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Fukushima

podniesinski.pl

121–130 of 227 posts

Re: Fukushima

#121
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the other alternative to nuclear power?

Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air has a section on the relative danger levels of various sources of electricity. I think we can assume Japan is similar to Europe in terms of regulation and safety. http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml And I should say that Sustainable Energy is the best book on this topic you can find and that it's free online.

Can't agree more, that book is my jam. Also, it is recommended by Bill Gates :)

Re: Fukushima

#122
post #102

Being Japanese, that picture of blackboard in abandoned school 1/3 of the way through the post alone almost made me cry. Single picture tells more stories than thousand words. 4 years since it happened, almost no major Japanese media talks about Fukushima any more, so please share this to anywhere so it gets more attentions.

I'm not Japanese (but have visited) and I agree - the blackboard photo was heart breaking and beautiful all at once. I hope that piece gets preserved somehow.

Re: Fukushima

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you have areas of land where people won't be able to live for thousands of years.." Where are these areas? Can you name a few of them? " in addition to that we have to store the waste from these "safe" plants for few millennia" Nope. After a couple of hundred years it's no more radioactive than the ore from which it came. Long half-life = less radioactive. By definition.

How about Chernobyl exclusion zone? "Ukrainian officials estimate the area will not be safe for human life again for another 20,000 years" [1] "The time frame in question when dealing with radioactive waste ranges from 10,000 to 1,000,000 years" [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#The_Exclusi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Long_term_ma...

There are people living there right now.

"The time frame in question when dealing with radioactive waste ranges from 10,000 to 1,000,000 years"

As I noted below, a long half-life implies less radiation, by definition. "Infinite half-life" = "not radioactive at all".

Anyone who tries to use a long half-life as a scare tactic is either lacking in knowledge or selling something.

Re: Fukushima

#124
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. You seem to suggest that the fact that Fukushima was not adequately prepared for this tsunami was human failure, presumably because they should have expected such a tsunami to occur. If this is the case, then you can just as well argue that it was human failure that the towns in the affected areas flooded because of the tsunami. After all, if they expected such a tsunami to occur they could/should have bu…

The extent of damage and contamination certainly is human failure, mainly in accident response. My understanding is that the correct response to such a major loss of cooling on BWR is just to evacuate premises and do nothing (with the idea that the resulting excursion will obliterate the reactor but the dangerous fallout will remain inside the containment), the Fukushima operators tried to save the situation and thus…

> the correct response to such a major loss of cooling on BWR is just to evacuate premises and do nothing

The problem at Fukushima wasn't a short-term loss of coolant; it was the long-term lack of backup cooling after the tsunami hit (by which point the reactor had already been shut down for about 45 minutes), because of poor siting of the backup generators and switchgear. The operators couldn't do anything about that, no matter what they did.

Re: Fukushima

#125
post #6

"Have we learnt anything since then?" I'm very curious to hear from those who are knowledge in the area.

Who's this "we"? The general public and politicians have learned absolutely positively nothing. The engineers could talk your ear off if you're willing to listen, about solutions that will never be permitted to be applied.

I mean seriously, looking at the disasters we've had, pragmatically noting the engineers have not been given free reign to fix existing plants or build newer safer plants, at least in the west, there is no way anything short of space alien invasion could shake "us" into action.

For example, you build a plant designed for thirty years of operation, invent a safer way to do things twenty years after the old plant is built, then operate the old plant unchanged for fifty years for financial or environmental protest reasons. Then act all confused around year fifty when something blows up that was a known and fixed problem thirty years ago but can't ever be implemented.

There are numerous source code / programming analogies relating to sunk cost fallacies and political footballs and the like.

Its not just the engineering department. From a pragmatic crisis management standpoint some CYA civilian cultures should not be permitted to operate reactors. Military combat crews universally have more effective crisis management techniques than even the best civilians teams, even cross culturally. To say implementing this management shakeup would be tricky would be an understatement, however "we" do know that some cultures just can't operate a plant without civilian CYA-ing themselves and their neighbors quite literally to death. Civilians in high positions are trained by the system to prioritize protecting themselves personally from future court cases over accomplishing the overall mission of not melting down the plant ... the plant will take care of itself, at least it always has so far, and prioritizing themselves is how civilians rise to positions of power ... put them in charge of a crisis and it melts down and everyone dies ... somewhat more gung ho military personnel will do things like dump raw seawater into a sub reactor to prevent a meltdown, even if it results in a guaranteed economic kill of the reactor, even if they have to improvise. If you grab the tiger by the tail you will get eaten if you text message blamestorm over who's responsible and who wrote what proper procedure instead of holding on tight to the tail. You can't just engineer safety into something and call it done, anymore than you can checkbox security into a web application and call it done.

Re: Fukushima

#126
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it is true that coal is not the only non-nuclear power generation mechanism, it is -by far- the most common in the US. It is also true that > When you hit a nuclear plant with the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded, then immediately follow that with a twenty foot high tsunami, and then it explodes, it still kills fewer people than an average coal plant does every single year when everything goes perfectly.…

I suggest you to learn a bit about power grid engineering. Basically, the fact that we can't store electricity means that when you power on your toaster, somewhere a power plant has to increase its power to compensate. But the nuclear power plant takes up to 2 days to startup. It's not sustainable for the daily life where consumption change every hour. That's why there is the need for more agile power plant, where fu…

nuclear could replace the entire base load. If you factor in CO2 emission externality costs, it might even be cheaper to run nuclear above baseload. Build solar to help with peak usage and rely on gas for peaking as well.

The surplus could be used to pump water up damns or charge batteries. Or even to just pull co2 out of the air to compensate for car emissions.

It could provide very cheap night power for electric car owners. Worst case we could just waste the energy.

Once you accept that co2 emissions are an existential threat to the world, small inefficiencies are a small cost.

Re: Fukushima

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are you convinced we can't store electricity? Pumped storage for storing potential energy has worked long before we even had electricity. Sure, the whole process of storing electricity is lossy. Thermodynamics guarantees it. But the point isn't to try and store enough generation capacity to meet our demand. You just need enough storage capacity to deal with the peaks. There is of course the argument of "pumped st…

It's not that we can't store electricity - we just can't store enough of it to turn renewables into usable tool for meeting baseline demand. We may be able to do that in the future, with battery technology improving and some clever shenanigans like using electric vehicles as grid storage - but we need something now , and there's no other alternative for doing it green than nuclear power.

I was never arguing that we would meet baseline demand with "renewables" stored in some sort of mechanism.

But if you're really convinced this problem is unsolvable, lets just do this: we'll generate enough power (with fission, or whatever you want) to meet peak demand all the time. As long as we're near the coast there is a convenient way to get rid of all that surplus energy: desalination plants. I can think of a few areas that would jump at this idea, like California. Even if you wind up with too much freshwater, just start dumping it back into the ocean. The salt is generally worthless and is dumped back into the ocean. This will actually help offset the fact that the oceans are desalinating due to the ice caps melting.

Electricity prices will go up as a result of this, but you'll be subsidizing the fact that the grid is now greener as a result.

Re: Fukushima

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The height of the tsunami depends on the area. In the area in question, for a very long time people thought that it was impossible for the a tsunami to go above 5 meters. That there were tsunami of that size in other areas is irrelevant. The earthquake in question was the most powerful in 1000 years. Looking back 100 years would be insufficient. What is interesting is that there was actually a city that raised the se…

I guess he was talking about higher walls around the (few) nuclear plants, not the whole country. That would not make the country "a jail where the only place I can see the ocean is from on top of a mountain".

The water will just go around the wall. I think people don't quite understand the logistics involved. You have this massive wave travelling at 300 km/h. The seawall will break up the wave, but you have to have it long enough to prevent the water from reaching the bits that you want to protect before it retreats (often 20-30 minutes later).

Do a google search for "tetrapod japan images" to see what the beaches around here already look like. The Japanese government is not trying to avoid money on reducing the damage of tsunami. It seems like there should be a simple solution, but there isn't.

Re: Fukushima

#129
post #40
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chernobyl The RBMC design was always known to be an absolutely terrible idea because it's use of graphite as a moderator that required active cooling, creating an inherently unsafe positive void coefficient[1]. In fact, this was such a problem that there was concern before the disaster that the ~60 seconds the emergency diesel pumps would require before they could pump enough coolant would not be fast enough to pro…

> Absolutely. We had safer designs decades ago (and even better ideas[2] today), but upgrading to these safer designs has been hindered at every step by radiophobic activists and "not in my backyard" politics. So we're stuck with minor revisions (if any) to reactors designs from the 50s-70s. There are still countries investing in nuclear energy, like China, and I suppose these new reactors are made to the latest norm…

> I suppose these new reactors are made to the latest norms of safety

They are, the Chinese are buying reactors like the AP1000 which is quite possibly the safest production-level certified reactor ever designed by humanity (and no I'm not a Westinghouse employee, I've just had a nuke "interest" for about thirty years).

Its almost comical in some sad ways... I've read reasonable predictions that in a decade the entire Chinese national "fleet" will have a total aggregate incident rate for an entire country below some individual antique American reactors. Absolutely tragic.

Re: Fukushima

#130
post #119
post #17

I found the pictures fascinating, but the accompanying text marred my enjoyment. Considering the circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, the anti-nuclear sentiment really irked me. The Tōhoku earthquake & tsunami killed close to 20,000 people. The author completely ignored those victims. Instead, he focused on Fukushima, which will cause around 150 deaths from cancers. For every tragedy created by Fukushima, there a…

The problem which nuclear disasters have that almost all other disasters don't is the permanence of danger over such a large area. There have been plenty of large-scale chemical or industrial disasters - everything from Bhopal to Tianjing to Agent Orange to Deepwater Horizon - but they have the common property that the smoke clears and it's possible to neutralise, disperse or otherwise clean up the mess. Whereas Cher…

Then again, humans have also done things like contaminate our soil with arsenic, and the effects exist to this day and will persist for a very long time.
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