Explosion at Japan nuke plant, disaster toll rises

[Member2019]

The sky is falling!!! Ahhh!!!

Ahhh ... I thought I'd just sit back and watch this. It's so much fun!

Seriously people, you watch too much network TV and other crap in the US.

Let's recap some of those "facts" that people don't like to talk about ...

1. After a full week, one worker has finally hit a grand total 0.1Sv of exposure. This is the legal limit he is allowed under Japanese law. It takes 1Sv to have radiation sickness. Japan has decided to extend the amount of 0.25Sv. Not sure I agree with the latter, but it seems necessary to allow responders to legally continue operations.

2. As water and pumping is restored to the waste storage and reactors, the facility is basically back to the same issues as when it was operational. That means it has materials that are cooled for many months, until their radioactivity is reduced. This would happen if the plant was operating nominally. The only difference here is that the reactors will no longer be used for power generation, because of their current conditions (obviously).

3. Dedicated storage facilities, like Yucca Mountain in the US, remove the need to store materials on-site at facilities. They solve a lot of issues. Not just for nuclear power plants, but for the 1-2 non-power issue of both prior nuclear weapons production as well as the 50+ years we've been creating medical devices and then trashing them. Japan doesn't have the former problem, but it has the latter. This doesn't begin and end with nuclear power for Japan any more than the US or any other western nation. So now the site is just a "storage facility." Guess what? It was already a "storage facility" (for its own, spent rods) like most all other, operating plants anyway!

4. The root cause of the failures of the coolant systems is still the storage of fuels above ground where the tsunami took them out. The reactors scrammed, output was reduced to 3% of nominal, the containment held and countless other things. This is not Chernobyl not in the least bit, or should I say, not in 97 bits out of 100.

5. The immediate plant is the only place where there is any issues, and that ends with #2. The remaining issues then become the clean-up of long-term, non-active materials that are basically heavy metals that you don't want to inhale or, more of a danger, consume. Which brings us to ...

6. There have been detections of both the iodine isotope and, in very rare but actual cases, at least a couple of our old friend Mr. 137. How much? So far one would have to consume 1kg of specific footstuffs every day for a whole year to have the equivalent creation of the same materials in their body to being zapped in a cat scan. Wow! Scary!

Seriously people. This isn't Chernobyl, which didn't scram and had no containment. It's the uber-hype of the media. No one will die outside of the plant ... ever ... and it seems that even the worker with the highest level of exposure has now only hit 0.1Sv.

To recap ...
- Japan had a 300 year quake
- It was at least a full order of magnitude worse than what the facilities were built for
- The facilities actually held up against the quake!
- The Japanese stupidly put their fuel for their cooling pumps above ground, and they were washed away by the tsunami
- The result was no coolant
- The GE design, which is not considered the best in a Gen-2 and not widely deployed in the US either, still actually held up against the lack of coolant!
- The design is from the '60s, started operating 40 years ago, and is what our parent's parent's designed having a whole 15 years of knowledge

At this point, again, I just can't believe how people have created the issue. Again we should have either banned nuclear power altogether in the '70s (ended all existing power generation), or built newer plants like the Gen-3 designs that don't rely on pumps for cooling. Instead, people acted like nuclear power didn't exist, or worse yet, kept consuming the energy created from it and acted like they didn't need it anyway.

This is why I honestly don't give a flying fuck what people think, because they just make the problem worse, instead of better. A great way people can help is to actually install solar power on their homes, so they have a great, point energy they can not only use, but feed back into the grid. I do so on my two homes myself.

I think - try to imagine - how that area will be when the meltdown is complete. Will they build a wall in a 20 or 30 kilometer radius around the nuclear site?

No, they will just build a 20-30km wall around your house so people can't hear you scream this non-sense.

Just saw a documentary about how the Chernobyl Disaster went down and how the area still suffers, 25 years later.

Yes, and this isn't Chernobyl. Chernobyl cannot happen in Japan or the US. Now in the UK, there are at least two candidate installations the last time I checked.

In countries like France -- well, only France -- they actually kept up their innovation and knowledge. It can't happen their except for a few, very old installations that are going to be shutdown within the next decade.

Russia never was the same after that, and to project that on a extremely smaller and much more dense habitated country is mindblowing.

Yes, Russia wasn't the same after that because it wasn't in Russia.

Yes, I know, I'm nitpicking, but if I really didn't want to have fun, I wouldn't have quoted you and responded.

But I feel somewhat tired by the permanent news stories, which sounds cruel, but I guess you feel it too.

I feel that I'm going to just end it all one of these days, before mass ignorance destroys us all.

 

[Member2019]

Beyond stupid here in the US ...

Oh, and in the "beyond stupid here in the US," we have our current policy on spent fuel -- the useless non-policy:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110322/ap_on_bi_ge/us_japan_quake_us_spent_fuel

Obama's non-sense on Yucca Mountain while supporting nuclear power is that duality of political non-sense. Nevada took the money and ran, although lawsuits by other states will probably force Harry Reid and co. to take the waste regardless of what they want.

Unlike France and most other countries, the US doesn't reprocess fuel. It was a stupid political decision, since overturned, but no one does it for fear it will be re-enacted. Reprocessing spent rods make them recycled for several generations. France also has far more efficient designs as well, that get far more use out of their rods, hence why they don't produce as much between the combination of newer designs and reprocessing.

And development in 4th gen reactors that allow 95% of even useless fuel for previous gen designs to be reused. France is leading on those designs.

 

[Facetious]

Japan Radiation Levels Surge in Water at Stricken Nuclear Plant
March 27, 2011,

Japan Says Nuclear Crisis Not Worsening as Radiation Levels Rise
Reactor Core May Be Leaking at Damaged Fukushima Plant (1)
Japan’s Prime Minister Says Can’t Let Down Guard Over Reactor

March 27 (Bloomberg) -- Radiation in water at Japan’s stricken nuclear plant reached potentially lethal levels even as engineers made progress in restoring power at the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

The water in the Fukushima Dai-Ichi No. 2 reactor’s turbine building was measured at more than 1,000 millisieverts per hour, Japan’s nuclear safety agency said today. That’s higher than the dose that would cause vomiting, hair loss and diarrhea, according to the World Nuclear Association. Repeated exposure may lift fatal cancer incidence by 5 percentage points.

“That’s very high -- the normal radiation level that we receive over a year is about four millisieverts,” said Stephen Lincoln, a nuclear power and uranium specialist at the University of Adelaide. “When you’re getting up to a 1,000 millisieverts this is a really rather large leakage.”

Repairs at the site have been hampered by radiation leaks, forcing restoration efforts to be suspended and workers to rotate shifts. Two men who were exposed to radiation had “significant” skin contamination on their legs, the International Atomic Energy Agency said.

Continued

 

[Facetious]

Cooling at Two of Japan's Nuclear Reactors Delayed as Radiation Increases
By Mike Lee and Akiko Nishimae - Mar 27, 2011 10:44 AM PT


Efforts to repair the cooling systems at the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors at the Fukushima Dai- Ichi nuclear plant are being delayed by the need to drain radioactive water from the floors, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.

Tests found radiation levels at 100,000 times the normal level in the No. 2 reactor at the plant, and the reactor may be leaking water, Vice President Sakae Muto said at a briefing broadcast on the Internet.

The company plans to put the radioactive water into condenser tanks. Those tanks are probably already full, so crews must find a way to drain them, company officials said at a briefing today.

“I think it is high,” Muto said of the radiation level in the pool of water at the No. 2 unit.

The cooling pool at the No. 2 reactor, used to store spent nuclear fuel, appears to be full of water, the company said. The pool at the No. 4 reactor is likely full, the company said. The pools need cooling water to keep the rods from melting and releasing radiation into the air.

The radiation level at the No. 2 reactor was measured at 1,000 millisieverts an hour, Japan’s nuclear safety agency said. That’s higher than the dose that would cause vomiting, hair loss and diarrhea, according to the World Nuclear Association.

“They’re finding quite high levels of radiation fields, which is impeding their progress dealing with the situation,” said Richard Wakeford, an expert in radiation epidemiology at the U.K.’s Dalton Nuclear Institute in Manchester. At reactor 2, “you’d have a lot of difficulty putting anyone in there.”

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What are they going to do with the 100,000 X normal radioactive water?

''Why, just open up the spigot and release it into the Pacific, we got to keep them rods cool at all cost!''


Everything is gonna be just fine you foolish newspaper reading laypeople! Go bury your collective uninformed heads in the sand! Brace yourselves!

 

[Ulysses31]

clip


What are they going to do with the 100,000 X normal radioactive water?

''Why, just open up the spigot and release it into the Pacific, we got to keep them rods cool at all cost!''


Everything is gonna be just fine you foolish newspaper reading laypeople! Go bury your collective uninformed heads in the sand! Brace yourselves!

It was all a big mistake

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12875327

 

[Facetious]

It was all a big mistake

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12875327

Stop that! It's only 100,000 X normal, not a million X! :nono: :spin:



Just as amusing, all of the government radiation detection devices for the state of California have been down all week and continue to remain down at this hour.
Don't call me a tin hatter, but the people have the right to know precisely what the conditions are 24 -7 IMO. Is this asking to much of the ''air resources'' bureaucracy in California or are they concealing the data?