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Fukushima plant crisis could erupt


Core meltdown is not a seven. I don't remember if the companies denied it but I know the Japanese government was not willing to say it fit until they couldn't take the pressure by the international community any longer.

A seven

"major releases of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended countermeasures."
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It failed to reach this level by a large margin. The problem with the measuring of the International Nuclear event scale is that there isn't enough levels to accurately describe the level of disasters. The way seven is described nothing at the moment touches it.
 
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Contaminated rice, contaminated fish, evacuations for 20km around the site. Major releases of radioactivity with plutonium and strontium found 50km away. Radioactive releases are ongoing. I think it fits the seven category perfectly as you have stated.
 

Its **** like this why I am against nuclear power plants. Its almost like a nuclear environmental bomb waiting to happen.I could be wrong but I never heard of any coal powered plants,solar power plants, hydroelectric damn or wind powered plant explosions making a area uninhabitable for humans for hundreds of year and dousing the local food and water supply with radiation.
 

:doh
No. It's not. A seven means that the accident has widespread consequences, seriously effecting a large portion of the world, i.e. multiple nations. The number you're looking for would be a five, "accident with wider consequences." Compare Chernobyl and Fukushima:
Chernobyl disaster, 26 April 1986. A power surge during a test procedure resulted in a criticality accident, leading to a powerful steam explosion and fire that released a significant fraction of core material into the environment, resulting in a death toll of 56 as well as estimated 4,000 additional cancer fatalities among people exposed to elevated doses of radiation. As a result, the city of Chernobyl (pop. 14,000) was largely abandoned, the larger city of Pripyat (pop. 49,400) was completely abandoned, and a 30 km exclusion zone was established.

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, a series of events beginning on 11 March 2011. Rated level 7 on 11 April 2011 by the Japanese government's nuclear safety agency.[2][3] Major damage to the backup power and containment systems caused by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami resulted in overheating and leaking from some of the Fukushima I nuclear plant's reactors. Each reactor accident was rated separately; out of the six reactors, three were rated level 5, one was rated at a level 3, and the situation as a whole was rated level 7.[4] An exclusion zone of 20 km was established around the plant as well as a 30 km voluntary evacuation zone.[5] See also 2011 Japanese nuclear accidents.

Three level 5 events does not equal a level 7 event. It equals a level 5 event, or maybe a level 6 event, if you can demonstrate that it's had a significant enough impact on a wide enough scale. You notice how the Fukushima incident doesn't list any casualties like Chernobyl does? That's because there weren't any, and that's why Fukushima does not deserve to be rated as a 7 in any sense.
 

Yeah. All the contamination was local. That's the difference between a five and a seven. Chernobyl seriously contaminated a large part of eastern Europe. Fukushima caused slightly increased radiation levels in Tokyo for like 2 days.
 

Do you really want to compare the total negative health effects of coal or oil vs nuclear? I can tell you what the results will be right now.
 
atrasicarius said:
Do you really want to compare the total negative health effects of coal or oil vs nuclear? I can tell you what the results will be right now.
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ooh! ooh! Let me guess on this one. Hmmm...I think that coal power has sickened or killed...1,000 times more people than nuclear power. Am I right? Is the number too low? Should it be 10,000 times?

:roll:
 
atrasicarius said:
Do you really want to compare the total negative health effects of coal or oil vs nuclear? I can tell you what the results will be right now.
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If a coal plant explodes does it make the whole city unlivable like Chernobyl for hundreds or possibly thousands of years? Will people have to wait hundreds or thousands of years before they can use the area again? A coal plant explosion might killed more people but what are the long term effects on that area and surrounding areas if a worst case scenario happens?
 
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Notice how one picture has trees and one picture doesn't? There's a reason for that.
 
atrasicarius said:



Notice how one picture has trees and one picture doesn't? There's a reason for that.
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Trees can grow back and those pits can be filled right back up.So it is not even close to worst case scenario of a nuclear power plant.
 
jamesrage said:
Trees can grow back and those pits can be filled right back up.So it is not even close to worst case scenario of a nuclear power plant.
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Well, you guys are missing a pretty big detail here.

You are basically treating all nuclear plants the same. A pebble bed reactor is exceptionally different from Chernobyl. In theory, a PBR can't actually meltdown, much less explode. So your discussion is a bit screwy because you aren't accounting for drastically different nuclear designs out there. Furthermore, when we add in small molten salt regulated uranium reactors and thorium, there is no way coal can win this argument James.
 
atrasicarius said:
Do you really want to compare the total negative health effects of coal or oil vs nuclear? I can tell you what the results will be right now.
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You have to put it in proportion.

Fossil fuel disasters happen more often, but the long term consequences pale in comparison to a nuclear meltdown, which happens much more rarely.

Fukishima has put proper perspective into this. It only takes one nuclear fallout to contaminate an area for centuries - even thousands of years. Nuclear power hasn't been around that long, and we've had several major incidents so far. Nuclear contamination of our environment has already happened, in this short time span.

So yes... in short term ways, fossil fuels are hurting our health more. They are changing climate, harming human health, and contaminating the environment in major ways. But not ways that would be impossible to recover from in a couple of hundred years.

Nuclear? Even a once in a blue moon disaster has consequences lasting for epochs.
 

You admit that something is in theory and then say that worry is unwarranted?

I can't count the number of times that people have said modern reactors are safe, that they are far more reliable than something from the stone-age Chernobyl era. Yet here we are, with a nuclear crisis in Japan, in one of the world's most modern and maintained reactor sites.

The very earth that reactors are built on is not guaranteed to be stable. Fukishima proved that. To say that all variables are taken care of is, frankly, very arrogant. The Fukishima region is screwed, for all intents and purposes, forever. Even a slimy, disgusting tailing pond from oil extraction could still recover, and have new life there, while another area remains nuclear for ages more.

We don't even have fool proof ways of storing spend fuel. Our solution has been to just put it deep underground. Well, the ground moves, geology changes. The continents themselves are in perpetual motion. What if in 10,000 years (when we could be theoretically be gone), mother nature decides to split the earth right where we've stored all this crap? It would destroy everything - again.
 

Not saying I don't have concerns over the safety and cost related concerns with nuclear power, but if these can be addressed adequately, I think we must employ them as one of our non fossil fuel alternatives to add to the mix of solar, wind, and hydroelectric.

After all, many scientists say that unless we can reverse climate change before we reach the tipping point, it may take the environment a couple centuries to recover.
 
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Temporal said:
You admit that something is in theory and then say that worry is unwarranted?
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Well, PBRs haven't moved out of prototype testing. But considering their yields, it does make sense. PBRs as singular reactors don't come close to the kind of power generation that we typically think of. To get the same kind of production, PBRs are designed to be built in clusters. Essentially it takes 4 standard PBRs to produce the same amount as the typical reactor we have in the US. That means faster reactor construction, greater safety, but requires more land.

When it comes to thorium, self regulators actually shut down the reactions if it gets to hot. It can't actually meltdown because the necessary conditions to produce fission stop at a certain point. That's actually quite a beautiful design. Furthermore, molten salt regulating reactions have been put in the ground for years without maintenance and no problems occur.


Fukushima was not a modern reactor. That thing is 50 years old. Furthermore, it had design flaws that have been corrected a long time ago. It was really a bad idea to have the spent fuel reactor pool on top of the reactor requiring active pumps to maintain water levels. That was bonehead. Modern designs rely on passive water cooling. You need to consider the significant growth in design over the past 50 years.

The very earth that reactors are built on is not guaranteed to be stable.
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Hence why we probably shouldn't build reactors in geologically unstable regions. That does not invalidate nuclear power though as a whole.


I never said that all the variables were. Only that you guys are treating nuclear power plants as a monolith when they are anything but.


That's largely because the US refuses to reprocess. France can fit all of its nuclear waste into a small area because it reprocesses its waste into new fuel rods. There are problems with that, but generally far less than just storing waste in its current form as the US does. Furthermore, prototype thorium eater reactors have been small scale proven to actually consume waste while generating electricity.
 

Did you miss the picture I posted? The Chernobyl exclusion zone is practically a wildlife reserve. And yes, the wildlife there has some health issues that wildlife in other places doesn't... but that's no less than you could say about your most recent oil spill, or areas contaminated with coal soot. Honestly, breathing smoggy air on a daily basis is probably worse for you than living in the exclusion zone would be, assuming you were smart enough to stay away from the sarcophagus itself. As for storing the fuel, most of it is actually recyclable in certain types of reactors. You guys are into recycling, right?
 
atrasicarius said:
And yes, the wildlife there has some health issues that wildlife in other places doesn't.
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Wired Magazine had a piece on that. Animals there have some pretty wild mutations.

As for storing the fuel, most of it is actually recyclable in certain types of reactors. You guys are into recycling, right?
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Sorta. The US doesn't reprocess out of security concerns which are pretty valid considering how bad our nuclear civilian security is.
 
obvious Child said:
Wired Magazine had a piece on that. Animals there have some pretty wild mutations.
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Here's an article from Wired about Chernobyl. Apparently the animals are thriving
Is Chernobyl a Wild Kingdom or a Radioactive Den of Decay? | Magazine

Found some good stuff here about pebble-reactors. I thought the USN was already using them. Apparently not. Still, they look promising.
The Nuclear Green Revolution: Future Ship Propulsion

Here's a link to an interesting article comparing energy related deaths
Deaths per TWH by energy source
Here's an excerpt from it. Of course, coal is by far the worst. Nuclear - even safer than solar :shock: [bold by me]:
 
atrasicarius said:
Yeah. All the contamination was local. That's the difference between a five and a seven. Chernobyl seriously contaminated a large part of eastern Europe. Fukushima caused slightly increased radiation levels in Tokyo for like 2 days.
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Right, and all those radioactive ocean fish know that they are supposed to stay close to Fukushima because it is a local event.
 
DaveFagan said:
Right, and all those radioactive ocean fish know that they are supposed to stay close to Fukushima because it is a local event.
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Radioactive fish.

:lamo

Maybe your problem is that you think "radioactive" automatically means "dangerous." Like I said before, you are radioactive. Spooning with your wife exposes her to radiation.
 
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Deuce said:
Radioactive fish.

:lamo

Maybe your problem is that you think "radioactive" automatically means "dangerous." Like I said before, you are radioactive. Spooning with your wife exposes her to radiation.
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How'd you know I was radiating? You been talkin' wit ya wife bout me. She's talkin' too much.
 
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