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Comment by chailatte | Hacker News Reader

Fairwinds: Fukushima Groundwater Contamination Worst in Nuclear History

"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?

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People will read the TEPCO report and they will process it in a variety of ways.

According to TEPCO (and GE documentation) the containment vessel did in fact contain the core material. Looking at the measurements reported, (both from TEPCO and other agencies) there isn't an indication of either groundwater or watertable contamination.

[update: The TEPCO folks early on said they did see some groundwater contamination with Iodine. They also point out that the plant is 'downstream' of the water table with any nuclides most likely being carried to the ocean rather than to either of the rivers higher in the water table. The engineers will know more when they open things up and start cleaning them out.]

The 'news' is that cleanup will take longer because rather than pulling fuel pins out of the reactor and sending them off to be either re-processed or disposed, the core material at the bottom of the reactor will have to be removed piecemeal by what is probably custom equipment.

This was the same procedure used at TMI to remove material that had migrated to the bottom of the reactor after having melted.

I don't think anyone disputes that this was a tragic event and at seems nearly the worst possible accident (it could have been worse if all reactors were at full power) but it hasn't killed anyone yet, this incident is unlikely to be the principle cause of death for anyone in the forseeable future. And yet tens of thousands of people are dead because they couldn't flee the wall of water, so the tsunami was a disaster, the damage to the nuclear plant was not.

When you see a head-on collision and the person in the car walks away because the airbags went off, we don't argue for banning driving because the car is destroyed, there is $50,000 worth of damage to the guardrail, and hundreds of people lost work because they were caught in the traffic jam. We say, "Isn't it amazing how safe cars are these days! That accident would have killed them even 10 years ago."

We have had a head-on collision between a late model nuclear reactor and an incredibly and extremely unlikely large magnitude double disaster and so far, the safety systems that were built into the reactors and upgraded over the years have kept everyone safe. Slowly, steadily, and with good engineering practices.

The results of that disaster are being addressed and will be cleaned up and repaired. I realize that someone walking away unhurt from what would have been a fatal collision might feel that it was a miracle, but it might just have been good engineering.

.... and, the incident at Fukushima was magnified by the safety features' reliance on active, powered cooling. Current reactor designs are capable of passive cooling, without external power, and would cause even less damage than this.

And yet tens of thousands of people are dead because they couldn't flee the wall of water, so the tsunami was a disaster, the damage to the nuclear plant was not.

And what about the 70,000+ people in the 20km evacuation radius who have no idea when or if they'll be able to return to their contaminated homes? (or even bury their dead) You're going to tell them Fukushima Daiichi is not a disaster?

At least the people who fled the tsunami are able to rebuild on that land.

If the expectations of rising sealevels due to global warming prove correct at all people will laugh at the amounts we lost to nuclear power.

The nice thing about rising sea levels is that, apart from the occasional catastrophic flood, the rise will happen gradually enough that most of the affected areas can be evacuated decades in advance. There will be a tremendous loss of infrastructure if e.g. Manhattan is under water, but we'll see the water coming.

They'll be able to come back within the year probably.

The land is not contaminated at all, and no one died, so no, it's not much of a disaster as these things go.

The surrounding land is heavily contaminated with Cs-134 and Cs-137.

http://i.imgur.com/xu0Pm.jpg

http://www.mext.go.jp/component/english/__icsFiles/afieldfil...

It will be a closed zone for decades. Almost all of the (external) dose in the area right now is from these two isotopes; the rest have decayed. (There's a model of this in [1]). These two will not decay away quickly; Cs-134 has a half life of 2 years, and Cs-137, 30 years.

[1] http://www.rri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/NSRG/seminar/No110/Iitate-inter...

It will be a closed zone for decades.

I believe you have misinterpreted the data. The highest measured readings were 91 uSv/hr. That is equivalent to 9.1 mRem/hr (1 mRem = 10 uSv). The lowest dose in the 'red' zone is 19 uSv/hr or 1.9mRem. Public safety is considered to be 'at risk' if you are exposed to > 1000 mRem over 4 days. You can't reach that level in places where they read 91 uSV/hr (best you can do is 9.1244 or 873.6 mRem/4 days. And where its only 1.9mRem you only get 182 mRem/4 days.

The bottom line is that it is safe to go anywhere in the current 80km radius circle, if you are the government and want to minimize radiological hazard you will go through the area that shows the highest activity and identify and clean up any hot spots.

That information btw is in the DoE's contribution to this report.

The second part you missed is that Cs-134 will be down to noise in less than a decade due to decay which will reduce overall dosage. (I've noticed that no one has published the ratio)

So is there contamination from the plant in Japan? Yes.

Does is pose a public health risk? For the most part no.

Will any part of the area be 'off limits' this time next year? Probably not.

Will monitoring continue and specific areas be targeted for decontamination? Almost certainly.

I want to disagree on one (mostly semantic) point: The evacuation is a disaster. Deaths need not be involved for something to be a disaster.

The tsunami is obviously independently of that the far worse disaster.

You make a valid point.

We can reason about the 'relativeness' of disasters. There are the folks who are alive and homeless because their homes were destroyed by the water, and there are people who are alive and homeless because of the evacuation zone around the reactor.

Given the readings for radioactive nuclides outside the Fukushima plants [1], once they are fully engaged in the process of the cleanup, the plan is to allow everyone to return to their homes. Living and working in Fukushima Prefecture will be no more and no less hazardous than it was before the tsunami, and the houses and farms and infrastructure is generally intact and ready to move in.

For folks who lost their home in the tsunami, once the roads and infrastructure have been repaired, they can begin re-building their lives.

So when we think about the relative scale of the disaster to people we might assign a value 'x' to someone who is evacutated for a period of time, and then returns to their home and neighborhood as it was pre-evactuation. And a value 'y' to someone who evacuated and at some point will return to the land where they used to live and can start rebuilding their lives and community.

I can't speak for the people, I don't live there, but if I were told I was going to be a member of either group x or group y I would prefer to be in group 'x' as it would seem to me to be the 'lesser' of two disasters.

So at some level, everything is a disaster, but in this discussion I continue to feel that the tsunami/quake combo was the 'real' disaster and the ongoing work to stabilize the reactors which were damaged by that disaster as one of many responses to the disaster akin to people working to prevent cholera and other outbreaks and to restore basic services like drinking water and electricity. Those people who are involved in surveying damaged buildings, recovering downed power lines, clearing debris from water treatment plants are in some ways more at risk of a life threatening injury than the engineers working to get the Daichi plant stabilized and into clean-up mode.

[1] "Gamma Dose Rates in 47 Prefectures

Gamma dose rates are measured daily in all 47 prefectures. On 10 May the value of gamma dose rate reported for Fukushima prefecture was 1.7 µSv/h. In all other prefectures, reported gamma dose rates were below 0.1 µSv/h with a general decreasing trend."

http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/tsunamiupdate01.html

Let's take a look at the report:

"Gamma Dose Rates in Areas More Than 30 km from Fukushima Daiichi Plant

Gamma dose rates reported specifically for the monitoring points in the eastern part of Fukushima prefecture, for distances of more than 30 km from the Fukushima Daiichi plant, showed a general decreasing trend, ranging from 0.1 µSv/h to 20.3 µSv/h, as reported for 10 May."

Let's say we're unlucky enough to live in that 20.3 µSv/h environment. Our daily dose is 487 µSv. Our monthly dose is 14 mSv. Our yearly dose is 178 mSv, way above pre-Fukushima radiation worker permitted dosage.

>>Let's say we're unlucky enough to live in that 20.3 µSv/h environment. [...] yearly dose

Sigh, when writing that, you knew that the radiation dose will certainly be much lower in just one year.

c'mon, these reactors of the basic design dating back to the Manhattan project need to give way. The primary goals of these designs were weapon related programs. Even molten salt reactor (supposedly coming in the happy future as Gen IV) was successfully prototyped in Oak Ridge 40+ years ago.

I'm completely for technological progress, including full speed nuclear. Yet, without hitting the current nuclear establishment hard in the nuts, they wouldn't let the progress happen, and will be continuing to build, if permitted, these old designs, or nothing will be built at all. The human race thus is kept hostage - either old and dangerous or nothing. There is no debate whether nuclear is safe or not. It is just a PR of the existing industry trying to sell old dusty designs and their minor tweaks wrapped as the necessary component of the technological progress of the human race. The real answer is - existing nuclear is dangerous, costly, and huge portion of its cost is socialized (as typical for any monopolized industry). The nuclear energy, if/when it is developed using even existing today state of human race technology (not 50 years old) can possibly be made safe and very effective.

Edit: among my best hopes for advanced nuclear and thermonuclear is that Musk will need a source of energy on Moon, Mars, etc... and there is no nuclear industry yet capable to reach beyond the Earth to limit the progress there

This is one aspect of this debate that I think hasn't been covered nearly enough. Nuclear opponents have successfully created an environment in which it is extremely difficult to construct new reactors, and then they are quick to decry failures of obsolete designs. The anti-nuke movement shares culpability in the Fukushima disaster precisely because they have done everything possible to ensure that we are stuck with older, far less safe designs.

If anything, Fukushima is an example of how little attention we should pay to the anti-nuclear movement, because an inevitable side effect of their cause is the prolonging of older reactor's lifespans, when much safer designs could be replacing them.

>If anything, Fukushima is an example of how little attention we should pay to the anti-nuclear movement, because an inevitable side effect of their cause is the prolonging of older reactor's lifespans, when much safer designs could be replacing them.

Unfortunately. if limitations are lifted or eased, we'd immediately get more of the same Fukushimas from the industry, and the anti-nuke movement is the only force keeping it from happening.

> the anti-nuke movement is the only force keeping it from happening.

You say that as though the engineers are willing to sign off on any old half-baked plan. Maybe things are different in Japan, but around here, you have to get engineers to approve things personally and there are serious consequences for someone who signs off on something unsafe.

> You say that as though the engineers are willing to sign off on any old half-baked plan.

Yes.

Then you are mistaken. At Fukushima, no less, there were reports about how an engineer held things up until his demands to improve the safety of some system were met. And his demands were met.

Certainly, there are a lot of things we have learned since that plant was designed that could be done better and if it had been just a tiny bit better, there wouldn't have been any leaks at all. But we can make plants a lot stronger these days. And we probably should be doing exactly that.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-23/fukushima-engineer-... you're talking about this one?

No, it was something else.

I think that both the industry and the anti-nuke forces are keeping nuclear from advancing.

When people like the founder of Greenpeace are pro nuclear, the only people anti-nuclear are radically anti-nuclear. They do not give a damn about old versus new tech.

The nuclear industry just wants to save money by pushing the old tech.

Together they create the false dichotomy of either old or nothing.

I wish we had an anti-nuclear movement which distinguished between old and dangerous and what we could have with new tech. Even if they were against both, if they were at least much more against the old an dangerous, that would be great.

But the current ani-nuclear forces are not that rational.

To support your point, can you link to some information about the new tech? I'd be interested in a layman's comparison to the old tech.

you can Google on your own and there are a lot of different designs in different states, from pure concepts to successfully prototyped. My point is the absence of any significant technological development by the entrenched and monopolized industry (and intentional preventing of others through regulatory machinery - i.e one can't disrupt the industry short of producing the fusion reactor in the garage).

From practical point of view, the most developed, i.e. it was successfully prototyped 40 years ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment), is Molten Salt Reactor :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

nice quote from the article: " Since it uses raw fuel, basically just a mixture of chemicals, current reactor vendors do not want to develop it. They derive their long-term profits from sales of fabricated fuel assemblies." :)

The principal difference of this type of reactor is that all the stuff (fuel, fission products, etc) aren't piled and accumulated in the reactor core. Instead, it is flows in, burns, flows out, filtered/reprocessed, flows in ...

General scare tactic utilised by the industry to preserve status-quo is expressed nicely here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

"As one director of a U.S. research laboratory put it, "fabrication, construction, operation, and maintenance of new reactors will face a steep learning curve: advanced technologies will have a heightened risk of accidents and mistakes. The technology may be proven, but people are not"

Basically - if you force us to make something new, it will be even more risky and we've warned you.

Another quote from there : "Nuclear engineer David Lochbaum has explained that almost all serious nuclear accidents have occurred with what was at the time the most recent technology. " .

Complete BS - nor Chernobyl, nor Fukushima have nothing to do with their technology being most recent as 1.their technology hasn't been most recent 2.it has to do with morons - Chernobyl, and unplanned for high tsunami - Fukushima and if i remember TMI was also not about new technology.

"If anything, Fukushima is an example of how little attention we should pay to the anti-nuclear movement"

I think the opposite. I recall many many people on this site asserting with absolute certainty that nothing bad could happen at Fukushima immediately after the earthquake. Anyone that suggested otherwise was demonized as an uninformed faermonger.

I'm not anti nuclear, I think it's a better option than coal, but the pro nuke people have done the cause a great disservice with their wrongness and refusal to cop to it.

Reread this for one example, and tell me which side sounds as if it doesn't deserve attention.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326726

Remember: Nobody has died as a result of nuclear electrical generation. Rooftop solar panels are more dangerous than a molten down reactor, and more people die on bicycles.

Is this sarcasm? Rooftop solar panels have never caused an evacuation. Bicycle accidents tie up traffic for a few hours at worst. Yes people die but that's hardly the only dimension of interest.

It's sarcasm, but I had to look at his comment history to figure that out.

It is :)

Hacker News nuke threads are almost as puzzling to me as BitCoin threads, but I keep coming back for some reason.

> c'mon, these reactors of the basic design dating back to the Manhattan project need to give way.

Absolutely. There's been a ton of research, but too little actually being built. This would be a good time for Japan (and elsewhere) to replace any vulnerable reactors to designs that can work with passive cooling.

I don't trust TEPCO reports at all; TEPCO has not given me any reasons to trust them. They knew about the meltdowns and the leakages all along, but choose to deny it until months later. EDIT: And keeping evacuation zone at 20km when there are high radiation 80km out? Come on.

That brings me back to my original point. I was not taking sides on pro/anti nuclear. I fear for my friends' lives in Japan. Because their government is weak and useless and saving face. That is why I was asking for independent monitoring links for plutonium and uranium. So that they can use scientific data to determine their own fate.

I haven't been able to follow the story as closely as I would have liked. Did TEPCO actively deny meltdowns and leakages, or did they just not confirm them? I thought that it was the latter, but could have missed overt denials.

> They knew about the meltdowns and the leakages all along, but choose to deny it until months later.

I don't know about leakage, but they've been very clear that the fuel had melted down for a very long time now, at least since after that first week. The only question has been how substantial has the fuel damage been, and now at least for Unit 1 we know the answer.

> I fear for my friends' lives in Japan. Because their government is weak and useless and saving face.

Independent monitoring should be used, but if you're really worried why don't you ask your friends to take actions assuming that there is plutonium and uranium all over the place (e.g. air masks outside, frequent washing of vehicles/hands/outerwear)? I hate to say this but it's not like knowing exactly how much radioactivity is out there would change the actions they should take too much one way or the other: wash that shit off, don't eat foods/liquids that are contaminated.

Plus, you really shouldn't ask for merely plutonium/uranium, as if radioactive Strontium or Cesium that the government is reporting figures for are that much better -- they're also nuclides of concern, so if you don't trust the government then you should also push for independent monitoring of those radionuclides.

They've been dumping 100's of tons of water through these reactors since the meltdowns.

Isn't there just the tiniest clue, in the massive quantities of 1+ Sv radiation from the water, that some of the materials have been washed out of the reactor?

Isn't there just the tiniest clue in the fact that the basements are full of water, that the RPV and containment are holed?

Fukushima groundwater has been contaminated since at least 1st April

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/making...

There are bigger concerns than ground water contamination.

This blog has info translated from Japanese,

http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2011/05/asahi-shinbun-core-meltdo...

I knew this comment looked familiar.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2543642

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