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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'

#191

Post by throwaway_yy2Di »

ericdykstra wrote: post #175

Here is an interesting video describing a model of the spread of radiation from the Fukushima plant over the next 10 years. I'm not sure how accurate it is, but it's an interesting watch nonetheless (and under 3 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAU00aL-_ic

Here's the paper behind that:

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/7/3/034004/article

Lest the logarithmic scale confuse anyone, the concentrations over most of the ocean are tiny. The scale has a 5 order-of-magnitude range.

As a reference point, Cs-137 background from atmospheric testing is a median 3 Bq/m^3 [1] in the Pacific. (Total weapons fallout was 25 MCi = 925 PBq of Cs-137 [2], about 30x Fukushima's 36 PBq [3]). Both are dwarfed by natural radioactivity, which includes 11 kBq/m^3 of K-40 [4].

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15245845

[2] http://books.google.com/books?id=JLFX6EMPqBkC&pg=PA34

[3] http://www.pnas.org/content/109/16/5984.full

[4] http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/natural.htm

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

#192

Post by AsymetricCom »

iyulaev wrote: post #180
rwmj wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've not been paying much attention to the Japanese nuclear industry. This is the industry that allowed junior staff to mix nuclear materials together unsupervised, causing a chain reaction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident#In_...

And engineers in Europe or the US have never had criticality incidents ;)

Lets try to stay on topic here. We should be doing everything we can to help Japan, not poking fun of them or trying to start some kind of competition of incompetence.

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

#193

Post by angersock »

kenster07 wrote: post #159
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…

Why is it fundamentally stupid to be opposed to it? Nuclear power in its current form presents tremendous, potentially country-altering downside when things (can and will) go wrong. Is this really the best humanity has got -- the side effect of a decades-old weapons program?

"Is this really the best humanity has got -- the side effect of a decades-old weapons program?"

You mean, like integrated circuits, GPS, and the Internet?

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

#194

Post by WalterBright »

pdonis wrote: post #177
WalterBright wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be easier to put the generators in bunkers and harden them. Besides, it was pretty clear to me reading the sequence of events at Fukushima that there was entirely too little thought given to backup decoupling - there was too much of a zipper effect of one failure leading to another. I'm not a lay person on this - I worked for 3 years on airliner designs, and much of that is finding ways to deal with failure…

It would be easier to put the generators in bunkers and harden them. Yes, that would work, as long as you also protected the switchgear and the power cabling leading to the pumps that serve the reactor. The nuke industry could learn a lot by consulting with airframe engineers. I think the nuke industry in general does pay attention to these things; I was actually somewhat surprised to find that the designers of Fukus…

From what I read about the disaster, there were a long series of design issues that could not withstand failures. As I recall,

1. hydrogen being vented into an enclosed area

2. no backup method for determining coolant levels

3. backup generators were not protected

4. no backup method for adding coolant (I would have had a gravity fed backup system)

5. critical systems were located too close to the reactor - I would have moved them further away so they could be repaired without the workers being irradiated

None of these are expensive to do.

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

#195

Post by beefman »

KVFinn wrote: post #189
beefman wrote: post #167

It's really sad and frightening for me to see such hysteria in the media and even in the comments here. I want to address all of it, but it's not possible even to make a dent. But I can offer the following numbers: Fukushima release to groundwater TEPCO estimate, August 2013 0.024 PBq ( And here's a picture of the leak http://stat.ameba.jp/user_images/20130820/14/noraneko-okayam... The highest seawater activity level…

You're quoting a bunch of year or more old stats... there's been a flurry of recent news coverage because recent measurements have either exceeded past limits, or past measurements are now considered to have been underestimates, with respect to ocean release. Example: http://japandailypress.com/fukushima-bay-radiation-levels-hi... >Reports from Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), operator of the disaster-stricken Fukus…

No, I'm not missing recent events. Year-old stats are still valid because almost all the release occurred during the accident sequence in 2011.

I'll drink the 4700 Bq/L tritium water too. That level doesn't even exceed the WHO limit for drinking water (10,000) let alone the Finnish one (30,000) or Australian one (76,103). The 4.7kBq measurement was made in the quay in front of the plant, not the open sea. Rising tritium levels there may be a result of leaks of cesium-stripped water from the onsite treatment system, or simply natural variation in groundwater drainage from the site.

I don't want to get personal, but the way your post is written as if it comes from a place of knowledge, is a worthwhile example of a larger phenomenon.

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

#196

Post by anigbrowl »

wissler wrote: post #158
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 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." If you look around you'll find a lot more examples than these two, and you'll trace the root cause as illeg…

What does this have to do with the government not exerting sufficient regulatory force against bad actors in the nuclear industry? After all, people who don't like being regulated frequently trot out your very complaint as an excuse for why they should not be subject to more regulation. I think you're confused.

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

#197

Post by DennisP »

WalterBright wrote: post #190
DennisP wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bear in mind that these reactors were built in the 1970s. Modern designs are a lot better, and some shut down by themselves upon loss of power, with no need for active measures at all. Even some reactors built in the 1980s got through the events at Fukushima just fine.

I worked on airframe design in the 1970s. The ethos of design to withstand failure was well-entrenched then, and goes back a long way in the airframe industry. The key idea is nobody has managed to design parts that won't fail. But they have figured out how to design highly reliable systems out of parts that fail.

Sure. The American nuclear industry kinda caught up with that after Three Mile Island, when they figured out that one nuclear accident put them all at risk. They developed an extreme culture of safety after that.

Current designs use lots of redundant safety systems. New designs depend more on simple physics...eg., fuel that expands enough when it heats to damp down the reaction, or large quantities of coolant with very high thermal capacity and conductivity. At Argonne's IFR project, they shut down coolant circulation and electric power, and the reactor quietly shut down with no damage.

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

#198

Post by mtdewcmu »

wissler wrote: post #158
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 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." If you look around you'll find a lot more examples than these two, and you'll trace the root cause as illeg…

Has GMO ever been confirmed to have harmed anybody? Confusion between real and imagined threats could be part of the problem. Nuclear accidents will kill you, as in -- dead.

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

#199

Post by mtdewcmu »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #96

I can't say I'm a Lewis Page fan, but his coverage on the Register [1] added an interesting insight which was that contamination in the water was resulting in primarily beta radiation, not gamma radiation. I know the folks who are reporting this, the "World Nuclear Industry Status Report" [2] are not exactly unbiased. Read through other reports they have on their web site and they don't seem to be coming at the debat…

The part that wasn't explained very well in these articles is the nature of the threat from water leaking into the ocean. I would think, perhaps naively, that once it entered the ocean, it would dissipate and be relatively harmless. It would also be a relatively benign place to contaminate the groundwater. The groundwater would be too salty to drink, anyway, and it would flow directly into the ocean.

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

#200

Post by javajosh »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #125
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Regulatory capture is a big problem. Regulatory capture is THE problem. Contrary to the parent post's claim, the problem is not with our "economic system". It's that, if you're going to regulate something (particularly something as complex as nuclear energy), then you need experts. And the only place to get those experts is from the industry. Generally, those people are naturally going to look at the industry from a…

How about requiring that regulators for one country be drawn from the industry experts of another?
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