Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now! Japan's nuclear powerplants have performed magnificently in the face of a disaster hugely greater than they were designed to withstand, remaining entirely safe throughout and sustaining only minor damage. The unfolding Fukushima story has enormously strengthened the case for advanced nations – including Japan – to build more …
Significantly lifted from http://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors/ but at least it's a refreshing change from the suggestions elsewhere that these power stations represent a significant environmental/human threat. Compared to the lack of power/clean water/accessibility parts of Japan will see over the next few weeks, the nuclear impact (currently expected) doesn't even register.
All that aside, the conclusions are entirely premature and you're just asking for trouble by titling it "Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power" and suggesting that they were/are "entirely safe throughout and sustaining only minor damage"
The Flying Tailor must have though himself an instant success as his silk cape began to flap open. In the moment he was impacting the ground, his magnificent ego must have been mitigating the dead drop as a simple, slight miscalculation that would cost him a broken leg or a few broken ribs. It had not gone perfectly, but with a few alterations his design would be now ready for widespread implementation.
As the earth compressed beneath him and his excess inertia bounced him briefly back into the air, he must have been thinking of penning a triumphant letter boasting of his engineering genius and the timid stupidity of his critics.
Wonderful piece. It’s so refreshing to read a tongue-in-cheek article from a publication with a sense of humour. And so well disguised too! If I didn’t already know (from previous amusing items) that El Reg has – how shall I say – a well developed sense of the ironic – I might have even take it seriously!
Personally, I’m now thinking about buying shares in the consortium which owns the 90 tonnes (or so) of plutonium currently stockpiled in the UK. I mean, ok yes, that’s enough to build around 11,000 Nagasaki-sized N-weapons, but think of the energy-generating potential! I’m sure that some time in the next 24,000 years humanity will find a way of safely using it. And in the meantime, the UK’s reputation for safe management and transparency in nuclear issues makes it an ideal repository does it not? Yes, ok, I know that Windscale ‘Pile 1’ is technically still ‘burning’– but there have been assurances that it will all be cleaned up by 2038 or so. And, as an added plus, the UK taxpayers generously pay to insure all the UK's N-plants – so I can’t really lose can I?
In short, I'm cheered by your wonderfully optimistic outlook on the current scenario, and I encourage all your readers to give your article all the credibility and respect it deserves.
"That can only be true if an unbelievable level of public ignorance of the real facts, born of truly dreadful news reporting over the weekend, is allowed to persist."
Since all previous attempts at eradicating hysterical ineducability about things nuclear have utterly failed, we can consider the truth to be pretty much fucked, can't we ?
Despite some of the physicists here picking up on nits, the point of the article is well taken. These 'antique' nuclear power plants were subjected to an catastrophe well beyond their design limits, and did not produce the 'extinction event' that the Greenies always warn of.
Build more nuke power plants, use less oil and coal, it's just that simple.
Yes, the media circus clowns want you to think that these cores are melting to the center of the earth and the world is about to explode.....what's really happened is that they've been junked by the seawater and will need a complete refueling, and perhaps even replacement of the hugely expensive vessels, still not an environmental concern, simply a financial one.
Great. While - at least at this hour - indeed it seems as if a Chernobyl-like environmental impact has been avoided - let's hope this will still be true in a few days hindsight - you are talking about an enormous financial damage.
Decomissioning those ruins will be several times more expensive than planned.
Also, as another poster pointed out, a conventional powerplant could by now be restarted and be productive again in a few days.
The conclusion is a bit premature and rather too triumphalist in nature. We'll see whether there are any more nasty surprises to come. Of course this has been something close to a worst-case scenario, but a rather predictable one. Tsunami is a Japanes word after all, and the consequences of such an event on nuclear facilities on the coastline of Japan ought ot have been forseen. At the very least I would expect to see any coastal nuclear installations being risk-assessed for this eventuality. Even coastlines further removed from fault lines could be vulnerable, albeit to smaller scale tsunamis.
It's financially fortunately that these are old reactors near the end of their useful life. If this had occured during the early years of going critical then that would have written off several billion dollars' worth of generating kit. it should be remember that Three Mile Island didn't kill off nuclear power in the states just because of the consequences of the accident. The financial costs and the risks were probably even more to blame.
At the very least there are questions to be raised over why these facilities were so vulnerable to a forseeable incident. It's probably that gas-powered plant would be repairable - once the core of a reactor is exposed or flooded with sewater it's just so much radioactive junk. So, I'd (conditionally) agree that the survival of such an incident without major loss of like shows nuclear can be safe. However, it raises questions of the financial costs and associated risks.
Also, people should note that apparantly benign power sources can kill. In 1975 the collapse of the Banqiao Dam killed an estimated 26,000 directly (and many times that indirectly). Dams are vulnerable to earthquakes too. Once potential energy is concentrated in one spot, then it is always has the possibility of a disaster. Unfortunately consentrations of potential energy are the most useful.
Okay, so far the engineering has done pretty well - but the underlying point for future development (or not) of nuclear power is risk. Not simply the obvious 'will it melt down and turn East Anglia/England/Western Europe into an uninhabitable wasteland' - which I accept with next generation thorium reactors etc may be really, really unlikely - but the basic risk to electricity supplies. Nukes are very big budget items. Get it wrong and you've wasted a hell of a lot of dosh. And no matter what you plan for there will be times when a reactor or set of reactors goes offline, even if it's only temporary (terrorist attacks, snow bringing down grid cables, floods, crashing Jumbo, industrial action - whatever) - and bang goes a sizeable chunk of your total generating capacity in one fell swoop, and the lights go off. This is what the Japanese are finding now. Going for a very widely distributed generation network, using a wide variety of small-scale, localised power sources (wind, wave, solar, fossil) gives overall resilience to the generating system, which you will never get with massive multi-gigawatt plants, whether nuclear, coal or whatever. And of course lots of small generation sources tends to smooth out expenditure and generate many more, localised jobs.
At the rate our energy needs keep on going up, multi-gigawatt plants are not going to constitute sizeable chunks of our energy infrastructure.
Don't forget that several milliard humans are only now catching up on this comfy civilisation thing and will need to have that powered. Even proposing to keep over half the world population in the dark ages because using less energy is the green thing to do is simply not realistic. To put it far more kindly than those that did deserve.
"Going for a very widely distributed generation network, using a wide variety of small-scale, localised power sources ("
Well that *might* democratize the power generation industry but that will increase transmission losses and massively complicate the billing and market arrangements in the UK.
"Going for a very widely distributed generation network, using a wide variety of small-scale, localised power sources (wind, wave, solar, fossil) gives overall resilience to the generating system, which you will never get with massive multi-gigawatt plants, "
Your problem is that *most* electricity generation is done by *big* multi-billion $ corporations who *like* big investments. They know how to do business plans for them, explain them to bankers and bankers *like* to loan out big chunks of cash for them (except in the case of 3 mile island, where a $1B asset turned into a $2bn.
Please note that I'm a fan of nuclear power, but let's include all the facts, shall we?
1) the 8.9 magnitude was at epicenter. At Sendai, the earthquake was about a 7. The plants were claimed to be designed to withstand a 7.9 on site.
2)pumping seawater into a reactor is a last resort, not just a line of defense. Once you put seawater into the building, they will have to close that unit permanently.
3)The radioactivity released was sufficient to be detected by the USS Ronald Reagan which was 100 miles off the coast. The claimed dosage was "1 month's worth in an hour" and the carrier was ordered to move out of the path of the radiation plume. -http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/03/carrier-ordered-further-away-from-radiation-from-japanese-nuclear-plant.html
4) the explosions were caused by a hydrogen explosion in the outer containment building. The plant is supposed to have hydrogen gas burn out systems to prevent such explosions and they obviously failed.
5) the hydrogen generated inside the reactor was due to the reaction of the zirconium cladding of the fuel rods interacting with the cooling water- which implies:
- a) the rods were hot enough to react
- b) portions of the rods were no longer covered by water
- c) that the steam and radioactivity released had been INSIDE the containment vessel and released through the emergency relief values
6) A third reactor has lost coolant pressure. You're touting the safety and design of a plant where they can't get and keep emergency generators online in 72 hours? Really?
7) As a note, reactor 1 was 40 years old, and due to shutdown in 1 month. Reactor 3 just had a 10 year renewal after inspection.
8) Lastly, the Japanese cabinet minister, Edano has been giving statements throughout, each of which has been understating the situation and downplaying the real events. I don't think that some level of scepticism is unreasonable about the official reports.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/14/fukushima_update/
I don't believe that we can consider this a minor release of radiation:
"The hourly amounts are more than half the 1,000 micro sievert to which people are usually exposed in one year.The maximum level detected so far around the plant is 1,557.5 micro sievert logged Sunday."
Read the article you're quoting. It says helicopter crews based on the carrier that have been flying all over the place have had that dose, not the ship itself. Who knows where those helicopters have been, but it's safe to guess they'll have been closer than 100km to the Japanese mainland at some point !
The problem with the nuke plant is that all the (potential) energy for months of operation is inside that containment vessel. So if things went wrong, they could go really wrong.
I was going to say, FF, not so bad, but then I thought about great flaming oil spills spread by a tsunami. Never mind.
And coal, is emitting a plume of radioactivity just in its normal consumption.
Hydro, well, we've already got a tsunami, that would just add more of the same misery. Even if a dam was not breached, water could slosh over in the quake.
The thing is that right from the first second that these reactors experienced problems, the PR-division of the nuclear power lobby have leaped into action behind the scenes. When I hear the soothing words from the commentators on the BBC and other news services, I naturally ask myself how much these messages are industry driven?
And of course there are reassuring words from the Japanese government about how things are all under control are probably mostly accurate, but again they have a bias – the desire not to panic people.
Just remember that billions of dollars are at stake here, and it’s not like the nuclear industry has never lied to anyone before.
Like th 'UN Nuclear Expert' with a beret on, scaring people with such gems as:-
'These reactors release Plutonium all the time,not just when there is an explosion... but you can't detect it.'
Total fearmongering Twat.Good job there was a proper scientist with a bow tie on to tell the truth.
Please note (I posted this on a forum previously) that the physics in the beginning of the article is not technically correct.
"As the hot cores ceased to be cooled by the water which is used to extract power from them, control rods would have remained withdrawn and a runaway chain reaction could have ensued – probably resulting in the worst thing that can happen to a properly designed nuclear reactor: a core meltdown in which the superhot fuel rods actually melt and slag down the whole core into a blob of molten metal."
A runaway chain reaction *does not happen* in modern reactors. As the coolant boils off, the reactor tends to sub-criticality because the cavitation in the water - bubbles - decrease the amount of moderation; neutrons are not slowed as much and the rate of reaction decerases. For lay-scientists - we want slow neutrons in nuclear power stations because there is a higher probability of them initiating a fission reaction with the fuel. This is usually considered a mandatory safety feature in PWRs - it's called a negative void coefficient. It ensures that if everything goes to pot, the fission reaction stops.
The latter part is correct though, meltdown can happen, but this is *not* due to runaway fission. It is due to products from the fission reaction undergoing beta decay, electron/positron emission, and heating the surroundings. It can get enough to cause the fuel rods to melt. The amount of time the reactor has been running will determine the amount of beta decay present - as it depends on the amount of waste isotopes present in the vessel.
The article is indeed very well reasoned. However it will not be persuasive outside of El Reg's readership. A more generally persuasive argument would be one which has the sole objective of provoking an emotional response.
Lewis Page asks us to spread the word, but his argument incurs the overhead of analysis and the processes of induction and deduction. It is reminiscent of an old O-Level standard essay, and as such will find no "route to market" with the GCSE generation.
If Page wants his argument to be generally appealing, he must first learn how to construct it without such blatant recourse to the facts, and without predicating its accessibility upon methodological frameworks of disciplined reasoning. Only then will it stand a chance.
If Lewis wants his argument to be appealing, or even better, believable enough to deserve spreading, he needs to invent time travel. Then go back and unwrite the large body of blatantly biased propaganda with his name on it.
If anything Reg readers will be less likely to be convinced by this than the wider public, we know his bias. Bias is bias, whichever way it swings and I know we won't get an accurate view of what happened till the courts force full disclosure 10+ years from now.
"Major natural catastrophe"
So the nuke plant caused the tidal wave?
"Thousands of displaced people"
By the tidal wave. I've no objection to folks being moved bcos they weren't sure the failsafes really *were* failsafe. But if you want to compare apples to apples - industrial site to industrial site - then check out the state of the area around the oil refinery. Let's just say that the oil refinery did not put up with the quake and tsunami in a failsafe manner, shall we?
"Radiation leaks"
Radioactive material leaks from your cellar into your house every day. (Radon gas.) BFD. Worry about the oil contaminating the area around the refinery, if you want to worry about leaks.
Chernobyl is indeed thriving - for a city.
For an area of wilderness it's in bad shape. Population densities are about half what they should be and mutation rates and mortality are very high.
It's easy to look at pictures of deer wandering about the streets and think "well, there's no deer at all wandering about MY town; Chernobyl must be a wild paradise" but such thinking is basically retarded.
None of which has anything to do with Fukushima and the PR spin that is coming out of there - that's a completely different load of bollocks.
This morning we had a "controlled explosion" that left people injured and missing. That's a wide ranging definition of "controlled" from the same plant management that a few years ago were found to be falsifying their safety checks and not long before that were using fraudulent documentation in their fuel shipments.
Biologist Anders Møller from the University of Paris Sud in France has been examining the effects of radiation on animals around Chernobyl for two decades. "Areas with higher radiation have fewer animals, survival and reproduction is reduced, sperm are abnormal and have reduced swimming ability. Abnormalities are commonplace and mutations rates are much elevated," Møller said.
Last year, Møller and Tim Mousseau published the results of the largest census of animal life in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone [1]. It revealed, contrary to the Chernobyl Forum's 2005 report[2], that biodiversity in insects, birds and mammals is declining.
[1] - http://cricket.biol.sc.edu/chernobyl/Chernobyl_Research_Initiative/Introduction.html
[2] - http://www-ns.iaea.org/downloads/rw/meetings/chern-forum-3rd-meetings-statement-rev.pdf
"new plants much safer yet would be able to resist an asteroid strike without problems". What size asteroid, please?
While there is much technical information in the article it reads like a story rather than a report or piece of Quality Journalism I've come to expect of ElReg and LP.
I have absolutely no doubt that Nuclear plant can be made appreciably safer still by the application of more modern design, build and operating techniques. Look what we've done with planes and cars over the past 50 years. But this, IMHO, does not trump the two fold problems of 100's of generations of potential Pollution and non-UK raw material dependence. Terrorist and other threats are no less for nuclear power than for any other form of bulk power generation nor can they be controlled any better.
Nuclear plants are more costly to build and operate that almost any competitive technology and the costs will not diminish proportionately even if they become the generation system of choice and economies of scale are applied.
An informative article, none-the-less.
Pretty close, shame about the poor chemistry re Hydrogen
Might have been a little more sensible to give it 3 days (doesnt it take about 5 to drop this design to a 'off' temperature with fully functioning cooling?)
Off course even if its all ok, and its pretty obvious its all ok at the moment, it will not stop fat block down the pub gobbing off, it went bang didint it?
Steve because a little radiation can do us good......
I thought the film was fiction until now.
These magnificent reactors will have to be de-fuelled presumably, and the only technology that has been shown to be capable to do this so far is Russian conscripts!
And there are still 1000 welsh farmers that might disagree with your analysis of the effect outside chernobyl (the sheep are still radiactive in them thar hills).
Whatever, this article is like saying no-one has been killed in an avalanche, while the boulders are still rolling down the hill, its just plain daft but hey its one with the previous "fuku" jokes which are just so so desperately funny to reg-hacks sitting in London I guess. Maybe its time to take some grow-up pills!
Earthquake causes dam to break in Japan
Posted: Mar 11, 2011 9:01 AM by CNN Wire Staff
Updated: Mar 11, 2011 1:09 PM
(CNN) -- A dam has broken in Fukushima Prefecture, washing away scores of homes in the area, Japan's Kyodo news agency reported early Saturday. The Defense Ministry says 1,800 homes have been destroyed in Fukushima.
Sorry, but there are some severe question I need to ask.
How can a Battle ship detect none existing nuclear radiation at levels elevated ~ 720 times? And why do you think that in Chernobyl massive death, 30 km2 not inhabitable area and massive loss of lives even to this time now is not an extremely problematic effect on nuclear power? Are you just kidding or do you really share the opinion you posted on?
I am just shocked - I had to endure the Chernobyl deserter living in Europe at that time but you just might not be aware of these risks.
I'd suggest ElReggers make their way to The oil Drum specifically http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7638 for an analysis of this. It seems this is just the start of what's goin on there and to suggest we move along as there's nothing to see is a little disingenuous at this stage.
What I find interesting is the fact that Japan, for whom nuclear is more of a done deal than it is for us, still has had to contend with coverups and falsified records at these plants, which at least leaves some taint over the current events. What chance have we got, where these things get to be done in smoke-filled rooms, of actuallly having enough infomration to form valid views.
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