Fukushima 'Full Meltdown' Made Official
theatlanticwire.com
theatlanticwire.com
That is quite a logical leap based solely on the INES rating. Fukushima is in the same category as Chernobyl, but this is also the highest category there is, and Chernobyl was past the boundary by a huge margin.
For example, the criteria for the total release of iodine-131 in a level 7 accident is "tens of thousands of TBq". Chernobyl released 1.8 million TBq. Fukushima has released about 370,000 TBq so far.
Chernobyl had killed 31 people by this point while Fukushima has had negligible health effects so far due to much better emergency response. The INES rating does not account for this, only for the amount of material released.
Granted, the situation at Fukushima isn't good, but "meltdown" seems to trigger the idea of a huge explosion and the scattering of nuclear fallout for miles & miles to much of the general public.
PS: As an aside, the dramas in Japan are disappointing, because I'm a strong believer in nuclear power going forward. Misconceptions & a lack of education, fuelled by crisis' like these, don't help the cause.
Just because all of Japan hasn't been destroyed doesn't mean that therr hasn't been significant damage done. Lies, corruption/amakudari and incompetence has all been unearthed in the nuclear disaster. In what sense is it hysteria to point this out?
(Oddly, I feel the Tsunami disaster itself was handled quite well by the gov't)
Eventually you'd run out of lives...
Is nuclear power perfectly safe? No.
Is it safer than coal?
Precisely. It's also crisis like Fukushima—using generations-older tech—that impedes development of safer nuclear generation technology (i.e thorium reactors, or even just better light-water reactors).
> I find it callous for you to brush aside the suffering of thousands of people by "The situation isn't good".
Perhaps I should have used stronger language. The situation is bad, most definitely, and Japan will be reeling from the effects for decades to come. Especially in the immediate area, and more depending on the extent of ground water contamination.
I'm just saying that the lack of education about nuclear power prevents us from moving forward with it, when deaths or disasters linked with other forms of power generation don't get the same media attention.
You have to compare casualties by number of people involved in both industries and also compensate for tight regulation.
My counter-question: How safe would coal be if it had the same kind of regulations as nuclear power?
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Projects/Economics.html
http://www.quora.com/Is-thorium-a-viable-replacement-for-ura...
* My statement, based on econophysics, remains true for perfect solar or wind collectors.
* Stop using the term "renewable". It's antiphysical.
* Learn something about fission - we can invest in it too, and there's a factor of 500 on the table.
This factor of 500 you're talking about... I don't even need to read anything to guess that'd only be available maybe 50 years from now, and then only theoretically. But pro-nuclear activism will get you lots of today's crappy tech, and you'll be stuck with it for 50 years. And the worst part is you'll have spent a ton of money on it, diverting from much quicker advances in renewables (a term I'll continue to use because everyone knows what I'm talking about when I say it).
Amortized over 40 years, the nominal cost of nuclear is very low - on par with coal. The barrier to rapid buildout is the high upfront cost. Operation is almost free. Standardized plant designs like the AP1000 should cure most construction delays. The Chinese builds currently underway were ahead of schedule last I checked.
The externalities of energy sources are poorly studied, nuclear being by far the best-studied. In the US, waste disposal is fully paid per kWh and has been since the early '80s. Mining and everything to do with the fuel chain is far cleaner than anything else, including wind and solar (it was my job to study these things for a certain fruity company that has no vested interest in any particular technology). Regulation in the US is also paid-for by the industry (NRC charges astronomical fees).
As you probably know, safety per GWh is found to be on par with wind and solar by every study out there.
The factor of 500 corresponds to burning Th232 instead of U235 (490 precisely). Burning U238 will give you a factor of 140 instead. Either will additionally save the need for enrichment, though turns out to be a tiny factor. High-temp operation with either fuel will get you 5/3 in the thermal efficiency dept. Atmospheric pressure operation gives you something like a factor of 10 on plant materials, which is not terribly significant on a per-GWh basis.
All of these have been demonstrated - most decades ago. There's no basic physics, just engineering. 10 years to market for any serious effort. Where you might need 50 years is something like a dusty plasma reactor. Those directly convert fission energy to electricity (thus reaching efficiencies over 90%) and can also enable interstellar travel. Still easier than fusion.
For solar efficiency there's a factor of 3 to the Carnot limit and wind is less than a factor of 2 from the Betz limit. Further improvements can come by making the collectors lighter. But solar cells are already thinner than can weather the elements and so are mounted on substrates, under cover glass, on stands and tracking motors etc. About the best that can be done is mirrors with a central thermal tower, and this is being done today. Tethered wind has potential for reducing the utterly absurd material requirements of current turbines - Makani says a factor of 5.
Those are available improvements, since you mentioned it. Absolutes are what count. For solar, plan to cover about the same amount of land as has been paved to date (assuming ideal location).
I don't know what renewables are. Do they include geothermal? Howabout induced geothermal? What about fission (supernovae aren't renewable)? Biofuels (are fresh water, fertilizer, arable land etc. renewable)? Is wind renewable? http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/2/1/2011/esd-2-1-2011.html What about hydroelectric (we seem to have run out of rivers to dam)? Is there really agreement on which of these are included? I've been working in the field for five years and I haven't figured it out.
All that, and how many people are dead as a consequence of the meltdown? Zero.
Wikipedia says:
"Major news source reporting at least 2 TEPCO employees confirmed dead from "disaster conditions" following the earthquake.[368] "The two workers, aged 21 and 24, sustained multiple external injuries and were believed to have died from blood loss, TEPCO said. Their bodies were decontaminated as radiation has been spewing from the plant for three weeks."
45 patients were reported dead after the evacuation of a hospital in Futaba. Some of them "were suffering from dehydration because they had not eaten anything for three days"."
If you mention the children born in the Ukraine and Belarus with horrific mutations and short lifespans, it will be either attributed to coal or spun to have nothing to do with the Chernobyl meltdown at all -- maybe the mother was playing with Uranium.
That's because when fuel makes it through containment and into the water table, this is exactly what happens.
[1] Fallout specifically refers to radioactive dust created by an explosion which then falls out of the atmosphere, contaminating the ground - it's radioactive dust, not a radioactive solution.
The situation is not good ... but I'm sure the environmentalists are sure the casualties in Japan from coal electrical plants in Japan and the PRC are much greater (and they're likely right).
" But in reality, while not great, failures are accounted for in the design of the reactor, and can be managed.
... The outer containment building is similar; it blows up, but the environment and the reactor core are still both fine. ...
Good for selling newspapers, but won't be ending the world just yet."
But they weren't fine were they?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is...
The result: estimated radiation doses ingested by people living near the coal plants were equal to or higher than doses for people living around the nuclear facilities. At one extreme, the scientists estimated fly ash radiation in individuals' bones at around 18 millirems (thousandths of a rem, a unit for measuring doses of ionizing radiation) a year. Doses for the two nuclear plants, by contrast, ranged from between three and six millirems for the same period. And when all food was grown in the area, radiation doses were 50 to 200 percent higher around the coal plants.
Or how about eating tuna every day and ingesting the mercury that primarily comes from coal burning for power generation?
But many are more eager to abandon nuclear than coal. I will be fair, however, in saying that at least some of them hope to abandon both.
And I will also say that if they can make wind & solar (or whatever else) work, I'm all for it. I believe that nuclear is a good engineering choice, but you can change that opinion by providing better technology.
I agree with you that it's really a shades of grey issue. I certainly don't think nuclear is the end all be all of solving our long term energy problems, but it's also not the boogeyman so many people try to make it out to be.
As far as pollution goes, my opinion is that modern nuclear is the best thing we have right now to bridge the gap to true clean energy (fusion, thermal, whatever). To connect this with your original comment, burning coal is like smoking cigarettes. 1 certainly will not kill you, but the aggregate effects of many plants (China was building 1/week at some point!) over many years is the real problem.
The biggest advantage of nuclear that I see is that it mostly concentrates and contains the waste. If we fully reprocess (something the US can't do now b/c of laws) there will still be some nasty stuff to deal with. Even then, I would much rather have it that way instead of just spewing the nasty all into the environment the way many coal plants do now.
The rabid defenders on HN have a worse track record than the Japanese officials.
Which choice is safer? It's the latter, because the latter causes panic, which causes safety to be ratcheted up to ridiculous extents, but nobody notices the former until they go to collect the data, and even then, cognitive bias tends to mean that people still pay attention more to the latter.
So, no, it may not be «complete safety», but at this point, it's the safest option.
And I don't think power companies can be trusted to safely run power plants without oversight. For all I know there are some that are more capable than TEPCO, but the fact that there are companies like TEPCO (and probably many that are even worse) means you need someone to look over their shoulder.
I have to admit that prior to Fukushima, human incompetence did not factor into my opinion on nuclear power as much as it now seems it should have.
Maybe the IAEA could be brought in on this. They seem to know what they are doing?
Another article with Fukushima in the title! Yay! Now I get to argue like a moron because it is a polarizing topic! Stupid {atomheads,hippies}!
Nothing has changed in Japan so there is no reason to expect the thread to change. Shut up, please, and do something productive instead of convincing other hackers with no power to make energy decisions about your take on nuclear power. I can recite this thread from memory it has been rehashed so much and I have flagged it as a result. What can possibly be discussed that hasn't been beat to death in the last two months?
Here's some:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2315205
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2318552
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2325588
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2316390
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326726
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2396258
Find your own:
You don't have to read the comments or argue about nuclear power to be interested.
You could even go so far as to say you don't even have to be a hacker to be interested...
And at that point you should flag the article for being off topic.
For better or for worse, if something is on topic, it's on topic whether it has been discussed before or not. For example, there are several separate posts about FB, PR, and Google, with the same arguments being repeated. There is no reason to flag any of the stories or the discussions just because you've read them before and you are no longer interested. Skip the post, or skip the comments, you have the power to ignore things, use it.
There is a deeper issue here around whether threads should be merged is some manner. So far, requests for this feature have not been heeded. Until there is a merge threads feature, each post on the subject is a brand new canvas.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This is covered on TV news, incites political debate, and is exactly the same phenomenon that's been rehashed to death.
I'm glad someone is pointing out how polarizing this topic is. I'm glad someone is pointing out that people are shouting each other.
People speculate and they opine and they rant. That the highest voted post provides a third point of view ("Let's recall that we've already discussed this numerous times") is a relief.
Also, if you want to attack a viewpoint, don't attack its tone, attack its argument.
If a news article is allowed to come out when "nothing has changed in Japan", and affect public opinion, I think we're allowed to deliberate it to do the same.
"That (contaminated) water is seeping into the ground table, and there will be contamination on that site for a long time to come. It could also move inland. This is ground water, it doesn't have to move out into the ocean. It is clearly moving into the north"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CAeixB19d4
I don't believe that TEPCO is actively monitoring plutonium and uranium, which is heavy and more likely to seep into ground water than to be blown into the air. I hope that people in Tokyo do have some independent monitoring stations setup. Anybody know any links?