Mistermix’s frequent discussions of Fukishima have caused me to search for news every day, and it seems that every day the news gets worse:
The amount of radiation released by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in the days after the 11 March tsunami could have been more than double that originally estimated by its operator, Japan’s nuclear safety agency has said.
The revelation has raised fears that the situation at the plant, where fuel in three reactors suffered meltdown, was more serious than government officials have acknowledged.
In another development that is expected to add to criticism of Japan’s handling of the crisis, the agency said molten nuclear fuel dropped to the bottom of the pressure vessel in the No 1 reactor within five hours of the accident, 10 hours earlier than previously thought.
By the end of last week, radiation levels inside the reactor had risen to 4,000 millisieverts per hour, the highest atmospheric reading inside the plant since the disaster.
The agency also speculated that the meltdown in another reactor had been faster than initially estimated by the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco).
It is not clear whether the revised account of the accident, the world’s worst since Chernobyl in 1986, would have prompted Tepco to respond differently at the time.
But it is expected to raise questions about the ability of Japan’s nuclear authorities to provide accurate information to the public.
According to the latest estimates, 770,000 terabequerels – about 20% as much as the official estimate for Chernobyl – of radiation seeped from the plant in the week after the tsunami, more than double the initial estimate of 370,000.
Japan will never be the same.
Strandedvandal
Props for the title.
Loneoak
Let’s hope they’re never the same. That kind of management structure and submission to authority in charge of technology that will kill for millennia is a dangerous proposition. Not that we have it much better …
Villago Delenda Est
The nostrum my brigade commander once fed me as a young lieutenant on brigade staff duty one day stays with me: “bad news does not improve with age”.
We’re seeing that here, as more and more bad news comes out, with less time available to wrestle with it.
The problem with nuclear power is “what if it goes wrong?” America’s nuclear industry doesn’t want to face that question.
30 years ago a decision was made on the future of energy for the United States, and it was a very bad one. Reagan can never be forgiven for shitcanning all of Carter’s research initiatives out of spite and greed.
vor
My guess is they wind up with an exclusion zone around the plant likd Chernobyl.
gypsy howell
Too bad we won’t learn anything from their disaster here.
zmulls
I assumed that, too. How big a geographical area will have to be cordoned off, and for how many decades?
Will the amount of unusable and uninhabitable land equal a percentage of Japan in the single digits?
PurpleGirl
But it is expected to raise questions about the ability of Japan’s nuclear authorities to provide accurate information to the public.
Uh, I’d say it will raise questions and convince many that any government and industry group will not provide accurate and timely information about any “accident”.
C.J.
Never any good news from there, it seems.
jeffreyw
I pray to the FSM (Praise be to His Tentacles) the ramen supply is not affected. Ramen
Steve
Yeah, if there’s one thing Japan could never, ever recover from, it’s the unexpected release of large amounts of radiation.
brendancalling
by next year, I fully expect to read articles about “mysterious” fish kills on Japan’s coast and “inexplicable” levels of radiation in milk, just like we get her in the US about the Gulf Coast.
perhaps the japanese will follow our lead and put a gag order on scientists dealing with the aftermath.
bkny
this blog does frequent updates on these disasters (anyone remember the gulf of mexico) … prolly too many links; but nevertheless depressingly informative:
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/
patrick II
This link was posted in another comment on another thread, but perhaps worth reposting here. Physicist Michio Kaku asserts that we almost lost Northern Japan
Also, that there was 100 percent meltdown in three reactors and only the last minute decision to cool the reactors with seawater saved Japan from three containment breaches and three simultaneous Chernobyls.
And that TEPCO did not want to put in the seawater — they were still trying to save their investment.
PeakVT
Arnie Gundersen on US evacuation plans.
Doug Harlan J
Great title.
Villago Delenda Est
@patrick II:
Money is more important than life itself.
That’s the epitaph of modern man.
Cliff in NH
Bunny born without ears, Outside the exclusion zone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw2R7y65nFg
MattF
Lesson from history: one should not believe initial statements about nuclear reactor meltdowns, period. Not from industry, not from government, not from nobody.
kdaug
I’d thought that everyone understood that it would be years or decades before the effects of radiation poisoning would manifest themselves.
But then I saw a man on my TeeVee telling me that WAY more people were killed in the tsunami – in fact, no one has died of radiation poisoning at all! So we’ve got nothing to worry about!
niknik
@Steve: What a funny joke, ass.
Michael Finn
A few things…
There is a containment dome around the plants, unlike Chernobyl, that is keeping the majority of radiation in-house. Most of the fuel is covered by water which is a good neutron absorber which is keeping it from melting down.
After the earthquake, please remember that everybody everywhere had no clue in what was happening. A 9.0 earthquake occurs and all communication/transportation goes down. The executives of the company did want to go down there and oversee what was happening but gave their ride to government officials to help them direct the flow of aide.
I’m not making excuses for anybody here but when a natural disaster occurs that destroys a good portion of your country/infrastructure, communication gets fucked up.
gizmo
Doesn’t it seem that the nuclear-powered nations ought to have an international ready-response team that is fully equipped and funded to act immediately in the event of a crisis? The early stages of a nuclear accident are critical, and perhaps there would be better outcomes if there was a standing team that could act pronto.
lonesomerobot
There could be an entire college course on corporate public relations that focuses only on the response to the BP spill and TEPCO meltdowns. The new proven formula, courtesy of BP:
1) prevent any outside authorities from having any immediate access to the accident site
2) deny, deny, deny that the problem is as bad as it is
3) flood the internets with pro-industry shills who exhibit specific, demonstrable “knowledge” of how the industry works and attack anyone who suggests the problem might be worse
4) manage the flow of inevitable truth, keeping it to a trickle and obfuscating any metrics that the public might use to come to their own conclusions
5) after a long enough time, when the story falls far enough off the radar, THEN go ahead and admit, yes, it really was that bad all along. But by then not nearly as many people will care.
I’d personally like to thank Hillary Rosen (former head of the RIAA), who PR-managed the BP crisis, for helping devise this conscientious, socially-responsible corporate smiley face that any business should know as a valuable tool for public affairs crisis-management.
And to any commenter on any blog that used words like “unhinged” to describe those of us who knew all along that this was a grand-scale disaster: FUCK YOU.
RareSanity
Physically and emotionally, no. But politically? It will be like it never happened.
Having worked in a Japanese company for going on 8 years, the responses from the government and Tepco during this disaster, were all to predictable. It’s the same tact Sony took when their networks were getting hacked left and right, and the same one Toyota took during the last two major recall situations.
Japanese government/business culture is a very regimented, top-down control structure. And I don’t use the word “control” lightly. The culture demands that situations have every variable be controlled as much as possible. Now we all know that some variables just can’t be controlled, but that does not deter attempts.
The structure is basically setup to honor executives/government officials when things go well and to protect them when they go wrong. I don’t say these things is in a negative light, as a matter of fact, it is quite amazing the level of dedication and pride, the culture produces.
However, mistakes that bring embarrassment and shame upon a company, or the country, are not easily forgiven. Pride is the driving force behind all of this. The government and Tepco behaved exactly as I would expected. First, try to avoid embarrassment, we don’t air our dirty laundry in public. Second, try to handle the situation as quickly and as quietly as possible, with no outsiders involved, that may reveal things about us that we would find embarrassing. Thirdly, if we begin to lose control of the situation, we must control the public perception of the incident to avoid embarrassment. Fourth, allow the truth the get out in a controlled manner to spread out the embarrassment, over time. We do not want to be perceived as dishonest.
It’s all standard operating procedure. I wish you all could experience how many times me and my U.S. engineering brethren have made the statement, to our Japanese counterparts:
“Why didn’t you just tell us that months ago? This situation wouldn’t have gotten to this point if we would have known that then.”
It’s just a different culture. In some ways it’s better than American culture, some ways it’s worse. Such is the world…
Michael Finn
@bkny: I was reading that blog until they started to give bullshit answers on these bullshit comparisons to Chernobyl, they went from this being 2x as bad as Chernobyl to 24x very quickly.
Chernobyl was a nuclear reaction going off in the air with no cooling or protective layering. It released something on the order of 200 million curies which Fukishima has released 4 million (different measurement of different types of radiation).
WereBear
Nor should he.
DBrown
@vor: A saving grace is it occured on the coast and nearly at sea level …
Matt in HB
@Loneoak: That’s really the problem with nuclear energy though, isn’t it? There is no “management regime” that can be devised to last as long as the hazardous materials we’re generating. It’s the height of hubris to think we can manage a very dangerous problem that will last hundreds of generations.
I’m guessing clean up costs and thousands of years of waste storage aren’t included in these projects’ ROIC calculations.
Alex S.
@lonesomerobot:
Very nice! I really like point 3. There were even some examples on this blog, commenters that suddenly appeared and were never heard of again.
Steve
@niknik: It’s not a joke. It’s a roll of the eyes at what I consider an overly melodramatic line.
lonesomerobot
@Alex S.: and the truth is, BP hasn’t to this day had to progress to step 5. The nature of that crisis is just murky enough for them to be able to ride out step 4, ad infinitum. At this point, step 5 would be admitting guilt and they have no reason to do so.
John Weiss
@gizmo: What we need, those of us in the world who consume electricity, is modern reactor designs. There is not a reactor in the world that was built with designs that are more recent than forty years.
Thorium reactors are much safer than uranium or plutonium reactors. If we can put people on the moon, we can design a safe reliable power source. Wind and sun are mostly just fine, but neither is reliable.
DBrown
@Alex S.: Yes, but it appeared to me thart some of the paid trolls (a few) really knew their shit and were willing to answer detailed questions with good information and not BS – not all were worthless shrills. BJ did get some of the better and knowledgable ones, and for that, I think we own some thanks to some of the more knowledgable people here that ask good questions all the time.
Poopyman
@PeakVT:
Too bad the White House is only 45 miles from Calvert Cliffs.
Villago Delenda Est
@RareSanity:
Reminds me of a very basic problem I observed during my tour in Korea. My unit had a number of KATUSAs (Korean Augmentee To the United States Army) and an ongoing problem was the issue of eye contact. In Korean culture, eye contact between superior and subordinate is considered disrespectful, while the lack of eye contact in our culture is considered disrespectful. So, obviously, there is a clash on pretty fundamental terms.
DBrown
@John Weiss: The CANDU is safe and as for thorium – there are zero examples; either every nuclear scientist is on the take or something about thorium reactors do not make anyone desire to build them – of course, cureent uranium reactors aren’t exactly cost-effective, so maybe thorium needs a look.
lonesomerobot
@DBrown: Of course they knew their shit. But they were still defending their own livelihoods. I can’t blame them for that, but still, I won’t pretend that they were unbiased.
Alex S.
@DBrown:
I agree.
jheartney
@Poopyman:
A 50-mile exclusion zone from Indian Point essentially eliminates NYC.
Gundersen doesn’t connect the dots, but the bottom line is requiring a realistic exclusion zone would effectively shut down most nuke plants.
bkny
michael finn .. i still find it a very good source for links for issues long forgotten except by those impacted.. and those with a conscience.
re evacuation zones for nuke plants — saw something yesterday that the nebraska nuclear power plant is in danger re the flooding of the missouri river…
Villago Delenda Est
@gizmo:
You really want to piss off the bean counters, don’t you?
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@MattF:
This. Alas, it seems that nobody but the Swiss and the Germans will actually learn and remember this little history lesson.
RareSanity
@Villago Delenda Est:
This is so true.
Our company rotates their “up and coming” employees for 5 year terms in the U.S. office. One of the things that they notice right away, is what to them, is the extremely informal (almost insulting) manner in which we address each other only by first name. To them, it’s almost always Mr. (suffix with -san) when addressing each other, even if only using the first name.
The funniest thing to me, is to see the look on their faces when the American employees not only challenge, but will openly mock their “superiors”. In a meeting, no less! The look of, “I can’t believe you just said that to your boss…” is priceless.
We don’t do it to Japanese management though, we would like to continue our employment…
jurassicpork
Guys, I am so sorry for this offtopic comment but I wouldn’t be violating blog protocol it we weren’t so close to extinction. Details are here but our backs really are against the wall and I swear to Christ I am not making this up. We really are this close to living out of a car that we may not be able to keep on the road. I am positively wide-eyed with panic and fear right now.
BO_Bill
We nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki and both are doing just fine. People do not understand the difference between the half-life of an isotope such as Cesium-137 and the effects of fission. The really nasty products of a fission reaction are gone after a few seconds. After this much time, the only surviving radioisotopes left in Japan are relatively benign, and will not hurt anyone.
President Barack Obama let women run his Libya policy and now thousands consist of nothing more than torn, decaying flesh. Nobody died as a result of Japan’s nuclear challenges.
Michael Finn
@bkny: I’m just saying that in this particular case the numbers on that site are multiplying very quickly without any evidence.
Villago Delenda Est
@BO_Bill:
It’s difficult to distill stupid to this level of purity, yet, here we have it.
PanAmerican
Using fission to boil water is a solution looking for a use. I think it was driven by the need to justify\rationalize\leverage the costs sunk into weapons and propulsion systems for the War Machine.
On a domestic US political note, the economic knockdown effect from this disaster may very well cost Obama re-election.
trollhattan
The IAEA, UCC and especially our own NRC were a lot more realistic in their appraisal of the TEPCO situation (especially the controversial evacuation zone radius) than the Japanese government. TEPCO was tragically, vastly unprepared and have yet to regain their footing.
I haven’t a clue what they’re going to do with the puddles of fuel at the bottom of those reactor vessels–burial in situ for perpetuity seems likely. Unit 2 is of most interest to me because of the plutonium fuel component, but I don’t know that it’s the most compromised reactor.
“It could never happen here” doesn’t convince me, here in the Land of E-5 Tornadoes.
Speaking of which, a photo:
http://hubbub.wbur.org/2011/06/06/tornado-from-space
trollhattan
@BO_Bill:
Get outta the deep end of the pool, kid.
trollhattan
@PanAmerican:
Atoms for Peace(tm), baby. I especially enjoyed the halcyon days when we used nukes as giant construction shovels. Seems reasonable, right?
handsmile
@Michael Finn:
A few things:
You write (at #21 above): “There is a containment dome around the plants…”
Would you be so kind as to disclose your top-secret source on this assertion? No other news organization or website has reported that there was a single containment dome covering the Fukushima Daichi plant. There were individual containment domes enclosing each separate nuclear reactor there, several of which, as you may have heard, were destroyed by hydrogen gas explosions in the days immediately following the earthquake/tsunami.
You continue: “..keeping the majority of radiation in-house.”
That certainly is an unorthodox measure of radiation leakage contamination and must be of great comfort to the tens of thousands of people who remain evacuated up to 30km distance from the plant.
You write: “The executives of the company did want to go down there and oversee what was happening but gave their ride to government officials to help them direct the flow of aide. [sic]”
Aside from a clumsy paraphrase of a TEPCO press release, what does that sentence even mean? “Gave their ride”?
You write: “When a natural disaster occurs that destroys a good portion of your country/infrastructure communications gets fucked up.”
An atlas may be of some help here. The March 11 earthquake/tsunami affected a relatively small area of the coastline of central northeastern Japan. While the human and property annihilation was and continues to be catastrophic in that region, the rest of Japan and its infrastructure/communications networks remained stable and viable. I know this not only from family members in-country, but also from daily podcasts from NHK and Japanese newspapers reporting on the situation from the very first day.
Sorry, but it does appear as if you’re making excuses – and not very well.
alwhite
@zmulls:
Given the half life, somewhere between 500 and 1000 decades
alwhite
@MattF:
Its not just nukes – whenever there is a problem, care recalls, food safety issues, oil spills, military invasions, the first reports are always, always, always, lies. And then they wonder why people don’t believe them,
John Weiss
@DBrown: Quite right about CANDU reactors. Thorium is interesting in several ways: it commonly occurs, compared to uranium, it cannot sustain a reaction without a source of neutrons (meaning that with some designs one can regulate power output without moderators and shut it down quickly) and it’s radioactive by-products are less toxic and have a much shorter half-life. And what’s really cool about it? One can’t make a bomb with it.
John Weiss
@PanAmerican: “Using fission to boil water is a solution looking for a use. I think it was driven by the need to justifyrationalizeleverage the costs sunk into weapons and propulsion systems for the War Machine.”
Don’t know about you, but I’d rather live downwind from a nuke than downwind from a coal-fired plant. Odds of a happy, long life are much better.
NoPublic
The thing I still don’t get is why people are so very concerned about the long term potential death toll of this and simultaneously willing to ignore the nearly 3000 people each year directly killed by coal mining (let alone those dying due to second order effects of coal-based energy production). But that’s just me.
p mac
Lessons learned:
* Always put your nuclear plants to the East [coast]. (Prevailing wind is from the west, so most of your fallout will fall somewhere else, hopefully on the ocean, but other countries will do in a pinch.)
* If You can’t do that, put your nuclear plants near the ocean (You get to dilute your fallout with everybody else’s sea water.)
* But do put your nuke plants above the tsunami line. Despite these ameliorations, fixing broken plants really is expensive.
Yutsano
@John Weiss:
You just discovered the fatal flaw for the MIC and therefore why thorium will stay hypothetical.
mrmobi
@BO_Bill:
Well BO, let’s try to distill this idiocy just a bit.
From Wikipedia:
So, BO, don’t go wading the the Pacific near Fukushima for 100,000 years or so, ok?
Public officials from large corporations lie all the time. If a spokesman for a large corporation tells you that things are just fine, you should gather up your family and run away as fast as possible.
I don’t have a link for this, but my understanding is that at least three of the 50 Fukushima plant workers have already died from radiation exposure, (not that TEPCO is being forthcoming with information about worker health) and, unfortunately, the amount of radioactive water that continues to pour into the ocean pretty much guarantees many more deaths. But don’t worry, officials at Fukushima will continue to obfuscate, and radiation is odorless, colorless and tasteless, so who’s to know?
Things are so bad at Fukushima Daiichi that a group of senior citizen engineers and scientists have volunteered to work on the cleanup, with the expectation that they would be allowed to exceed radiation exposure limits, even at the cost of their own lives. Reminds me of the people who volunteered at ground zero at little, but straight up heroic, in any case.
Linda Featheringill
Paul Rogers and The Firm, Radioactive.
Great song. Deep, deep biting sarcasm to use it with this topic.
I guess that you went with this title because this shit makes you angry. I understand.
BO_Bill
I forgot how challenging many of you were. This is most likely a consequence of your education. The activity, or health threat, of an isotope is the inverse of its half-life. When you read something that says ’90 years or less’ , that means that there are isotopes with a half-life of less than 90 years. And, as I previously informed you, the really nasty stuff goes away after a few seconds. Any isotope with a long half-life is inherently stable and does not give off much radiation. If your city was to get nuked, you would probably want to say in the basement for a couple of weeks.
Now, BEHOLD, Nagasaki Today.
ItinerantPedant
@John Weiss: Modern reactor designs are only as good as the people running them. In short, until you tell me that you’ve designed an entirely new management system to manage a plant (and likely an entirely new economic paradigm to go with it) then all the neat designs in the world can’t overcome running plants well past their “sell by” dates, shorting maintenance in the interest of short term profits, and managing to protect careerist managers rather than maximizing safety.
In short, everyone who talks about reactor technology has ENTIRELY MISSED THE POINT of this particular incident.
Neutron Flux
You say true, I say thankya.
Neutron Flux
My reply in #64 is addressed to ItinerantPendant
PeakVT
@handsmile: Very nice. (Minor note: none of the containment structures at Fukushima are actually domed like they are at most PWRs. The containment is a substructure of/within the reactor building.)
John Weiss
@Yutsano: Now that’s rather cynical. Though probably at some point true.
The world leader in thorium power is… India! She’s got plans for start-ups within ten years! And the US? Lots of old, complicated (read that unsafe) plants based of designs 40 years old. And no plans for the future but wind and solar, unreliable and diffuse sources. Something isn’t right, don’t you agree?
Linda Featheringill
@BO_Bill:
Is this, by any chance, Brick Oven Bill?
daveNYC
@BO_Bill:
That’s true, but not in the way you probably meant.
Anyhoo, Cesium-137. Thirty year half-life, not your friend.
Strontium-90. Twenty-nine (ish) year half-life, not your friend.
Iodine-131. Eight day half-life (long enough to get in someone’s thyroid), not your friend.
Plutonium (any of it). Effectively around forever (as far as we’re concerned, low radioactivity but toxic as Hell.
But other than that, nuclear reactors produce nothing but sunshine and happy thoughts.
John Weiss
@ItinerantPedant: Well, management is a universal problem (it’s hard to find good help). Modern uranium-fueled designs shut themselves down if they get too hot without any intervention by ‘management’. Google you some “pebble bed reactors”. And some “thorium reactors” while you’re at it.
PeakVT
@John Weiss: …. India! She’s got …
Wait, when did India grow breasts and other parts that scare conservative NYT columnists?
trollhattan
@BO_Bill:
You ignorant putz, we (the U.S.) are still dealing with waste from the Manhattan Project–is that enough elapsed time for you, or would you like to go live in a tent on the Hanford Reservation and make tea from the groundwater and explore the idea further? And let’s park forever the notion that an airburst atomic explosion and a reactor meltdown have anything in common.
I did so love it after JC banned your sorry butt.
trollhattan
@daveNYC:
Geez, don’t get him confused by bringing up alpha, beta and gamma emitters.
John Weiss
@PeakVT: If a country could grow breasts, it would be India, and she wouldn’t stop with breasts, either.
Yutsano
@trollhattan: Well FWIW that waste is keeping my father gainfully and happily employed and the Japanese have already come knocking on his door wanting his expertise. I think the old gruff wants to retire on time though.
BO_Bill
Trollhaten; The principle difference between a nuclear power plant and a nuclear warhead is that while the radioactive materials from a nuclear power plant largely stay in the engineered containment vessel in the case of a meltdown, the radioactive materials from a warhead BLOW UP AND GO ALL OVER THE PLACE DUMBASS.
Now, analyzing this difference, we conclude that warheads are less conducive to public health than engineered containment vessels. And we further conclude that if a person was to accumulate and concentrate Cesium-137 to be their friend in the kitchen, perhaps Mother Nature does not intend for that particular person to reproduce. Now, again,
BEHOLD! Nagasaki Today.
trollhattan
@Yutsano:
Well, bless your dad for sticking with it–talk about a profession where you know you’ll never outlive the project timeline.
Maybe he can land a nice quarter-time consulting gig, paid in vast buckeds of yen? That would ease the pains of retirement some.
trollhattan
@BO_Bill:
Heh-heh, you so funny.
Now. Go. Away.
ItinerantPedant
@John Weiss: Sure I was aware of pebble bed reactors (not so much thorium) and other dead man switch type rectors.
None of which (like everything else with more than 2 moving parts) can survive the kind of institutional willful avoidance of uncomfortable realities that a manager faced with hitting their Q2 retained earnings is capable of. Handwaving “Management is a universal problem” misses the point. Again.
Any system is weakest where it interacts with the people running it. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess you’re an engineer of some sort. Every engineer I know thinks that somehow they can design a fool proof system. You can’t. You. Just. Can’t.
So as a society you decide which systems and technologies you’re going to approve with that in mind. If the downside is Chernobyl bad, you don’t get to point to technology. You want to build more of the damn things, you tell me how you’re going to manage them organizationally, not technologically.
trollhattan
@ItinerantPedant:
Has anybody constructed a pebble bed reactor? I’ve read of them for, geez, more than a decade but am unaware if there’s a functioning one somewhere.
Yutsano
@trollhattan: It’s so nice to put up nice bright shiny pictures of a modern city…and totally ignore the numerous and long-lasting health effects both Nagasaki and Hiroshima are still experiencing. But life is always easier in BoBworld, reality not allowed.
My dad has dealt with nukes pretty much his entire working career (20 in the Navy) so it’s his comfort zone.
ItinerantPedant
And for what it’s worth I’ve seen one suggestion warranting further review, from SF author Charlie Stross over at his blog.
daveNYC
@John Weiss: Fuck that shit. How about you come up with some new ultra-safe nuclear tech that I can Google and get results back that include the words “currently in use in the real world”.
It’s like we’re talking about the problems with the shuttle program, and you’re telling us to read more about warp drives.
ItinerantPedant
@trollhattan: Nope. They were designed after the manifest problems of the older technologies became known, coupled with the kind of management that gets you Three Mile Island, Bhopal, and the Pinto, which resulted in such massive protests and hassles that no power company here wanted to build a new reactor.
Coupled with (then) falling fossil fuel prices and the rationale for nuke construction went away. Most everywhere else (France, Germany, Japan, etc.) seemed to have an installed base of the older designs (especially France which went great guns nuke early and often) which, like most large fixed cost investments, had a long nominal lifespan.
Which is to say, I’m not sure a lack of pebble bed reactors points to anything other than the inherent structure if the nuclear power industry.
ericblair
@daveNYC:
If nobody ever builds anything unless someone else has built it first, you realize that nobody will build anything new ever again, right?
I’m not a big fan of nuclear power, but it seems you have to think about what the alternatives are going to be. We should go balls to the wall on green power technologies, but that’s not going to give you anywhere near 100% of power needs (I’ve seen figures around 30%). So you’re going to need other base power sources, and that most likely means more coal plants. We’re exchanging risks of a nuclear catastrophe to increasing the likelihood of a global, universal climate catastrophe. It really sucks, but there you are.
trollhattan
@ItinerantPedant:
Okay, thanks. I sort of answered my own question, Germany built a small (15MW) working model that ran for 21 years.
http://www.newsweek.com/2002/04/07/the-last-great-hope.html
There was some sort of US-South African consortium at one point, but it dissolved. Now, it may be up to the Chinese. Here’s hoping they don’t cut too many corners.
Cliff in NH
@John Weiss:
This has to be one of the Stupidest things I have Ever read.
Oil Spill Vs. Wind Spill Vs. Sun Spill:
http://www.thegoodhuman.com/2010/05/03/oil-spill-vs-wind-spill-vs-sun-spill/
Nuke spill:
http://www.pixelpress.org/chernobyl/index.html
El Cid
The comparisons to Chernobyl, and exceeding Chernobyl, most recently by Michio Kaku’s comments when the Japanese government finally admitted that there were indeed 3 complete meltdowns, were based on the conclusion that only the massive and untried inrush of seawater for cooling prevented the sort of core fire which released the radiation throughout so much of the former Soviet Union at its most concentrated.
So apart from the seawater, it was indeed going to be Chernobyl, and more serious, given the Japanese government’s admission of the meltdowns. Though there were certainly reasons for Fukushima’s immediate placement, it might very well have been situated even locally (even if you have to imagine a slightly different topology) in such a way that such quantities of seawater weren’t available.
The comparison is entirely apt, as long as one is realistic about the multiplier of what seemed likely to be released versus Chernobyl.
Cliff in NH
Nuke Spill:
http://www.pixelpress.org/chernobyl/index.html
Marcellus Shale DIscount Sale
no problems dudes, i got your back.
Cliff in NH
@Strandedvandal:
The Title:
I’m Not Uptight, I’m Not Unattractive:
http://www.pixelpress.org/chernobyl/screen8.html
I’m Not Uptight, I’m Not Unattractive:
http://www.pixelpress.org/chernobyl/screen12.html
daveNYC
@ericblair: Not my point. I’m just sick of the pro-nuclear posters name dropping tech that either doesn’t work, is still in the wishful thinking design stage, or has nearly as many issues as the tech that they want want to replace. Read the wiki on Pebble Bed and Thorium reactors. They are not the superawesomesauce winfests that the posters imply they are.
It’s about as useful as mentioning a Tokamak fusion reactor as the solution to our energy problems.
You know what our potential sources of energy are? Fossil sources that are finite in availability and create piles of pollution, wind and solar that are intermittent and inefficient, and nuclear reactors that suck and are run by morons.
John Weiss
@ItinerantPedant: Good. Dead man switch reactors. The point being that I agree with you about “any system is weakest where it interacts with the people running it”. Of course it is. Hence the DMS design.
PS Your guess was close. I was raised by a ceramics engineer and a school teacher.
You know, I’ll bet that you’re old enough to know that no matter what, you won’t live forever and that anything at all can go wrong. So what do you do? You play the odds. Do we need electricity to live? Nope. Do we need it to maintain our civilization? Until something better comes along or until we modify our civilization, we do.
So, whaddya want, (hopefully) well-designed nukes (’till we figure out fusion) or a declining level of tech/civilization? I don’t see a choice.
virag
@Steve:
jesus.
virag
@John Weiss:
wow, that’s quite a lack of imagination and innovation.
the only choice is nukes–and fusion!! what’s the kwh on that jobby gonna be?–or declining level of civilization? really?
John Weiss
@daveNYC: Aww, Dave. Aren’t you something?
If the wise, educated public will ever get over their irrational fear of nuclear power, thus allowing a new plant to be funded, you’ll see newly designed power plants. I’m not talking warp drives, I’m talking about stuff that works and is within the grasp of current tech.
virag
@brendancalling:
mysterious fish? blinky?
ericblair
@daveNYC:
Hey, at the end of the day, at least we at BJ can all agree that life sucks.
John Weiss
@Cliff in NH: I’m flattered. I excel, at least in one person’s mind, to the ultimate.
I said that wind and solar were unreliable. They are, ’cause no one has come up with a practical method of storing the energy that they create.
I don’t see what oil spills have to do with the current discussion, do you?
John Weiss
@virag: Thanks for the kind thoughts. As long as humans keep breeding the way most rodents do, yeah, we’re going to need power and lots of it. Perhaps you favor orbiting solar stations?
virag
@PanAmerican:
atoms for peace! not only justify the cost and existence of nuclear weapons, but also to mollify the conscience of some of the nerds who were instrumental in getting the things going in the first place. that’s a huge incentive on its own.
that’s why some of those idiots pushed for star wars missile defense so hard under ronnie alzheimer’s. if they could 100% protect from nuclear weapons, they weren’t so bad!
virag
@John Weiss:
i don’t have a blind belief in the worst choice as the first choice, that’s all.
orbiting solar stations? that kind that would shoot microwaves to receivers on the surface, or the other kind?
virag
you know what’s pretty safe? looking at the ways the electricity and energy are used and wasted and making improvements to infrastructure and appliances and shit.
you know what else? it’s a ginormous economic boost, too!
Cliff in NH
@John Weiss:
You Clearly have no idea what you are talking about.
How about you look at a power usage graph for ANYWHERE in the world – You are free to explain how peak solar energy and peak usage are Soooo very different.
You should also explain your unsubstantiated claim that widely distributed wind resources are not base load power.
daveNYC
@John Weiss: You mean their irrational fear that the safety systems won’t work as advertised and that management will be more interested in covering their asses than ensuring the safety of the plant and the surrounding population?
Cliff in NH
@daveNYC:
suffer from corrosion. (and failures of cap-ex aka maintenance)
Cliff in NH
@Cliff in NH:
If its too hard for you John, here is a vid of the distribution of CO2 over the us, which shows a high resolution, interactive map of United States carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels (directly related to total energy use)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJpj8UUMTaI
Robert Sneddon
@daveNYC: As well as the sources you list there’s also hydro power, which is claimed as a renewable energy source by some folks until you mention the Banquaio dam disaster in China (between 100,000 and 200,000 dead) and they shuffle their feet and look shifty. Of course Banquaio isn’t the only lethal dam failure in history, just the poster child for the industry. China has now built the Three Gorges dams (about 19GW of generating capacity) which, if they ever let go will kill millions.
As for comparisons between Tchernobyl and Fukushima, I recently took a look at a map showing the exclusion zone(s) around Tchernobyl dated 1996. The exclusion zone around Fukushima Daiichi to scale is only a little bigger than the marker on the Tchernobyl map showing where the reactor was located.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chernobyl_radiation_map_1996.svg
Robert Sneddon
@Cliff in NH: Energy usage, especially for home heating in Europe tends to be highest in winter when solar energy collectors are at their least productive due to long airpaths (the sun remains low in the sky during the day) absorbing UV energy. We also get extended periods of continuous cloud cover which also doesn’t help. In addition the days are much shorter than in summer, of course — in midwinter in my home city of Edinburgh we get about 6 hours of daylight. It is somewhat different in the US though.
Cliff in NH
@Robert Sneddon:
Yup the wind stops blowing, the tides stop flowing. great call.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Scotland
You better be doing some research dude.
John Weiss
@virag: “orbiting solar stations? that kind that would shoot microwaves to receivers on the surface, or the other kind?”
The microwave sort. The idea is a large array of receivers, so the microwave density is low enough so’s not to be dangerous, just in case. Nukes, however, are much less expensive.
Cliff in NH
@Robert Sneddon:
Here is Your governments plan:
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/54357/0013233.pdf
Oh, woops, You generate too much and can’t export it, well now, that’s Surely a problem of not enough generation.
Robert Sneddon
@Cliff in NH: There’s been a few folks who have built tidal and wave power systems and tried them out in sheltered coastal areas around Scotland. One of the better ones, a concrete wave-tower system lasted six months before it broke up from the effects of the waves and weather. The north Atlantic is a monster.
It takes a lot of effort and maintenance to keep something planted in the ocean from falling apart in rough weather and that’s when it is not trying to stand in the way of the waves and tides to extract energy from them. See the Alexander Kielland disaster for an example, or the Brent Alpha disaster, and they were situated in the North Sea which is a millpond compared to the more enegetic Atlantic.
The cost of maintaining anything at sea is ten times or more that of a land-based facility, never mind the extra costs and losses involved in transferring the energy back to the shore. It’s one reason I’m puzzled at the offshore wind generation plans being put forward here and elsewhere as the capital costs of building ANYTHING offshore are eyewatering.
Scotland probably could become energy independent based on renewables; it’s a country with a small population, only 15% that of California and now the older smokestack industries have died off (steel, shipbuilding etc.) its manufacturing base doesn’t require a lot of power per se. Norway is in the same boat with its abundant hydro power but again it has a small population and corresponding small energy demand. The problem, as such, is that Scotland is a net energy exporter to its bigger more populous neighbour to the south but that’s only based on its nuclear and coal-burning power stations; the intermittent wind power generators (grid solar here is a non-starter for obvious geographical reasons) are a drop in the bucket. The current (no pun intended) tidal and sea-current generators being trialled are very experimental and it may be impossible to build them cheaply enough for the energy they produce to be cost-efficient in any scenario unless we are somehow forced to gear down to the level of hamster-wheels.
Cliff in NH
@John Weiss:
Prove it.
John Weiss
@Cliff in NH: “You Clearly have no idea what you are talking about.
How about you look at a power usage graph for ANYWHERE in the world – You are free to explain how peak solar energy and peak usage are Soooo very different.
You should also explain your unsubstantiated claim that widely distributed wind resources are not base load power.”
Thank you for the kind words.
The congruence of peak solar energy and peak useage match where the climate is hot and cloudless, as, say Arizona, where AC is practically needed to live there. In another climate, where our bugaboo is heat in the winter, it’s (you guessed!) not very sunny. Widely distributed wind sources result in the problems we have today with widely distributed sources, to wit: a big ‘ol power grid, which even if made ‘smart’ is still wasteful and expensive to maintain.
As for wind power, it suffers the same sort of disadvantages that solar does. Both kinds of generation are unreliable. Fine for those days when they work. Until some sort of storage of the power they generate that is inexpensive and practical, these methods of power generation are certainly helpful, but they aren’t going to shut the coal plants down.
I want a thorium reactor in every town. I want one for my house!
Cliff in NH
@Robert Sneddon:
Source of renewable energy.
Love the concentration on failures, instead of successes.
John Weiss
@Cliff in NH: Cliff, Cliff. I’ve nothing to prove. You do know that the happy feets for putting a pound of something into LEO is around 10,000 dollars, right? Well, the miceklwave thingies are going to have to be placed in geosync orbit, right? Maybe double the cost? And then one must go UP THERE to service them, right?
Those orbiting satellites will have to wait for a ‘space elevator’, or something.
Cliff in NH
@John Weiss:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/aj07_jamc.pdf
Cliff in NH
@John Weiss:
Wha??? WTF you talkin’ ’bout fairy-tails for, I’m talking about things that exist on earth, for purchase, NOW.
John Weiss
@Cliff in NH: Well, thanks for the link. What did I say about power grids?
I think that a much better solution is locally generated power. No brown-outs, you know.
http://pediaview.com/openpedia/Electricity_transmission#Losses
Cliff in NH
@John Weiss:
Solar
Solar thermal
Geothermal
Air-source heatpumps
Ground-source heat pumps
Water source heat pumps
Waste heat from industrial source heat pumps
Wind
Tidal Flows
But how much more coal will be preserved for the future?
Cliff in NH
@John Weiss:
Yup, Germany is Just Like Arizona, try again?
John Weiss
@Cliff in NH: OK. You can buy a pebble-bed reactor, if you can get a permit to build any kind of reactor. You can build a thorium reactor if you can get a permit. If you have the bucks. Both are available, here and now.
Or you can accept the status quo, you know, where they’re hauling mountain tops away to the power plants and throwing everything but the coal into the valleys.
Because I do not believe that wind/solar power will ever fill the need, and because the idea of a national grid, which we have of course, is dumb. Like old nuke plant designs: they work, but they are high maintenance and not particularly efficient.
Cliff in NH
@John Weiss:
From the paper you didn’t read:
John Weiss
@Cliff in NH: Here’s a two-fer: the thing about coal, is it’s dangerous to burn, and past that, it has limited usefulness. Not useless, limited usefulness (unlike oil).
Who said Germany is just like Arizona? I’m sayin’, in case you’re listening, is various climates make solar and wind more or less useful. Unless there’s a flopping huge grid. Can’t be the only sources of power at this point in techno history.
Then there’s fracked natural gas. Don’t get me started, please.
Cliff in NH
@John Weiss:
Ah, There, Found your problem. No Facts.
Solar has come down ~20% in cost recently… Must be unrelated to all that research…
John Weiss
@Cliff in NH: Oh, stop being rude. Of course I read the article. I think that in practice, it’s very optimistic. What, you collect the power from a bunch of wind farms and shoot it over a single line to somewhere and it increases transmission efficiency by eighteen percent?
I doubt that, it sounds like magic to me.
Cliff in NH
@John Weiss:
Are you attempting to claim we don’t have a powergrid in this country?
Are you saying we can’t upgrade?
WTF?
Cliff in NH
@John Weiss:
Oooooh, science is Magic now.
You are obtuse.
John Weiss
@Cliff in NH: Ok, ok. I know solar has come down in cost. I also know that wind and solar simply don’t work in many places (though they don’t hurt). I think that local power generation is “the answer”, apparently you don’t. That’s fine. You’re a fan of low density power generation, I’m not. You like large distribution grids, I don’t.
You accuse me of not having facts. Fine. I think I’ll go plant something.
Robert Sneddon
@Cliff in NH:
Who is going to pay for the dedicated wind farm interconnects? I know wind farm operators in the UK won’t pay for them, they only pay for the haul from their farms to the nearest regular grid connection point and after that they sit back and collect the money from their real profit centre, Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs).
Building out a Smart Grid is going to cost a lot; in the case of the US it will probably end up costing trillions of dollars and it will not add one solitary watt to the actual generating capacity; the only structural benefits are that it makes it easier and more efficient to move power created by the existing generators around the country.
An energy journalist I read a while back explained the two real reasons behind the US energy industry’s drive for a smart grid and smart metering. The first reason is the ability to black out very small areas like residential suburbs without knocking out the neighbouring hospital or military base when the limited baseload is all committed elsewhere and the wind dies or the sun goes behind a cloud. The existing grid can’t allow for such fine-grained control and high-priority facilities have to maintain backup generators on-site in case of area blackouts due to supply failures.
The second reason for smart metering is more avariciously capitalistic; the ability for electricity suppliers to auction power on a real-time basis to individual customers. If you want your lights to stay on and the power supply is non-optimal then you can bid on-line against your neighbours. Low bid and you can light candles instead. Basically the smart grid will permit a million Enrons to bloom where only a single state-wide operation could exist previously given the crude grid control structures in place back then.
mapaghimagsik
@RareSanity:
I work in an american company and thats how it is too.
Cliff in NH
As far as I can tell, the only argument so far is “Don’t invest! We Cant afford it! Hell no You Can’t!”
Cliff in NH
@Robert Sneddon:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/29/980087/-My-Solar-Panels-Rock?via=tag
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/03/981774/-Making-My-First-Clean-Kilowatt?via=search
It can even be done up North here:
The Maine Solar House:
http://www.solarhouse.com/
Cliff in NH
@Robert Sneddon:
http://www.solarhouse.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=68:battery-backkup-system&catid=38:core&Itemid=62
and as a reminder, 62MW in 16 years…
If the SERC program existed for that entire time, that would be about $19,000+
Cliff in NH
@Cliff in NH:
As a simple exercise in math, compare the current return on a US Treasury bond VS the return on a solar system of equivalent value. (consider also the solar system pays till it wears out – No silicon based system has yet ‘worn out’.)
Cliff in NH
HAHAHA.
No answers to factual real world examples, even hours later.
HaHaHa!!!
mclaren
@vor:
And if they do, know what will happen?
Wildlife will flourish. Species long thought extinct will make a dramatic comeback. Wildflowers, birds, animals, insects will all proliferate wildly.
How horrible!
How unthinkable!
How horrendous!
Caz
They recovered from two atom bomb attacks, so I’m sure they’ll recover from this lesser nuclear event. They’ll be the same, and it won’t take as long as you think.
That being said, they sure fucked up! With a country that size, you can’t afford to have nuclear plants spreading radiation all over the place. It’s not like the U.S. were we can detonate actual nuclear weapons in a desert 500 miles from the nearest population center.
I hate to say this, but at least this nuclear disaster will curb their out-of-control and immoral fishing practices for at least one year. They kill dolphins by the hundreds every year, they kill as many whales as they can get their harpoons on, they kill sharks just to cut of their fins to make soup. They are the worst destroyer of ocean ecosystems on the planet, so at least the sea will be healthier this year because of Japan’s catastrophe.
They would literally hunt numerous species of fish intentionally to extinction, and then just move on to the next species. Abhorrent. I’m sorry that people are suffering from a nuclear radiation disaster over there, but environmentalists should be happy that the fish and mammals in the sea may survive for another year.
DPirate
…which, as everyone knows, is more than +1?