Fukishima is Worse than Ever
cringely.com
cringely.com
And Fukushima isn't the only accident. It's merely the most recent big one.
Even if nuclear reactors work as designed, we still haven't solved terminal storage of nuclear waste after more than 60 years.
Compare it to e.g. the vast on-going death toll caused by pollution from coal, and decommission nuclear power plants becomes outright immoral if it is replaced by coal. If you can replace it by e.g. concentrated solar or wind, then fine, but even hydro is likely to cause more deaths of time (dam accidents - construction, maintenance and failures - kill a lot of people).
It's bad, I know, but this seems off by a few orders of magnitude. This appears to be a general problem when reasoning about radiation.
I can understand why nuclear advocates would want to challenge basic reasoning. This appears to be a general problem when government tenders are at stake.
Ater 1000 years of a Chernobyl every ten years - and a Chernobyl every 10 years is completely unrealistic, given that it took a totally obsolete generator design and ridiculous levels of human error for us to get one, 30 years ago - the uninhabitable area based on the widest Chernobyl exclusion zone, would be 0.05% about 1/2000th of the surface of the Earth.
That assumes no contraction of the exclusion zones as radioactivity tapers off, which is highly unrealistic as there's already a push to start making use of parts of the Chernobyl exclusion zone (or for that matter that Chernobyl itself continued to produce electricity until 2000 before the last reactor was shut down) - the issue is less regular radioactive levels in normal conditions as risks involved in releasing sequested radioactive material (e.g. forest fires will throw radioactive material into the air for many of the same reasons why coal is so nasty).
> affecting fauna migrations and neighboring countries
Overall effect on fauna of Chernobyl has been positive: As it happens humans are much worse for the fauna than the radiation. Obviously there are issues, but they're dwarfed by the incursion of humans on animal habitats - the area surrounding Chernobyl has seen rapid increases in populations of a wide range of fauna as human activity ceased.
There is an impact on humans from contamination of fauna that does not kill the animals but makes them unsafe for consumption in some circumstances, as I've addressed elsewhere, and that's not non-trivial but it's a far more short-lived issue than the contamination of the site itself. That is also the main effect on neighboring countries (spread of Cesium etc.)
How long does it take to recover from fossil fuel-based economy, including massive emission of radioactive material contained in coal?
As I mentioned elsewhere, this affects reindeer and sheep in Norway some years, and that was a much larger scale issue as this was/is commercial level food supply. Not so much any more, but the effect varies from year to year as various animals will often prefer faster growing food (foliage, berries etc.) but may resort to other food that may be more likely to still be a reservoir of cesium or other contaminants if they are short on their preferred foods.
It's still trivial compared to coal in particular.
I thought that sounded familiar. The following is about the Midnight Mine uranium mine in eastern Washington.
"The exposed surfaces of rock in the ore piles, waste rock piles, and forming pit walls generate acid rock drainage in the groundwater, seeps, and surface water. The surface water from the mine's drainage basin flows to three drainages which empty into Blue Creek. Blue Creek, which flows into Lake Roosevelt, is home to several fish species of special concern that have been found to contain heavy metals that many link to the contamination from the mine. The U.S. Bureau of Mines and the U.S. Geological Survey indicated that seeps, ground water and pit water at Midnite Mine are contained with heavy metals and radionuclides. In April 1998, the EPA also found elevated levels of metals and radionuclides in numerous on-site sources. Several contaminated ground water seeps were observed to be flowing into nearby surface water drainages."[1]
[1] http://toxipedia.org/display/wanmec/Midnite+uranium+mine%2C+...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnite_Mine
http://www.webcitation.org/6JeqbINGL
Edit:formatting
For example, 2 died because they were smoking a cigarette outside of the wall when the tsunami hit.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/05/25/news/radiation-d...
The worst exposure outside of the plant was 10 millisievert, or about the same as a CAT scan.
Inside the plant one worker got close to 500 millisievert exposure, or about what an astronaut can expect to receive during a 6 month stay in low earth orbit, or what you receive every 2 years living in Ramsar, Iran (a city where humans have lived -normally as far as is known- for thousands of years).
TLDR: nobody died. Maybe 150 people will die a year or two sooner compared to if there was no incident. 4-5 people may experience more effects. For comparison, solar power (the next safest source of power) has killed more people even during the Fukushima disaster itself. Coal has killed over 100 people in the same time period.
Additionally dams are fairly simple to build and construction of them is not as well regulated during its history as nuclear has been for most of its life because of its very obvious risks. If anything the mortality statistic is an argument for more regulation of mining and dam construction practices, not for more nuclear power.
The reality is that while not that many people died in Chernobyl, Fukushima and other nuclear disasters relative to other disasters we have had, they are still some of the worst disasters in human history and downplaying that to push nuclear is either being very cynical or naive.
It's still an issue now and again in some areas, but it was still a minor inconvenience compared to the huge amounts of deaths caused on an ongoing basis by some of the alternatives.
> Additionally dams are fairly simple to build and construction of them is not as well regulated during its history as nuclear has been for most of its life because of its very obvious risks. If anything the mortality statistic is an argument for more regulation of mining and dam construction practices, not for more nuclear power.
Great, but until that happens, they are still far more lethal. In the case of coal, by at least an order of magnitude, probable 2-3 orders.
> It works because nuclear creates long term problems that aren't people getting crushed in a coal mine or drowned when they fall off a dam, and both coal and hydro have been around a lot longer than nuclear and as a result have some really major disasters in their history.
For coal, coal kills more people per year due to respiratory illnesses etc. than nuclear has done in its entire history. For dams, feel free to ignore the largest ever (Ban Qiao - 171,000 people dead) which was an extreme outlier (so far - there are a number of dams, like e.g. the Mosul dam, that are in disrepair and has the potential to be worse if they fail) and it's still worse on average than nuclear.
> they are still some of the worst disasters in human history and downplaying that to push nuclear is either being very cynical or naive.
Exaggerating it is worse: It leads to policies enacted out of fear that kills and harms far more people. It's immoral.
With current generation tech ?
I love how people project problems we have now on to long time spans like that makes any sense given how fast the technology is moving, especially if the scale of problem changes giving more incentives to solve the problem.
Like all the people saying that in 100 years we'll starve to death because global warming will cause arable land to flood - meanwhile we know how to produce food from stuff like algae even now and could scale that up relatively fast if needed, GMO advances are almost guaranteed to give us a way to efficiently produce macro nutrients from simple organisms if we just don't figure out efficient ways to synthesize them directly on that time span.
It's how people used to worry "In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure", http://watervat.blogspot.hr/2016/02/great-horse-manure-crisi..., worrying about long term problems based on current technology and scale is ridiculous - if nuclear scaled up it would put even more incentives to deal with the waste and 60 years is a lot of time to come up with ways to deal with it. It just requires dedicated investment/work.
Your assumption is wrong, though. Technology has not always advanced in the history of mankind. And it also hasn't advanced faster and faster.
I'm not saying nuclear doesn't have problems, I'm just saying 50-100 year long impact is impossible to asses realistically and should not really be the deciding factor.
Using the same arguments we can just continue with the CO2 and say "future tech will reverse global warming".
Or - more simply - will allow us to live with the consequences of global warming. Global warming doesn't mean that the planet will implode. It will have huge impact on the ecosystem but we already have the technology to isolate ourselves from the adverse effects of that - it's just a matter of scaling and perfecting it.
Instead of dealing with manure you create cars. Instead of saving agriculture, climate, etc. you create controlled livable environments that aren't be impacted by the environmental changes.
Reducing the waste (future tech) and managing it are two different things. In Sweden there are far gone plans for deep underground storage with significant R&D (www.skb.com). Though untested, as we need several thousands years to be truly sure of its effectiveness, I would still argue that it is a close to solved problem but with a fair degree of uncertainty due to its' long time span.
> Using the same arguments we can just continue with the CO2 and say "future tech will reverse global warming".
The big difference is that at lot of CO2 emitters doesn't have to store or pay the full price of their bi-product. It is a huge difference in incentives.
If the problem is materials, we're in trouble.
That is like saying that this is the grim reality of hydro power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam?oldformat=true#Cas... [171,000 deaths and 11 million displaced.]
Is that code for "we haven't been able to prove risks big enough to be particularly scary, so let's make stuff up"? Because if so, I agree with you.
The death counts are low compared to things like coal and hydro even if you use the worst case estimates from environmenal organizations. The long term effects on fauna and flora so far looks positive, largely because as it turns out human activity is more negative to animals than getting radiated.
Effects on our ability to make use of the environment is certainly negatively affected, but the same is true of e.g. coal mining which is hugely destructive, as well as hydro, which has displaced far more due to damming exercises, than nuclear ever has.
In fact, several individual dam projects have caused more displacements and put more land out of use than all nuclear accidents combined have.
He said that the risk of a Chernobyl given current high safety standards was 1 every 20 years.
At the end of his talk he remained bullish on nuclear, suggesting that doubling the number of nuclear plants would solve the coal problem.
In the Q&A that followed, I asked him to confirm whether the 1 in 20 years probability of a Chernobyl scale disaster was correct and he said yes.
I then asked him to confirm that his suggestion was to double the number of nuclear plants from around 250 to 500 and he said yes.
I then suggested that this would increase the risk of a Chernobyl to 1 every 10 years. He was stunned. He had never put two and two together.
A young nuclear engineer in the room quickly suggested that building more plants would increase safety...
But, indeed, one every 10 years would still be far less destructive and lethal than continuing our current use of coal.
Btw. we're well on our way to that 500 number - by 2014 there were 435 plants - so I guess we'll see soon enough.
There is, however, every reason to assume that your flippant assumption that doubling the number of plants would double the risk is wrong, for the simple reason that the safety profiles of the older plants like Chernobyl and Fukushima is drastically different, and the then-current set of plants included a lot of old plants of old designs.
Even for Chernobyl itself it took massive human error - the plant was intentionally and explicitly operating under non-standard conditions far outside of normal operating parameters as part of a test.
Meanwhile many modern designs are getting close to walk-away safe.
In coal mining you either get killed quickly or get slowly killed by black lung.
Your opinion was formed with the bold ignorance of how much your power costs and why people though nuclear was a good idea despite the problems.
The waste issue will be side stepped.
Having said that I have followed the Fukushima situation somewhat, and it certainly has given me pretty serious pause in my conversion to a nuclear "new fission" advocate (like many on HN seem to be).
The general argument seems to be "Oh, new reactors are much safer than the old ones."
To be honest, that argument doesn't seem very compelling. The most compelling version of this argument involves using Thorium reactors instead of Uranium. This does seem somewhat safer, but actually reading it turns out it is only a question of degree[1][2].
It seems to me renewables + power storage seems a much better solution.
[1] http://ieer.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/thorium2009fac...
[2] https://theconversation.com/should-australia-consider-thoriu...
You're aware that Fukushima Daiichi NPP was older than Chernobyl NPP, right?
I'm just relaying the argument as I understand it.
The only reason we don't have clear evidence either way is that the risks even with the older models is very low.
The risks associated with those accidents are extremely high.
And yet they are low enough that nuclear is one of the safest alternatives we have, given the low incident rate.
It's also probably a better idea to go with lots of small, simple reactors versus larger singular points of failure, but I haven't done a lot of research into how viable that strategy really is beyond the sci-fi scenario of a reactor outside every house.
It's probably still the main reasons why I don't want to be here. It's easy to forget about everything but things could go sour very quickly without us being able to react in time.
Is this really what happens? How does a quantity of molten metal-oxide burn a hole through "hundreds or thousands of feet" of earth? Where does all the earth / rock go? Does it just vaporise off?
If he has other sources, perhaps he should have mentioned them. Otherwise he's posting pure speculation.
EDIT: From the source of the source of his blog post [1]. Clearly it is serious not to know with certainty where the fuel is, and that makes it possible that he could be right, but it's still pure speculation:
> The firm said radiation was not leaking outside the reactor, adding that the robot would still prove useful since it would move from one spot to the other and encounter radiation of varying levels.
> Tepco and its network of partner companies at Fukushima Daiichi have yet to identify the location and condition of melted fuel in the three most seriously damaged reactors. Removing it safely represents a challenge unprecedented in the history of nuclear power.
> Quantities of melted fuel are believed to have accumulated at the bottom of the damaged reactors’ containment vessels, but dangerously high radiation has prevented engineers from accurately gauging the state of the fuel deposits.
[1] https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/03/fukushim...
The fast erosion phase of the concrete basemat lasts for about an hour and progresses to about one meter in depth, then slows to several centimeters per hour, and stops completely when the melt cools below the decomposition temperature of concrete (about 1100 °C). Complete melt-through can occur in several days even through several meters of concrete; the corium then penetrates several meters into the underlying soil, spreads around, cools and solidifies.[3]
This would seem to counter the claim that the molten core material could burn through hundreds or thousands of feet of earth.
Per my understanding, it will always be sub-critical without correct geometry and neutron moderators. But wouldn't the precise amounts and percentages of various materials in the molten sludge vary thermal output?
I find it hard to believe there are any circumstances under which a hundreds-of-megawatts to gigawatts core could remain hot enough to burn through hundreds or thousands of feet of earth.
It's kind of amazing how one can completely ignore people you've hurt and keep posting as if nothing happened, when they keep asking for explanation.
Why is no media talking about this? It looks like a huge scandal.
The whole “The radiation levels inside Japan’s damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor No. 2 have soared in recent weeks” is bogus.
The new, higher readings are from areas never measured before[0]; levels measured from consistent points are falling consistently!
[0] http://blog.safecast.org/2017/02/no-radiation-levels-at-fuku...