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Comment by amalgamated_inc | Hacker News Reader

Very cool. Japan doesn't have much of their own in terms of energy resources, so I applaud both the commitment to help our ally and the R&D in terms of new and especially SMR nuclear.

Japan is the perfect use-case for nuclear. Even when disaster strikes, they're extremely safe. Only 1 person ever died of radiation in Fukushima. Thousands to tens of thousands died from the tsunami that caused it.

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> Only 1 person ever died of radiation in Fukushima.

While I tend to agree with your point, there's also the couple hundred square miles and 165k people worth of exclusion zone as a side-effect. That's not small, but it's potentially something you can mitigate by picking sites carefully.

If the U.S. shared similar concern for environmental health a good portion of urban areas would be in exclusion zones from other sources of industrial contamination too. Instead we tolerate these people having elevated rates of diseases such as cancer or asthma and generally shortened lifespans, and let companies responsible go bankrupt with their executives absolved of all responsibilities while we spend time today scratching our head figuring out what to do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund#/media/File:Superfun...

That exclusion zone is mostly unnecessary. You can go there with a geiger counter and you'll find it's not much more radioactive than e.g. Utah.

Most of the "measures" were completely irrational.

The exclusion zone isn't unnecessary. It's gone. All exclusion zones have been remediated and reopened: https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear...

Nobody bothered to clean up Chernobyl because the whole town's existence was to support the plant and plant workers. With no plant, the city had no value and thus no incentive to spend money on remediation. By comparison, Japan showed us what occurs when places with value are contaminated: effort is made to clean them up. Half of the exclusion zone was reopened within 5 years, and the most intensely irradiated locations were cleaned up in just over a decade.

This doesn’t fully track, the Chernobyl popwerplant was in operation for many years after the catastrophe. I think the sinister truth is that the soviet union just cared a lot less than the Japanese government, not to mention the slightly bigger scale of damage.

More specifically: Pripyat and the original exclusion zone evacuated. Slavutych [1] was subsequently constructed to support the nuclear power plant after the disaster. Because again, Pripyat had no harbors, and no real economic value other than supporting the power plant. So it was simpler to just construct a new city.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavutych

A more modern reactor design would not be at risk from coolant failures and significantly less likely to release any radioactivity.

It's been a while since I looked, but I think the claim here is that the evacuation of elderly and infirm people from the parts of the exclusion area that were otherwise not seriously affected by the tsunami resulted in a large loss of disability-adjusted life years.

Yes, that's true. And that evacuation was based on irrational fear-mongering, completely unnecessary.

I'll have what he is having, in fact, Ill have a double.

"Because of the plant’s location along the coast, much of the water washed into the Pacific, resulting in the largest accidental release of radiation to the ocean in history. Additional airborne radioactive material from the explosions and fires at the plant fell onto the sea surface, where it too mixed into the water, as did subsequent leaks from tanks on the site holding treated water."

This is from Woods Hole, you probably do not know or recognize their expertise.

"the largest accidental release of radiation to the ocean in history."

Yes, and, as demonstrated in another post on here, way less than what's released naturally every day.

Even the worst case just isn't very bad.

And it is is just a drop in the ocean when you consider the natural radioactivity from ⁴⁰K.

It may be a local, time-bounded problem in the first few years after the accident in that certain isotopes may bio-concentrate and affect fishing and agriculture in that region.

So far as the ocean as a whole goes I'd be more concerned about chunks of styrofoam.

Didn’t that person actually die from cancer and not radiation per se?

I understand that cancer can be caused by radiation, but that is actually treatable and not always fatal, whereas radiation poisoning is afaik fatal.

This is correct, it is not 100% certain the cancer was caused/exacerbated by the radiation. But let's count it as a conservative 1 death.

It was not acute radiation poisoning.

>Thousands to tens of thousands died from the tsunami that caused it.

19,759 according to the sources cited by the wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...

Thanks for looking it up, I remembered "something ten thousand" but wasn't sure if it was just under or just over or just something with a ten :)

How much radioactive waste was dumped in the ocean?

I don't know, you tell me. Are you saying it was non-zero?

Fukushima dumped about 45 PBq of radioactive material into the ocean.

For reference:

Chernobyl did 85 PBq

Global nuclear weapons testing: 400 PBq

Natural Uranium-238: 37,000 PBq

Natural Potassium-40: 15,000,000 PBq

https://www.whoi.edu/multimedia/source-of-radioactivity-in-t...

Now divide each number by its area.

The ocean constantly churns, mixing these all together, so dividing by the constant area of the world oceans doesn't change this.

Explain the trash islands

I dont think its accurate to equate floating trash and something dissolved in solution. Their behavior is likely to be very different.

This is presumably being downvoted for the unnecessary “gotcha” phrasing, but it is an interesting point of distinction. I have an intuitive guess as to the principles at work, but I don’t really know the actual physics.

> but I don’t really know the actual physics

Vastly oversimplifying: two versus three dimensions.

I don’t think that explains it at all. So garbage floats (more or less), so can be modeled as a 2D plane. But why do patches form? Why isn’t the garbage distributed uniformly across the plane? And why doesn’t that same mechanism apply in 3D?

Explain the lack of sodium islands.

E: "Cesium dissolves easily in water."[1]

[1] https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radionuclide-basics-cesium-137

This takes decades. The plume was largely concentrated over a few dozen km and couple hundred m deep when it hit california five years later. And actually significant spill would be orders of magnitude worse.

This is also why mass expansion of reprocessing facilities is completely untenable.

Which is why any next-gen nuclear should be doing near-complete fuel consumption. Solid fuel rods aren't going to cut it.

Liquid / molten salts can be reprocessed "online" and the fission products extracted (yeah, handwaves a LOT of chemistry), so you don't get these partially transmuted solid rods.

Even if you have solid rods or solid pebbles doing the primary power, maybe you can have a secondary on-site molten processor to take care of the waste without it shipping.

One of the annoying aspects of arguing with pro-nuclear people is their blind spot for reprocessing/waste. It just gets shrugged/handwaved away, but to the voting public, having a reactor that produces no waste in the traditional solid fuel sense would be a political boon.

The real issue is that nuclear simply isn't price competitive, it barely beats coal. I would like it to be otherwise.

Safe single fluid LFRs are scifi. Two fluid ones have worse reprocessing problems than solid fuel.

It would be nice, but the list of reasons which are sufficient to stop it happening is very long.

And factor in decays too!

Very comparabale! And also sheer luck the main plume went there too..

Is that natural uranium concentrated in rock formations? Because the weapons testing and dumping disperses the material.

I'm genuinely asking

Or 75mm bananas.

For some perspective: I don't have a full breakdown of the release materials on hand, but according to Wikipedia of the 45 PBq you quoted something like 20 PBq of that was Iodine-131 and 5 PBq of Cs-137. That's about 4.3 grams of I-131 and 1.6 kg of Cs-137. In radiological terms that's a LOT if they were concentrated in a small area, not so much when diluted into the entire ocean. Note that estimated releases to the atmosphere were about 10x that IIRC (but don't quote me on exact numbers).

Not to downplay the risks or consequences, people need to decide that for themselves and the dynamics of how this material ends up dispersed in the environment are complicated, but talking in terms of mass helps put things into perspective.

Wiki has a good writeup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fuk...

These comparisons—except for Chernobyl—are disingenuous. Nuclear weapons testing has been outlawed and has mostly stopped, natural Uranium and—even more so—Potassium don’t release radiation in nearly the same concentration as Fukushima (or Hanford to that extent). Radiation is dangerous when it concentrates.

US also has gotten Eastern Europe and South Korea involved.

https://emerging-europe.com/news/ukraine-joins-europes-list-...

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