - Korea, China, and Russia, all of whom have great power and relation(trade and diplomatic) with Japan, to respond. I mean, they've already done but it's time to make the pressure more concrete... economic sanction, albeit partial?

This is a globe-wide matter.

Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'

#85

Post by bengrunfeld »

pdonis wrote: post #77
lignuist wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mil…

Right, but isn't radioactive water like cordial, you only need a small amount to change a much larger body of water?

Ton for ton, I can see your point of how it's only a drop in the ocean, but if that drop is highly radioactive and spreads in the currents, wouldn't that be enough to cause serious damage?

Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'

#86

Post by ghostDancer »

samatman wrote: post #50
jre wrote: post #16

I 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…

I think it will be more effective if you put the politicians in power or the owners to live next to them, i can assure you there will be no lack of money for building and maintenance of the nuclear plants.

Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'

#87

Post by JonnieCache »

Anyone wishing to become more familiar with the murky process which led to the proliferation of the unsafe Boiling Water Reactors such as Fukushima should watch Adam Curtis' film A is for Atom, which details how the US government and General Electric conspired to ignore the warnings from the Atomic Energy Commission about the designs.

He made it available in full on his (excellent) blog in the wake of the earthquake: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/03/a_is_for_atom....

If those from outside the UK can't watch that one, it's also on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FDrA7yUdFc

Those wary of Curtis and his psychedelic editing tricks should still give it a go - this one is from 1992, before he got so into Boards of Canada and flash cuts.

Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'

#88

Post by pdonis »

samatman wrote: post #67
potatolicious wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I do think a "vast number of errors and safety lapses" is unlikely to come out of a cult (note the word) of engineering which embraces ritual suicide as the cost of failure... This is about human psychology, rather than reliability in the engineering sense. I truly believe it would lead to better safety, but not perfect safety. The idea is that yes, all or most of the engineers involved in a nuclear accident of…

running the risk of turning our children's children into walking bags of cancerous mutation.

But here's the thing: we have already had two "nuclear accidents of any significance": Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Neither of those came even remotely close to "turning our children's children into walking bags of cancerous mutation". Nor will Fukushima. Yes, it's very bad for people near the plant, and for fishermen in the surrounding waters. But on a global scale, it's just not that big.

what would it take to have a culture of safety as serious as the threat of nuclear disaster?

Wrong question; the answer to it ask you ask it is that we already have a culture of safety at least that serious, with regard to nuclear power, because we treat nuclear power far more strictly than we treat other sources of power (like coal) that pose greater overall risk to humans. If we're going to effectively ban nuclear reactors because we're worried about radiation, we should also ban coal because we're worried about deaths from mining. And we should ban oil because of the risk of something like the Deepwater Horizon spill.

There isn't a simple solution to any of this; but a good start would be to be open and realistic about all the risks of all power sources.

Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'

#89

Post by potatolicious »

pdonis wrote: post #80
potatolicious wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> "the fact that the backup diesel generators and the switchgear for them were sited behind a seawall that was overcome by the tsunami"

Sure, but who's responsible for that? I don't mean to say that there must be many technical causes of incidents, but rather that it is almost impossible to find a situation where there is a singular human cause.

The multitude of engineers that saw the plans before they went final? The managers who pushed for the generators to be placed there in the first place? The contractors who built it knowing full well that the design was garbage? How high up does it go, and how many degrees removed from the situation do we require before you're absolved of guilt?

We could do something silly to consolidate the guilt, like, "the last person to stamp the designs gets the blame", but that seems like it would encourage a culture of hot-potatoing instead, especially if the stakes are your own life ;)

To put a more extreme example of it: a bus driver falls asleep at the wheel, jumps a curb, and kills a person. Do we punish the driver for his negligence, or his shift supervisor for threatening him into taking an extra-long shift, or someone even further up who knowingly encouraged a culture of overwork?

Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'

#90

Post by bengrunfeld »

rtpg wrote: post #44
bengrunfeld wrote: post #31

Honestly, 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.

Not to be rude but I think you're highly overestimating the effects this could have globally. The ocean is really big, and it's not like radioactivity is contagious. As for the local effects, who knows... EDIT: by who knows, I just mean I'm not aware of the scale, I could imagine it getting pretty bad. It's just that with all the sensationalism and non comprehension of basic statistics in some articles, I feel pretty…

I'm not overestimating, or indeed estimating, anything. I was interested in other people's opinions. Rudeness pardoned.
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