Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 265 posts

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

#211

Post by [deleted] »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #76
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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#212

Post by saalweachter »

e12e wrote: post #119
gngeal wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

200 tonnes of radioactive water There is a (long) trillion of tons of radioactive water in all the world's oceans. C14, see? "Radioactive water" is a meaningless term.

I think meaningless is a little strong. We talk about CO2 emissions, even though the air contains CO2. My understanding would be more radioactive than ambient radiation, or something along those lines. I do agree that seeing some actual numbers would be helpful (eg: types and amount (estimated) of isotopes).

The total increase in CO2 levels over the last couple hundred years is about 30%, from 280 PPM to around 400 PPM.

By contrast, the total increase in the ocean's radioactivity from Fukushima is about 0.000002%, give or take a zero. While "trillions of Bq" sounds bad, and probably isn't good, the oceans contain something like 14,000 exaBq worth of Potassium-40 alone.

The problem with radioactive releases is more about concentrating it. There's sort of an anti-goldilocks situation. If a radioactive release doesn't spread very well at all, that's kind of OK. The radioactivity at the point of release is extremely dangerous, but hey, it is well contained and you can clean it up. If the radioactivity spreads extremely well, that's kind of OK too. It freaks people out, but realistically if you dilute radioactive materials enough they stop being dangerous. You're pissing in the ocean.

But if the radioactive material spreads JUST RIGHT, you can contaminate too large of an area to clean up while still leaving the radiation levels high enough to be dangerous.

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

#214

Post by jacobquick »

ajscherer wrote: post #153
CWuestefeld wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Regulatory capture is THE problem. This is difficult for me to understand. Are you suggesting that if nuclear power were completely unregulated, Tepco's behavior would've been more virtuous (as I read it, totally virtuous)? Or is the claim that regulation made the problem somewhat worse, and this margin (between how bad the problem would've been without regulation and how bad it was with regulation) is the only part…

You should look up "regulatory capture" it means something very different than how you are taking it.

Just so it's not a low-content post, a company can lobby the government to change, weaken or not enforce existing regulations, and often they compound this with bribery of the regulator. Many large companies in the United States go further and lobby to extend or re-word regulations specifically to give themselves a monopoly over the regulated market. All of these actions are forms of regulatory capture.

Other examples of it: the present state of the us patent and copyright system, especially if you include enforceable work-for-hire clauses and the language in various treaties referring to copyrights. Elon Musk's difficulties selling his electric cars online in Texas and other states are due to regulatory capture by car dealerships in that state. In general, most government-backed monopolies or "public-private partnerships" can safely be expected to involve a significant amount of regulatory capture.

Still though you should look it up because both the term and the actual process are really useful at figuring out the hows-and-whys of US government domestic actions.

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

#215

Post by bradleyjg »

palmer wrote: post #157
ajscherer wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Regulatory capture is THE problem. This is difficult for me to understand. Are you suggesting that if nuclear power were completely unregulated, Tepco's behavior would've been more virtuous (as I read it, totally virtuous)? Or is the claim that regulation made the problem somewhat worse, and this margin (between how bad the problem would've been without regulation and how bad it was with regulation) is the only part…

Regulatory capture is when the people tasked with keeping an industry on its best behavior have too close ties to the industry, through personal connections or financial incentives, and are no longer able to do their jobs. I would agree that we have a problem with inadequate or corrupt regulators in several industries.

Regulatory capture can take the form of outright corruption, but the more insidious form is cognitive capture. That's where the regulators simply don't have a sufficiently detached perspective from those they are regulating. They internalize the needs and thought patterns of the industry as there own.

A related phenomenon in foreign affairs circles is called "going native".

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

#216

Post by sesqu »

mtdewcmu wrote: post #198
wissler wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> Nuclear accidents will kill you, as in -- dead.

They have been markedly less successful at that than other industrial accidents.

edit: Wikipedia suggests a total of about 9250 accidental deaths worldwide over the past 56 years related to nuclear research, power, weapons and therapy, of which some 126 died of radiation while the rest died from explosions and cancer (estimates vary; except for the 9000 deaths attributed to Chernobyl, the numbers likely discount some terminal cancers).

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

#217

Post by 205guy »

hkmurakami wrote: post #35
yxhuvud wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan is getting away with it because there is no radioactive rain impacting other countries.

I guess it helps that the winds blow from west to east (i.e. straight into the ocean where the next country is ~8000 miles away)

3800 miles and the next country is ... USA (Hawaii). However, both winds and water currents tend to go north of Hawaii, so it is more like 5200 miles on the great circle to California.

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

#218

Post by doctorstupid »

lmm wrote: post #11
veidr wrote: post #2

I'm so fucking sick of this. This level of ass-clownery makes Japan look so bad, and so diminishes its national prestige in the world, that it's almost like when Bush the junior was president of the USA. Yes, TEPCO is a private company. But it reflects on Japan the same way it would if the US government just left BP and Halliburton to decide entirely for themselves how to clean up the New Horizon oil rig disaster, wi…

>Except that the Fukushima disaster is about 100 times worse than the New Horizon spill. Really? Everyone is terrified of the radiation bogeyman, but I'd bet there were more injuries and deaths as a result of New Horizon.

Because they occurred together, people conflate the natural disasters of the earthquake and tsunami with the nuclear one.

But there were no deaths caused by radiation exposure, and this year the WHO claimed that the health risks to evacuees attributable to radiation are below detectable levels.

A shallow look onto the Deepwater Horizon spill makes it pretty clear that it had far more serious environmental and health effects.

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

#219

Post by redblacktree »

lenkite wrote: post #136
redblacktree wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but I'm not a miner. Coal is much less dangerous for those who live near the power plant.

>Coal is much less dangerous for those who live near the power plant I don't believe so. Toxicity and Emissions of a coal-fire power plant does severely affect those in the neighborhood. Studies show that radiation dose is comparable. As and Se are found to have higher concentrations in soil samples. http://rpd.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/3/169

Yes, but the coal plant won't suffer a catastrophic failure. It has negative effects, sure, but they're diffuse, not acute, like a nuclear meltdown is.

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

#220

Post by PaulHoule »

This is very bad news for the nuclear industry although I think the threat to the global environment is overblown.

For instance, they speak as if going into the ocean was the worst place the leakage could go. But face it, the ocean is a huge place and spread out that thin, it's an infinitesimal part of the natural background radiation.

Sure, radiation puts stress on life forms, but so does SO2, CO2, POPs and all the other pollution we create and in the big picture Fukushima has far less impact than, say, rice farming, has in Japan.

Post reply on HN