Japanese nuke meltdown may be underway

Containment chamber intact

The containment chamber's intact, and radiation levels have gone down. As long as the containment chamber is intact, there won't be any severe contamination outside; the lack of containment chambers in Chernobyl was what made that one go so ugly.

So it isn't quite the end of the world...

Re: yesterday

So you're prophecising nuclear doom based on what? Smug? Listen to yourself.

It's a bad situation that human intervention has had to be relied upon to keep this plant under control. That is not really acceptable and is a sign of the age of the plant.

So if this thing does end safely, what happens to your hysteric rhetoric? Are you going to eat your own words then or just shuffle off somewhere?

If there is a large release of radiation, are you going to be smiling at people saying "I told you so?". As has been said in this forum before, some modern nuclear designs go so far as to be safe even in the event of a meltdown. Why don't you do something constructive and campaign for better designs of nuclear power instead of throwing out the best energy source mankind currently has for it's future?

Oh boy

No one here is advocating that we build NEW nuclear reactors using that old (30+ years IIRC) design you bloody muppet.

What we are talking about is looking at new and future, safer designs, ones that CANNOT (literally, the physics won't allow it) melt down due to the way they are designed.

Kneejerk prat.

Signed: From Japan

Re: Are we still as smug now daylight has broken?

Yes, actually. It's Saturday, so I've had a lie-in. By the time I got around to reading your post, things were looking safer again. But by the time you read this, I may be dead. Ho hum!

Perhaps "now" isn't the ideal moment for cool heads to have the nuclear power debate. Can we reconvene at the beginning of next month?

Cherry picking ?

>> Yesterday we were being informed that anyone here thinking it would all end in tears were barking mad as it was perfectly safe and normal.

For more completeness, perhaps you might also observe that comments went along the lines of "after 40 years, things have improved somewhat - and modern reactor designs are fail safe". Clearly there is a rick from these reactors, but lets not forget that we knew a lot less about reactor design 40 years ago. While some release may well happen, and a core meltdown may happen, we are almost certainly not looking at the sort of failure that Chernobyl was infamous for.

Let's see what happens

We have yet to see what emerges, but the Japanese authorities, according to the BBC, are reporting that the pressure vessel has probably not been seriously damaged. We will see.

It should be remembered that that this is a very old design, it's been in operation for 40 years and has been built in a tsunami-prone coastline. There are reports that it was the tsunami that disabled the diesel standby generators.

This is getting close to a worst-case scenario. If an outdated and elderly nuclear facility such as this can be hit by the fifth most powerful earthquake in recorded history and an enormous tsunami without loss of life, then it would give us confidence that a well-designed, modern design less vulnerably located would be safe. It will be expensive, but in terms of deaths per unit of electricity produced, other methods of generation have worse records, often far-worse records. Coal for one and even hydro where dam failures have been devastating (and are, if anything, more vulnerable to earthquakes).

It's interesting to compare this with Chernobyl. Chernobyl was frankly an appallingly bad design and the explosion was self-inflicted due to dreadful operational practices. There was no natural disaster involved. In the case of the Japanese facility we have had a devastating natural disaster on a fundamentally sound design. We will see what happens, but another Chernobyl looks very unlikely at this stage. However, those designing nuclear facilities in future will have to think about tsunamis and not just earthquakes.

What this tells us is that it's the design that matters. Early aeroplanes were quite good at killing their passengers - these days they are pretty well the safest way of travelling on a deaths per passenger mile basis.

@Elmer

I believe nuclear power is quite safe if handled correctly, I'm just not sure that putting reactors in areas that suffer earthquakes at 8.9 on the Richter scale is really that safe. It would seem that their precautions - generators etc - would be fine except when you get an 8.9 followed by a tsunami.

UPDATE: haha shit

If I'm reading this right, they've either already lost the building around No. 1, or they're getting ready to:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-12/explosion-destroys-walls-of-japan-reactor-building-nhk-reports.html

So, uh, yeah, all that stuff I said about how it's more likely to end like TMI than anything? You guys, I am beginning to suspect that I have been unduly optimistic!

Even if that's true, though, the lesson is not that nuclear power can never, ever be done at all safely because neutrons eat trees and babies, or whatever. The lesson is instead that forty-year-old BWRs from the dark ages need to be safely decommissioned in a hurry and replaced with modern designs, like the CANDU, that won't go boom no matter how shit a job you do on the maintenance work, or how fast you lose your coolant.

And, you know, you want to make cracks about nuclear power saving the human race? -- how the hell *else* do you expect to fend off a Malthusian catastrophe once we get so low on oil that we can't afford to burn it in conventional power plants any longer? Or are you one of those who's perfectly fine with the idea of a third or a half the human population dying off, just so long as it doesn't include anyone you know?

Yeah, pretty much

Because you're thinking "meltdown" means "OMG END OF THE EVERLOVING WORLD", and it really does not. If it breaches the reactor's pressure vessel, that's bad; if it breaches the surrounding containment building, that's quite likely disastrous, but that's also not terribly likely to happen -- the molten core by itself wouldn't be enough, there'd need to be a steam explosion which they appear to be very much staying ahead of with the steam releases from the buildings.

You're thinking Chernobyl, but you shouldn't be; that reactor didn't even *have* a containment building -- the RBMK design in use at Pripyat was pretty much what you'd get if you took every advance in reactor design since the Windscale fire, lit the whole stack on fire, and then built as many potential disasters into your own reactor as you could possibly manage to squeeze in. So when the Chernobyl pressure vessel blew, that was all she wrote: instant dispersion into the environment, 30km exclusion zone maintained for decades, enough to make even the Soviets decommission their remaining RBMKs, you know the story.

The Fukushima reactors may indeed be forty-year-old boiling-water reactors from the dark ages of nuclear engineering, but they're not nearly as bad as an RBMK; judging by what little I've been able to find that describes their design, they're actually not all that different from the reactors in use at the Three Mile Island generating plant when they had their little accident. That incident ended with a large fraction of the reactor's core molten and puddled in the bottom of the pressure vessel -- but it did *not* end in a breach of the pressure vessel, much less the surrounding containment building, and the resulting radiation release was negligible.

It is possible for the Fukushima crisis to result in a blown containment building and a massive release of core material and exotic byproducts. For that to happen, though, would require complete incompetence on the part of a very large number of people now involved in managing the situation in Japan. Assuming that all of those people don't suddenly decide as one to stuff their heads up their asses, what we're by far most likely to see out of Fukushima is much the same as what we saw out of Three Mile Island: a scary situation which, in hindsight, wasn't anywhere nearly as bad as it could've been if it hadn't been handled promptly and well.

Actually, I'm giving the TMI staff a bit too much credit there, they screwed up plenty in the first few hours of the crisis -- that seems to be pretty much what always happens when a reactor starts to go wrong: either the control-room crew knows exactly how to handle it, does so, and it never makes the news, or else it's the useless night-shift guys on watch and we all get to hear about how they screwed up. Point is, though, even with all the mistakes people made at TMI, there *still* wasn't a containment breach, and there's no reason to assume there will be one at Fukushima, either.

It's possible, but it's not at all likely, so why not wait to worry about it until you know you need to? I mean, it'll happen or not happen on its own either way, so why not just relax, imbibe a reasonable dose of your favorite intoxicant, and wait to see how it goes?

oh, be fair

wind power also brings with it the problem of storms and hurricanes, and tidal and hydro give us flooding, and solar has the side effect of trying to give us all skin cancer.

@yesterday

Let's wait until we find out what happened and then consider the status of the container, its contents and the fan.

Yes. I do feel like being smug.

You see, unlike you, I don't assume that every nuclear reactor is a giant nuclear bomb waiting to go of at the slightest gust of wind. Nor do I feel the need to use a disaster to score political points.

http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/77123.html

URGENT: Serious damage unlikely to reactor container: official

TOKYO, March 12, Kyodo

Japan's nuclear safety agency officials said Saturday they believe there has been no serious damage to the container of the troubled No. 1 reactor of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

The officials made the comment after examining the latest radiation data monitored around the facility after an explosion in the afternoon, they said.

==Kyodo

Yes!

Why not - the safety keeps working in a controlled fashion, even though it is 40 years old. Nothing has made me reconsider the rational course of action, which is to invest in the latest reactors as soon as possible.

However, the rational are going to have to deal with the irrationally fearful, as demonstrated by Elmer Phud's comment.

Re: yesterday

I don't think anyone yesterday said these 40 year old design reactors were especially safe.

Modern designs are many degrees of magnitude safer than these.

Not that Japan had a choice in the matter. They don't have much coal, they don't have much oil, but they do have a hugely technological society. Nuclear was the only viable source.

If you are so against modern Nuclear may I suggest you start reducing your power consumption by approx 95%, then you might have a hope of being truly green, although only when the wind blows.

Cue the anti-nuclear protests

This'll be yet more fodder for the environmental activists in the debate against nuclear.

Probably the worst thing about nuclear is that it does have a bit of an unfair reputation due to accidents in the past. Modern reactors are not supposed to misbehave like the ones of the dark ages. They're by no means perfect however.

I agree though that perhaps earthquake-prone Japan was not the best place to put one, as nothing can be completely "natural-disaster-proof".

In the meantime, I have my fingers crossed, hoping they can somehow reign in this runaway chemical reaction. No used arguing over what should have or shouldn't have been now, what's past is past, all we can do there is learn any lessons taught. We need to consider now, and the future.

Nuclear is perfectly safe

The people who died in Chernobyl all died from the flu. And they're packaging up the core into sweets to sell to children.

Tragic

My heart goes out to Japan. It's truly tragic all that needless loss of life

Let's hope something good comes out of this - better nuclear reactor design, more experience with dealing with problems like this.

I would hope too, (maybe this is too much or even somewhat evil) that Sony got hurt in this :P

Err...

Yes, because power station design engineers don't take the local geology into account when designing a power station.

Re: Lots of "told ya so"s

They don't really have a choice, their entire country is an earthquake zone!

The USA do have a choice, but they still built SF on a fault... And then rebuilt it when it get destroyed!

Nope

A proper nuclear explosion isn't possible. It would be like a dirty bomb, an explosion that scatters radioactive material.

Title

Despite the disproportionate media coverage, I suspect that the Fukushima nuclear failures are relatively insignificant compared to the damage caused elsewhere by the earthquakes and tsunamis.

There seems to be a great deal of hysteria wherever the word "nuclear" is involved. I'm sure a couple of core meltdowns will necessitate an expensive decommissioning operation but there's very little risk to life, and its economical impact will form only a small proportion of the overall cost of the earthquake disaster.

@tirk

Nice, but you forgot to mention the dam that burst and swept away several hundred homes. That's hydro-electric generation ruled out as well, at least in earthquake zones.

Of course, if you just don't generate the electricity, then people start dying for other reasons, as the world's population slowly resets to the levels of (say) a hundred years ago. But that's only a few billion dead and those who were left would all feel *ever* so smug about their "ethical" lifestyles.

... so what would you do about it ...

OK - if the answer is not nuclear, then what is it?

I get fed up with the "<insert item x> is bad" camp - you guys never seem to actually be able to come up with any viable alternatives, other than going back to the stone age sans electricity.

We don't have coal, we don't have oil, and we no longer have enough gas. Wind, solar, and tidal are crap primary energy sources until someone works out how to store a significant proportion of our daily usage for when we actually need it.

The options are (1) import it, or (2) nuclear. If we go to (1) what kind of power plants are the "other guys" going to build? You guessed it - nuclear - hello France.

Hell, even Greenpeace has started coming around to "we need nukes" point of view from what I've read.

And as has been mentioned before - read about Thorium reactors - they solve most of the issues you raise.