Which of the 507 other plants will be the next go into meltdown? I wonder how many of these disasters the planet can handle before it becomes inhabitable to all life.
The increase in radiation in the pacific is lost in the noise when compared to naturally occurring background radiation. There are some areas directly around Fukushima where that is not the case, and it is a big mess, but I would happily eat fish from the vast majority of the pacific.
A far bigger threat to our ocean is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
http://www.isoe-network.net/index.php/component/docman/doc_d...
[A diver not briefed on avoiding unknown objects picked up a highly activated bolt laying on the pool floor and received a substantial amount of radioactive dose.]
I don't have stats about what gets directly into the oceans, but when we mine gold, copper, and other ores, we create entire ponds called "tailings ponds" full of arsenic, cyanide, mercury, and all sorts of other nasty substances. These ponds leak into the environment on a regular basis. Short of seeping into the environment, many of these substances NEVER GO AWAY. THIS IS A HUGE PROBLEM.
Nuclear waste comes in small quantities, in neat, easy to handle packages, and the most dangerous elements in it will decay relatively quickly. Over the entire lifetime of the nuclear industry, less than 80,000 tons of radioactive waste have been produced. Meanwhile, one mine alone produced 237,000 tons of arsenic trioxide over its lifetime. This substance is just sitting in the abandoned mine now.
The most worrying part of the nuclear waste story, to me, is that NIMBYism and fear has blocked attempts to produce permanent, safe facilities for permanent sequestration, so it's stored almost as poorly as our super toxic tailings. At least there's less of it, and efforts are made to clean it up when it gets into the environment.
Uranium itself is only weakly radioactive anyways (the kind of uranium you mine has a half life measured in billions of years). You'd be at more danger from radiation from walking out of the mine into the UV-filled sunlight, or from smoking cigarettes (which contain radioactive Po-210) than from working under the earth in a uranium mine (though you would admittedly want to wear a face mask).
In fact Congressional staffers receive more exposure to radiation than U.S. naval nuclear plant operators, because the nice granite-based buildings they work in contain pitchblende impurities (containing uranium), and yet those Congressional staffers are allowed to work in those buildings.
The radioactive waste produced by the plants is more of a political issue than a technical one, as is the switch to far safer, more maintainable, non-proliferating reactor designs.
The one major exception is Fukushima Dai-Ichi (which used one of the oldest BWR designs), and even Fukushima Dai-Ichi has not killed anyone from radiation directly.
But just to contrast, the nearby set of operating reactors at Fukushima Dai-Ni (which also used an old BWR design with a minor containment upgrade) both managed to safely achieve cold shutdown even despite getting hit by the exact same tsunami that hit their sister site just a few kilometers up the coast.
Obviously you should always question the safety of a new technology instead of blindly trusting it. The modern reliance on computers and the magic of the Internet seems to come to mind for me as an example of where blind trust leads to problems. But questioning nuclear just because it's nuclear may well have made one a Luddite. The basics of nuclear engineering are not actually as difficult to understand as it's portrayed to be, but people object to the technology without even the slightest attempt to understand it, which may well make one a Luddite as well.
"A far bigger threat to our ocean is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch."
Maybe it will even help the ecological systems there a tiny little bit because (even if only few...) people might back down on seafood from the over-fished areas there.
To respond to your question, Earth would get over it, and humanity would survive even 507 meltdowns. Fukushima was an exceptional case on a 40-year-old design, so we wouldn't have 507 Fukishimas (keep in mind how many people died from the giant tsunami that caused the Fukushima meltdown).
Compare a tiny amount of radiation coming from a long distance (say the core of the earth) and a tiny amount of radiation coming from speck of decaying radioactive material released by Fukushima that is floating around in the air of your office room. You measure the radiation in the room and sure enough the radiation is very weak. You conclude "See? Fukushima is no worse than natural radiation". Now what happens if you're so unfortunate to inhale that speck of material and it settles in your lungs? Then the picture changes completely because some cells of your lungs will now be very close to the source of radiation and these cells -- and always the same cells -- will be subjected to a long period of intense radiation.
By that logic, we should panic if we inhale the sweet scent of someone eating a banana, or walk by a soy farm with the obvious smell of fertilizer. What people actually never seem to understand is that you live in a world already filled with natural radionuclides, they are not simply buried deep in the Earth's mantle, they are everywhere around us.
What airborne radioactivity is floating in your office from Fukushima, by the way? And what type of radiation does that radioactive contamination emit; alphas and betas would effect local tissue, but neutrons and the much much more common gammas would have their interactions occur over a much much greater volume (possibly outside the body entirely).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium-40#Contribution_to_n...
Secondly, and more importantly, you bring up this number of 4900 decays per second as if it means anything by itself. Those 4900 decays per second are caused by the presence of 18 milligram of Potassium-40 in your body. One of the elements released by Fukushima is Iodine-131. If you ingest 1 microgram of Iodine-131, this speck will generate 4,6 BILLION decays per second. So yeah, you're right that 4900 decays per second is not a big deal. But then you conveniently forgot the fact that the material released by Fukushima is orders of magnitude more radioactive than Potassium 40.
Not nearly all of the naturally occurring radiation is occuring in some well shielded location deep underground.
So no, I don't agree - likely the number is much less than 507 and uncomfortably close to the number of plants already in disaster-mode.
I suspect that you may be confusing a radioactive isotope (such as U235) with the particles associated with nuclear radiation (such as alpha and beta particles).
A meltdown will generally involve a lot of radioactive material. It will usually be localized and only very rarely pulverized into a dust. Chernobyl's steam explosion did this. The meltdown will probably also emit a lot of radiation, but that never "contaminates" the atmosphere, unless you consider electrons or helium "contamination".
Unfortunately, conflating radioactive isotopes with the radiation those isotopes emit when they decay is very common misunderstanding.
But yes, I do consider particles like Iodine-129 and Cesium-137 "contamination".
That's a terrible analogy. Radioactivity, a nuclear reaction, deals with totally different physics and phenomena than combustion, a chemical reaction.
A more proper analogy would be: Would you rather me shoot you with a cannonball once right now, or would you rather me split it up into a million little BB pellets and shoot one at you a day?
I'd choose the million little BB pellets a day because my body can recover from that in between. Likewise, your body constantly repairs DNA damaged by the sun or from other radiation sources.
Radiation, activity, and dosages are extremely difficult to keep straight. Especially when coming from the media. Not even units can help you (ex: Equivalent vs Effective Dose), and it is hard to keep straight (ICRP vs NRC).
> Only the fire doesn't end - because we don't have the technology to stop it, and perhaps will not ever.
I am not quite sure what you're referring to -- stick yourself in a heavily-lined lead chamber and I'm sure you will measure far less gamma radiation inside of it than outside.
> So no, I don't agree - likely the number is much less than 507 and uncomfortably close to the number of plants already in disaster-mode.
Then we can agree to disagree -- it seems you have already made your mind on how many plants are close to "disaster mode" (unsure what that really means in an engineering sense).
Exactly what level of physics education do you have?
But hey, I'm listening - show me a chart that compares the total amount of ionizing radiation released into the atmosphere by bombs dropped on Nagasaki & Hiroshima versus the amount produced already by the Fukishima site.
This link [1] roughly compares Chernobyl to a Fat Man equivalent, which had a 21kT yield, or 0.021 MT. That's 0.003% of the total yield of all the atomic tests mankind has conducted (545MT total [2]).
So by a first cut of the numbers, we've set of 26,000 Fat Man equivalents. Even considering that Caesium ratio of 890:1 between Chernobyl to Fat Man, that's over 29 Chernobyls worth of the stuff flung out. Pick any of the other ratios and it looks worse for your argument.
Oh, and on the note of you freaking out about the amount of radiation that Fukishima is dumping into the Pacific and how it's screwing up all the ocean life, remember that about 10% of all of those explosions were detonated into the ocean half-way between the US and Japan.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Chernobyl_and_ot...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests#...
If I can step back from mrschwabe's immediate questions, I'd like to point out how problematic your attitude is, NamTaf.
Nuclear power generation in the West is a political question. Which means its future is going to be decided by the average voter. The average voter is not going to have a "physics education". Maybe they took high-school physics[1], and maybe that class touched on radiation and nuclear power generation. But odds are, even in that case, the average voter doesn't really remember it.
I just checked my alma mater's undergraduate physics course catalog, and nuclear physics is an upper-division topic. It is unacceptable, in a democratic society, to suggest that voters have the right to an opinion on a topic of importance to society only if they've taken upper-division university classes on the topic in question.
The real failure isn't that mrschwabe doesn't have a physics education. The failure is that, 66 years after nuclear criticality was first used to power a light bulb, the physics/nuclear power advocate community hasn't figured out how to incorporate the basics of nuclear power generation into the average person's "common sense".
[1]Obligatory disclaimer about this being a U.S.-centric post. I'll let others comment on the quality of secondary-level physics instruction in other countries.
Are they good enough? Sure. They're good enoguh to convince anyone with an open mind. But they're not the problem. None of them are yet to the point to convince the person who is inherently against nuclear power. It's not yet at the stage where we can throw in some stuff, have it do its nuclear thing and produce energy, then do something very simple, easy, an un-fuck-upable such that there is no problematic waste at the end.
Maybe the technological aspect is political in disguise. I mean, it's easier to point at containers of nuclear waste than it is the airbourne pollutants that coal spews out. But I think you'll find that the easier solution to that problem comes from an improved technology that renders it null and void, rather than a change of political will. Particularly when semi-alternatives in the form of the various renewables exist and provide a much bigger attraction to the nuclear detractors even despite their flaws.
That's a mistake. "Common sense", or the mental picture of "how things work" you've built up over a lifetime is utterly useless when it comes to nuclear devices. Things that common sense will tell you are super dangerous really aren't, and conversely things that common sense tells you should be safe are not at all safe.
But it's not a given that their rollout of alternatives will be better/safer than nuclear either.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=inhabitable&oq=inhabitable&a...
HN is a place to discuss, not to proselytize. Thanks.