I’ve been holding back on posting about Fukushima Daiichi because my OCD on the matter is both ugly and uninformed, since the last time I looked at a physics or chemistry textbook was longer than Justin Bieber’s been on this earth. With that caveat, here are a few observations that haven’t made the newspapers:
- A good one-stop source for a factual update is Jeffrey Lewis’ daily post of the English version of the Japanese trade association for electric power, the FEPC. It comes out in the morning — here’s yesterday’s version. In that summary, it’s clear that the cores in units 1, 2 and 3 have been uncovered by about 1/4 to 1/2 throughout this emergency. Either the pumps pumping in seawater can’t overcome the pressure in the containment vessel, or TEPCO is holding back on the pumping because they don’t want to increase the pressure in the containment vessel to the point where it needs to be released (which leads to venting more radiation into the atmosphere). So, there’s some very hot, uncovered core in those reactors, which means that this crisis is far from over.
- The Union of Concerned Scientists is a top-notch organization that has been putting out factual, reasonable information and holding in-depth press briefings throughout the crisis. Their nuclear blog is excellent. They believe that the Japanese government is wasting its chance for an early evacuation outside the 12 mile zone. The Japanese have advised a voluntary evacuation of 20-30 km (12-18 miles), but UCS scientists think the NRC recommendation of 50 miles is more reasonable.
- Yesterday’s exposure of three workers to radioactive water in the basement of the #3 reactor has led to an admission that number 3 is leaking from the Japanese nuclear safety agency. This “no shit, Sherlock” moment is typical of the kind of drib and drab approach that seems to be the norm for information release this accident. Part of the reason seems to be that the instrumentation at the site is without power, or destroyed by explosions, so we can’t get a full picture. (Here’s a narrated video of the destruction.) But some of it also seems to come from a natural reluctance on the part of TEPCO and the Japanese government to admit the full extent of the crisis and the possible consequences.
The One clear lesson of the disaster so far is that spent nuclear fuel needs to be stored on-site in dry cask storage, not pools.
Grumpy Code Monkey
IINM, spent fuel has to spend a non-trivial amount of time in the pool before it’s cool enough for dry storage.
What this says to me is that the spent fuel pools need to be inside primary containment, which I think it is in newer designs.
For me, the takeaway lesson is that if you lose external power for more than a day, you are well and truly screwed.
dsc
NATURAL? this is NATURAL?
they are creating panic. on what information can you rely?
and the consequence of this stupidity is that almost every Japanese citizen I see interviewed does not believe one dam.n thing their “fearless leaders” are telling them.
EVEN IF the water is safe (?), no one trusts anything they are told by “authorities.” No one believes that anything at all is “under control.”
What a living hell. I wonder about the long term consequences in a society that is otherwise so compliant, patient, and trusting.
debbie
Science and physics is far beyond my abilities and most of what I’m reading about this doesn’t sink in, but it still makes Albert Camus’ “The Plague” more and more prescient.
Alwhite
thanks for the update – this is very good information. We were discussing this on the way to work just this morning, the story seems to have disappeared from the media but it could hardly be over with.
As for learning lessons – I believe Homer said it best when he said “I will never get my comeuppance! You hear me! No comeuppance!!” just substitute ‘lessons learned’
Xboxershorts
@dsc:
I think you’ve nailed a very specific flaw in how any business is conducted these days via western style unfettered capitalism.
Our captains of industry, whether that be finance, mining, drilling, manufacturing or energy, seem all too willing to treat the rest of us plebes as dimwitted cattle who wouldn’t understand what their brilliant minds do. Therefor, why even bother trying to inform us?
It’s really insulting to us all.
Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy
It’s natural if you accept the following truth: nuclear power plant operators lie. The costs, the safety & especially the accidents, the only way they can gain popular approval is to set their pants on fire.
cmorenc
@mistermix:
Excellent essay EXCEPT: Why did you have to ruin my morning by mentioning JUSTIN BIEBER in your very first sentence?
I hereby sentence you to a day, no maybe a whole week of trying to get the world’s most annoying “happy” tune out of your head: “IT’S A SMALL WORLD A-FTER ALL…”
Robert Sneddon
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
There have been hot dry storage systems designed for recently-exposed fuel rods but they’re even more dependent on sustained power for the maintenance of the rod cooling operation than the simple open-pool wet storage systems — basically they use a sealed gas-cooling loop flowing through frames holding the dry rods inside the cask to an outside heat exchanger. They need pumps to circulate the coolant gas (nitrogen is the preferred option) and can break and leak gas and isotopes from overheating fuel rods if the dry store is damaged sufficiently by, say, an earthquake. I don’t think anyone actually has any hot dry casks in operation though.
The good thing about hot dry cask storage is there’s no chance of oxy-hydrogen disassociation and resulting explosions from vented steam which is what did all of the physical damage to the reactor buildings.
cmorenc
@debbie:
When the technological explanations get tough, the liberal arts majors go literature?
mistermix
On dry cask storage, what’s been happening is that because of “security concerns” US operators have been packing their storage pools instead of moving spent fuel to casks. All the UCS is advocating is moving that fuel to cask storage onsite since it lessens the amount of fuel in the pools, which in turn leads to lower temps in the pools (so less need for immediate cooling) and the total mass of fuel in the pools is less (so the consequences of an accident are lessened).
Superluminar
I can’t believe anyone is taking any of these estimates seriously when far more people were killed by the Tokyo Firebombing of 1945…
Xboxershorts
@Superluminar:
Good point. Why worry about a silent killer that lurks in our water table and food chain for generations. Killing in slow motion through mutant cancers when we can kill ourselves in much more spectacular fashion.
Amiright?
polyorchnid octopunch
I dunno. The truth is that even with all the radiation and radioactive materials released from TMI, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima, let alone all the little ones from various nuclear reactors around the world, it’s still only a tiny fraction of the amount of radiation and radioactive material released from coal fired power plants… and that’s without getting into the whole mercury releases from coal issue.
Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy
PO: Which is great in the abstract, but kinda beside the point when you look at the area in the immediate neighborhood of the contamination source. To say nothing of the economic damage done, which could be quite expensive if things get any worse than they are now.
The key is that a widespread release of fuel elements would have an effect similar to a dirty bomb: if the contamination from Fukushima Dai-ichi is nothing to worry about, why worry about dirty bombs?
nancydarling
@cmorenc: Debbie, I appreciate the literary reference. We need more than math and science to deal with the cascading failures civilization is facing today. There has to be a moral underpinning for how we use science. In “The Plague” Camus tells us that it is clear the strong must bear the burdens of the weak, and we have the choice of joining forces with the plague or fighting against it. In “The Rebel”, he tells us of rebellion born in the heart of a slave who suddenly says.”No; there is limit. So much will I consent to, but no more.”
I am paraphrasing some of the above from a book on philosophy. Thank you for reminding me of Camus’ work and how it relates to our humanity. He died tragically and too young.
Punchy
Where does all this radioactive seawater go when it’s finished cooling things? Please tell me they dont wash it back into the ocean….
Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy
Punchy: Well, some of it is released to atmosphere as steam.
Speaking of which, I am surprised the mistermix didn’t mention the problem of salt buildup in the cores.
Trinity
@nancydarling: I have never read Camus. I just reserved a copy of ‘The Plague’ at my local library.
I love this blog.
Hawes
I’ve been reading a bit on the side about Thorium reactors, using either molten salt or a fluoride solution.
It doesn’t produce nearly the same quantity of toxic waste (most of it gets recycled in the reaction) and it’s impossible to create weapons grade uranium or plutonium from the process (which might be why it was never adopted beyond experimental reactors in the ’60s and ’70s.
I’m as far from being a nuclear physicist as possible, but what I’ve read on the Internet (and when has the Internet been wrong) suggests that this is a nice stepping stone to something like fusion.
Every type of fuel is dangerous in the short term and long term. Thorium reactors sound considerably less dangerous than hydrocarbons or uranium/plutonium.
cathyx
A news agency is calling this catastrophe a level 6 out of 7 point scale.
http://www.arirang.co.kr/News/News_View.asp?nseq=114145&code=Ne2&category=2
polyorchnid octopunch
@Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy: Dude… every single coal fired plant is basically a dirty bomb in slow motion. You might want to ask those people next to that river in Ohio (IIRC… maybe PA?) that had the fly ash disaster whether it all happens in slow motion too. Why isn’t anyone freaking out about that? The area right around that accident is uninhabitable and very toxic and will be for decades if not centuries.
That’s pretty much the only difference right there. It’s like banning air flight because the crashes are spectacular, despite the fact that cars are actually a lot more dangerous to their occupants.
The only other alternative is to give up on industrial civilization. What do you think the likelihood of that is?
Also, too… one last question. What’s a bigger problem for us as a species, let alone as a civilization… a six degree temperature rise, or having a couple of areas that are too toxic for people to go? Here’s something that might help you with that… one can be cleaned up. The other will take literally eons to work out via natural processes.
Superluminar
@Xboxershorts
Please recalibrate your
Geiger countersnarkometer, possibly with reference to other threads.There seems to be a lot of hysteria on here about this though. So far total Fukushima deaths=0. FWIW, the entire senior management of TEPCO need to be encased in sand & concrete faster than the reactors.
I seem to recall that the answer to the seawater thing is that the radiation dissipates quickly so it’s ok to put it back in the ocean, but I’ll try to find a link for that.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
I live 12 miles from the Callaway Nook Plant here in red, rurl, central Misery. Nominally upwind but that’s problematic.
Emergency response maps here show “only” a 10 mile evacuation radius. Believe me, if we were having the same problems here that they’re having in Japan, I’d pack up the missus, the old 3-legged dog, the 8 cats and the ageing and exceedingly grumpy mother and get the fuck outta here. I’m sure somebody here at BJ could put us up.
Oh wait, we’re rated as the safest nooook plant in ‘Murka. Yeah, I sleep better knowing that.
MikeTheZ
I would just like to eat some of my earlier words on this topic. And hope it doesn’t get worse.
Xboxershorts
@Superluminar:
Snark-o-meter re-calibrated. Not only TEPCO but Excelon and GE executives as well.
Vermont Yankee and Oyster Creek BWR’s have been killing people slowly for decades now. My wife grew up a few miles from Oyster Creek, she is a thyroid cancer survivor, her sister is coping with brain cancer now and her niece is also a thyroid cancer victim.
Whodathunkit that cooling 200 degree centigrade hot fuel rods with a hydrogen rich coolant (water) would/could result in explosive hydrogen bubbles and tritium leaks?
Superluminar
Okay found a link and it sounds like radioactive seawater is a bit bad, but not really really bad. Also that the Japanese govt says it’s perfectly safe. That probably means it’s not.
Xboxershorts – sorry about your family, that’s awful. There should be some special form of punishment for executives who cut corners with incredibly dangerous industrial process ( see also Union Carbide).
Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy
PO: Again, relevent to the broader convo (one which our society has no interest in having BTW), but one which has no particular relevence to the events as they occur in Japan.
Do you go up to people who are being cut out of mangled cars and tell them “dude, car travel is very safe. What, are you going to do, giv e up on travel?”
I am not interested in ‘saving’ the political viability of nuclear power, especially in a for-profit setting, and I think efforts to discuss the relative costs and benefits of various energy production systems while the accident is still ongoing is a best ghoulish and at worst obfuscatory.
Furthermore, if you really think that nuclear power is viable, you should probably devote your efforts to encouraging the nuclear power industry to be more transparant about costs and risks.
Monkeyfister
Here is what’s happening inside those Reactors: http://www.osti.gov/bridge/purl.cover.jsp?purl=/6124656-R8y05j/
A very good step-by-step written some years ago by OSTI at Oak Ridge Labs. Easy to read and understand. Actually those first explosions were the collapse of the steel structures inside the core.
Have a read.
–mf
BR
@polyorchnid octopunch:
The good or bad news is that this is happening whether we like it or not. Industrial civilization as we recognize it will be over in this century due to the Limits to Growth, the downslope of which we’re just starting now.
nancydarling
@Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy: My understanding is that if an accident like this happened in the U.S., the nuclear industry would be on the hook for 12 billion and we, the people, would pick up the tab for the rest. The nuclear industry has never operated on the free market principles so beloved by the right. We have never paid the true cost of energy in any of its forms in this country. Maybe that’s why we waste so much of it.
Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy
Also, the number of deaths across the span of the entire nuclear fuel cycle is not knowable due to the extreme length of time involved, so the deaths=0 or coal is more dangerous statements strike me as propagandistic at best. YMMV.
Cermet
@Superluminar: Ok stupid – what is your point? Japanese workers don’t count as human? Your ignorance is only matched by the nonesense coming from out of your mouth – zero deaths? Right – seven workers who fought to save so many are dead being hero’s so try reading even one fact before you prove how stupid you are.
Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy
nancydarling: Nuclear accidents are uninsurable because there is little to no recoverable value to highly contaminated land. Adding to that, banks will not loan money to NPPs without government backed loan guarantees.
nancydarling
@BR: It started decades ago with the first Arab oil embargo. That was a real loud wake-up alarm, but we’ve been hitting the snooze button ever since. Maybe all the science geeks will have to rely on liberal arts majors like Debbie to give their lives meaning in a Mad Max world. Me? I’m a retired dental hygienist, so all I know about is teeth. I do grow a fine garden, however.
Jack
@polyorchnid octopunch: Agreed regarding the emissions from coal fired power plants, but when people hear the word “radiation” they freak out, not realizing they were exposed to more radiation from the old CRT monitors we used to use than from all the nuclear power plants combined. You increase your radiation exposure every time you eat a banana, for Pete’s sake…
And everyone also forgets the “mountaintop removal” mining used to get the coal we’re burning, which ruins huge areas. We’ve destroyed more in West Virginia through that type of mining than the uninhabitable area from the Chernobyl disaster.
We’ve been using mega-sized reactor designs from the 1960s as our baseline (and that’s the type of reactors in Japan that are in trouble). There are new designs that are “inherently safe” when they lose power/cooling. Pebble-bed reactors are one example, and there’s no need to make these reactors so huge.
Cermet
@nancydarling: Nuclear power plants always lose money – and of course the industry knows how unsafe they are – that is exactly why they cannot insure them but the taxpayer does. These are absolute facts that no one can spin away … squirrel!? Uh, what’s wrong with nuke power?
That said, some plants are far, far safer – the CANDU heavy water reactor – it never would have had a melt down if it was at the site in Japan. Flowing water is not needed once the control rods are in place.
Can we just get started on building CANDU reactors here and finally, deposit the waste in a better storage site than pools of water or dry sites at the plants?
Hate, or support nuclear power, we have over a hundred dangerous plants operating and there is zero chance that will change for some time, so we had better address the worse of the problems – upgrade safety and get a better storage system in place.
Superluminar
@Cerment
I hadn’t read about any of the workers having died, but if you have a link to a story then please post one, I’m just too stupid to realise that if I knew the answer was > 0 I couldn’t get away with claiming it = 0, or something. Also, yes of course those Japanese workers are subhuman beasts. May they all die of radiation sickness!
Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy
Well, good nws is that fresh water supplies have been restored to the site, and #1 is recieving fresh water, with #2 to follow shortly (Reuters).
Superluminar
Oh well I’ll answer my own question I guess as checking all the recent BBC reports reveals no deaths, and the only ones I found on the first page of Google results was dated June 2009 and refered to some highway construction workers (but they were Japanese so they deserved it anyway). No reference to worker deaths in any of the places mistermix linked to either. No matter…
Viva BrisVegas
@polyorchnid octopunch: Dude… every single coal fired plant is basically a dirty bomb in slow motion.
Coal is dirty, but it’s not that dirty.
You might want to ask those people next to that river in Ohio (IIRC… maybe PA?) that had the fly ash disaster whether it all happens in slow motion too.
You probably mean Kingston, Tennessee.
Why isn’t anyone freaking out about that?
They are, but in the courts.
The area right around that accident is uninhabitable and very toxic and will be for decades if not centuries.
It’s mostly cleaned up already. Although it will never be the same again, the idea that it will be uninhabitable for centuries is ridiculous.
It’s like banning air flight because the crashes are spectacular, despite the fact that cars are actually a lot more dangerous to their occupants.
It depends on how you measure safety. If you measure in terms of the deaths/trip rather than deaths/mile, cars are safer. If you talk in deaths/mile the space shuttle is probably one of the safest forms of transportation, but obviously not in terms of deaths/trip.
The only other alternative is to give up on industrial civilization. What do you think the likelihood of that is?
I don’t see how that is the only alternative. The main objective is to use less energy from burning carbon. We can most easily do that by using less energy overall through greater efficiency. This can be done without collapsing civilisation as we know it. At least it can be if you are not Republican.
Also, too… one last question. What’s a bigger problem for us as a species, let alone as a civilization… a six degree temperature rise, or having a couple of areas that are too toxic for people to go?
Six degrees for sure, but coal waste has no more heavy metals or radioactive elements than a number of common types of rock and soil. The bigger problems with coal waste relate to silicosis and pH.
Here’s something that might help you with that… one can be cleaned up. The other will take literally eons to work out via natural processes.
True, but overstating the problems with coal and understating the problems with nuclear doesn’t do anybody any favours.
In the end we may have to go with nuclear, but if we do we should all remember that it is only because it is the least worst form of energy generation. The fact that after all this time of using nuclear we still do not have anything remotely like a safe way to store nuclear waste even for decades, let alone the thousands of years required, should tell us that nuclear is not the easy option we’d like it to be.
jheartney
I can only shake my head at attempts to minimize this accident, the full scope of which we don’t know yet. How much land will be rendered permanently uninhabitable? What happens with the water table underneath? How many excess cancers will there be (and there will be some, even if no further radiation is released)? And what about the succeeding generations who will have to deal with this nuclear stinkpot we’ve created, both here as well as everywhere else that there’s high-level waste?
WRT “inherently safe” designs, my guess is all “inherently safe” means is that the failure modes haven’t been imagined yet. After all, we’ve been told for decades that the current nuclear technology was safe – why build it if we thought it was going to fail? We may know that the newer designs won’t fail in the same way that the older designs have. But what we don’t know is that some other “unforeseeable” circumstance won’t arise that leads to familiar images of ruined reactors belching radiation which we’ve seen at both Chernobyl and Fukushima.
At the heart of all nuclear power designs is a simple concept – you cook up a big pot of extreme nastiness, the worst sort of nastiness that humanity has ever devised, nastiness so extreme that anyone standing next to it dies instantly if it’s not shielded. This nastiness stays bad for multiple lifetimes, is corrosive as well as toxic, and once released, can’t realistically be expunged by anything other than the passage of considerable time. In exchange for cooking up the nasty, you get electricity. You then hope the nastiness doesn’t leak out, both immediately as well as over the course of the generations during which it stays deadly.
You can argue over the figures etc., but the reality is that this accident is the end of the line for large-scale nuclear power generation. We’ve had previous accidents with handy excuses – Chernobyl was the result of careless Soviet operators who didn’t bother using a containment vessel, TMI and Windscale managed not to have very large releases of radiation, Fukushima was the result of siting on a fault plus poor placement of backup generators, etc. But with this one, it’s dawning on people that you can’t realistically guarantee containment will NEVER be breached when you have large numbers of reactors, producing copious waste that must be safeguarded for essentially unlimited amounts of time.
4tehlulz
Obviously, more Japanese dignity, perseverance, and resistance to assigning blame will take care of the problem.
/Western Media
Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy
jheartney: Also, the only reason that the radiation release from windscale was attenuated was because of the inclusion of exhaust scrubbers that many thought unnecessary.
PeakVT
@mistermix: Absolutely right.
@Hawes: Fusion is always going to be 30 years away, and while thorium sounds promising, there are lots of obstacles to it even being researched further.
@Superluminar: It depends mostly on whether the fuel rods are intact. Since the nuclear chain reaction that normally takes place in a reactor has been stopped, there won’t be too much activation of the elements in the seawater. And O-14 and O-15 have very short half-lives, on the order of a few minutes.
Cermet
@Superluminar: Sorry, but the NYT already posted that five were dead and two missing – google it yourself. Here is a link to get you started (two deaths):
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2011/March/Massive-Quake-Triggers-Tsunami-in-Japan/
and here (about five dead)
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11075/1132302-82.stm
Try using key words like Japanese nuclear workers and death – that was my third in the line for a number of posts that talked about workers at the plant dying – you live in a strange world if you are posting here and don’t know that this topic has been talked about over and over – trolling the wrong threads, I guess.
You owe those japanese families an apology.
matryoshka
@nancydarling: I also appreciated the reference, and I detected more than a little sneer in the comment “When the technological explanations get tough, the liberal arts majors go literature?” Like that’s a bad thing?! Is this the “technology: masculinity :: literature: girliness” paradigm at work?
Cermet
@PeakVT:Yes, and you are an expert in thermonuclear fusion and have read all the technical papers to make this claim? Of course, you are basing it on the real fact that people have been saying that fusion is right around the corner but that does not mean it isn’t and before you ssay this, read up on real fusion work – the Princeton Tokamak achieved breakeven in the early nineties (goggle that subject) and the Nike program (goggle Nike and laser fusion) has a realistic approach to a prototype inertial fusion reactor (NIF is a weapon’s only approach that has zero chance for power application – that one is a dead end.) The ITER reactor will take a number of years and will produce limited (but way above breakeven) and could be used as a breeder for nuclear fission power plants (the ITER could produce the fuel for ten fission reactors, that is almost a hundred times but a fission breeder could do) without a breeder’s dangers of Plutonium fuel.
So the field is far more advanced than you seem to know – read about it; you will learn a great deal and be more careful about what may (or may not) be possible in fusion.
PeakVT
@Cermet: Whatever, asshole.
elmo
@Viva BrisVegas:
Thanks for rebutting that so I didn’t have to. I live in Kingston, a few miles from the affected area. A few homes were destroyed, and it made part of the Emory River non-navigable (and non-pretty) for a few months, but uninhabitable? Please.
matryoshka
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: Dude, I know that plant’s history and location very well. If it’s the safest one in ‘Murka, we’re really fuzzizzled.
MobiusKlein
@Cermet: I believe Superluminar will claim they died from the explosion or some such, not the radiation.
Hair splitting is crucial in the spin-business.
debbie
@nancydarling:
cmorenc aside, I suppose I could have also cited an old-timey song line from the Talking Heads, “Same as it ever was.” But I fear his/her head might explode.
I read The Plague so long ago, but I still remember one line: “Stupidity has a knack of getting its way, as we should see if we weren’t always so wrapped up in ourselves.” It refers to bumbling, inept government, but I think it relates to humanity in general.
Xboxershorts
@MobiusKlein:
Having been told by Superluminar to adjust my snark meter, I would pass the same recommendation on to you as well.
trollhattan
I won’t be surprised if it costs more to clean up and decommission Fukushima Daiichi than it did to build the bloody place, not to mention the task of replacing the significant chunk of the nation’s power supply eliminated in one big wave. Impossible, of course, to predict the total impact of the startlingly farflung contamination already turning up.
Vulnerable design, bad management, poor emergency response. Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy
trolhatten: I gave it a glowing review.
Cermet
@PeakVT: Yes, a real mature attitude but I was really agreeing with the bases of your first point – I guess that epitaph is what you really think of yourself as well.
jwm
Yeah, that’s definitely the only lesson that’s clear as a bell. Good thing you waited to post anything or you might have said something really stupid.
Cermet
@MobiusKlein: I see he still has not apologized to the families of the dead workers that he so insulted – their sacrifice was a joke to him and their deaths only add up to zero for him and safety issue of nukes – how brave for him to sit on his ass and say all is well while hiding behind a blog as real hero’s fight and die to save others and try to prevent a nuclear disaster- so typical of these hired trolls – no knowledge of any details/facts, just lots of posts that all is well. In past threads we had rather smart trolls that were really helpful in nailing down facts – we don’t rate anymore?
mistermix
@jwm: Yeah, the “The” shouldn’t be there, so I removed it. Though, if you think there are other obvious lessons, you could name them. If one of them is “no more nuclear power” you need to give me a better alternative.
jwm
@mistermix: Just one better alternative? Ok, giant hamster farms. I estimate we could pack them in 1’x1′ cages and stack ’em as high as they’ll go. Hook up generators to their wheels and harvest their energy. That’s one idea thats better than nuclear. I’ve got more if you want.
trollhattan
@Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy:
Win. Where can we deliver your internets?
melior
As long as you’re listing observations that don’t seem to be making the newspapers, here’s another big one: The most likely cause of the continuing problems with the spent fuel pools. I can’t count the number of stories full of quotes from puzzled sources scratching their heads trying to guess what could have happened to cause them to lose water and catch fire, and TEPCO sure isn’t saying. It’s a mystery!
That’s probably because it’s almost certainly due to a (20/20 hindsight is awesome) bleedingly obvious design defect: relying on rubber seals similar to bicycle inner tubes that must be continuously inflated by electrically operated air pumps. And no, those electric motors aren’t backed up by diesel or batteries, and no, I don’t believe this is some magical type of rubber that withstands extreme temperatures or explosions. At this point I must clarify that as stupefying as this sounds I’m not making this up. These seals rim the concrete sliding doors that connect the spent fuel cooling pool (which contain fuel assemblies that have caught fire and burned in more than one unit by now, recall) from the reactor containment vessel.
There’s a very clear explanation at All Things Nuclear (note: not exactly a bunch of tree-hugging hippies). They have diagrams and pictures, you’ll be okay. Read how a failure of a very similar system at a nuclear plant in Georgia (US) 25 years ago almost led to disaster here in America. Then go get a drink, if you’re like me you’ll need one.
And please nuclear apologists, give the “Our reactors are totally safe because they are designed to tolerate failures” a rest. No one believes you any more.
Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) Spent Fuel Cooling System
When the gates are closed, they are made watertight by an inflatable seal, similar to a bicycle innertube, that runs around the sides and bottom of the gates. Electric air pumps are used to inflate these seals and keep them inflated as air leaks out of them over time.
These pumps are powered by electricity from the power grid, and not by backup diesel power or batteries. So once the power grid in Japan was knocked out, these seals could not be inflated if they lost air over time. If these seals lost air they could lead to significant water loss from the pool, even if there were no direct physical damage to the pool from the earthquake or tsunami. This may be what happened at pool 4, and could affect the other pools as well.
trollhattan
@melior:
Thanks for the detailed explanation, not that it’s going to help ease my shot nerves.
Something interesting: US says “Hey, you probably want to stop using seawater for cooling. Like, yesterday. We’ll even give you freshwater.”
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/25_22.html
Something else I learned just yesterday, Japan has two different power standards.
erinsiobhan
A lot of good data and status updates are at the NISA site.
http://www.nisa.meti.go.jp/english/
Today’s summary of the reactor condition
http://www.nisa.meti.go.jp/english/files/en20110325-5-2.pdf
Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy
erinsiobhan: Not, of course, that the METI (nee MITI) would ever be less than fully truthful.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy: Well, there’s one thing… I don’t live in the US, and the nuclear plant operator here in Ontario is publicly owned… as in, owned by the taxpayers of Ontario. So, as a consequence, the stuff that fucks up gets published, if not necessarily shouted from the rooftops.
Our plant designs are also significantly safer than most if not all US plant designs; CANDU is widely considered one of the absolute safest designs in the world. We decided to pay the upfront cost for that (our plants cost a LOT more than most US plants to build, not counting the graft of course). The world’s first major nuke accident was in Ontario at the old research reactor up in Bruce in the late fifties; I think maybe they learned their lessons about public safety back then.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy: I never said deaths equal zero. They don’t, outside perhaps the pointy little heads of PR reps working for GE. However, the rate of death per TWh of electricity is something like 2000 for coal, and less than one for nuclear.
Personally, I think that disposal of wastes can be quite viable; once all the energy has been wrung out of the stuff (which is many generations on) there are lots of ways to deal with what’s left. Our geography helps (I live on the edge of the most stable geological formation on earth; four billion years and counting bitches!) and vitrification and burial a few km down in the shield should be just fine. That said, you don’t want to make it inaccessible; in the old days the stuff that powers a lot of the new cool medical tech was thought of as nuclear waste.
Look. Right now the US’s thirst for petroleum is getting ready to completely destroy the entire Athabasca watershed. It’s already done a tremendous amount of damage to an area the size of Texas, and it’s only going to get worse as production ramps up. I’m not sure how Fukushima is worse than that.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Viva BrisVegas: I certainly don’t think it’s easy… but if you’re going to count the whole life cycle of nuclear, you’ve got to consider the whole life cycle of fossil fuels, and we’re getting a really good picture of that in Alberta at the tar sands (and, as another poster mentioned, in Virginia and Tennessee with their mountains). In Alberta, we have no idea of how to make the hundreds of square miles of insanely toxic tailings safe, and when some of those dikes go it’ll destroy the entire Athabasca watershed. Rates of deformed fish downstream of those ponds have gone through the roof, as has the number of weird cancers.
virag
@Cermet:
one of the questions that don’t have happy answers for the big money boyz is the $/kwh for commercial generation using fusion. so far, they don’t like those answers. not at all.
virag
not easy to count the deaths anyway. takes fancy math, honest investigation and 50-100 years. that shit don’t play well on the 24 hour newz or the blogz…
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Punchy: In a feed-and-bleed situation, the steam gets vented (carrying away a lot of heat and hopefully only a few short-lived decay products) and new water is pumped in. The problem with using seawater is that it leaves behind salt and other gak, which builds up and eventually interferes with pumping in more water. Not to mention that at those temperatures it’s corrosive as all fuck and will eventually eat away at the steel of the pressure vessel itself, if it hasn’t already.
@Hawes: I’ve also seen designs for a reactor that uses helium as the coolant and working fluid. It works at higher temperatures as well, making it more efficient, and producing less waste. The problem is that (AFAIK) nobody’s done the kinds of real risk assessment on these designs that they’ve done for light water reactors, and until that happens the NRC isn’t going to license anything that isn’t a LWR.