The Fukushima disaster is already as bad as Chernobyl according to the International Atomic Energy Association's scale
That is quite a logical leap based solely on the INES rating. Fukushima is in the same category as Chernobyl, but this is also the highest category there is, and Chernobyl was past the boundary by a huge margin.
For example, the criteria for the total release of iodine-131 in a level 7 accident is "tens of thousands of TBq". Chernobyl released 1.8 million TBq. Fukushima has released about 370,000 TBq so far.
Chernobyl had killed 31 people by this point while Fukushima has had negligible health effects so far due to much better emergency response. The INES rating does not account for this, only for the amount of material released.
20%? That's a lot closer to Chernobyl, radiation-wise, than I expected. Why haven't the effects been anywhere near as bad, given that the released radioactivities are of the same order of magnitude?
You can get this from wikipedia, but the short answer is that the graphite moderator Chernobyl used ignited. The burning graphite released smoke fallout, which spread very far due to wind. Fukushima released about an order of magnitude less nastiness, and it hasn't spread as far in quantity (though some of it is in the ocean).
The Chernobyl reactor blew wide open, sent core bits flying, then burned for a couple of weeks. Fukushima remains mostly contained. I think release has been mostly through water. But it's not over yet and we don't know what the total effects will be.
A short, but well written article that does a good job of taking on the "full meltdown" hysteria that some news organisations seem to clutch on to.
Granted, the situation at Fukushima isn't good, but "meltdown" seems to trigger the idea of a huge explosion and the scattering of nuclear fallout for miles & miles to much of the general public.
PS: As an aside, the dramas in Japan are disappointing, because I'm a strong believer in nuclear power going forward. Misconceptions & a lack of education, fuelled by crisis' like these, don't help the cause.
I find it callous for you to brush aside the suffering of thousands of people by "The situation isn't good".
Just because all of Japan hasn't been destroyed doesn't mean that therr hasn't been significant damage done. Lies, corruption/amakudari and incompetence has all been unearthed in the nuclear disaster. In what sense is it hysteria to point this out?
(Oddly, I feel the Tsunami disaster itself was handled quite well by the gov't)
Thousands of people have been displaced from their homes in the mandatory evacuation area. Displacement is really a horrible thing. It destroys communities and they never fully recover afterwards because people can't or won't return.
I'm not trying to be snarky, but is your disappointment that it's turning out that nuclear power may not be as safe as we hoped? It seems that this is a valid data point to look at when considering whether or not we should deploy nuclear power more widely. Even if it hadn't happened, from our current vantage point it's obvious that it _can_ happen.
Personally, I think this shows us how safe nuclear power can be. The plant was hit with an earthquake many orders of magnitude stronger than it was built to handle. Then it was hit with a tsunami. Then it melted down.
All that, and how many people are dead as a consequence of the meltdown? Zero.
Wikipedia says:
"Major news source reporting at least 2 TEPCO employees confirmed dead from "disaster conditions" following the earthquake.[368] "The two workers, aged 21 and 24, sustained multiple external injuries and were believed to have died from blood loss, TEPCO said. Their bodies were decontaminated as radiation has been spewing from the plant for three weeks."
45 patients were reported dead after the evacuation of a hospital in Futaba. Some of them "were suffering from dehydration because they had not eaten anything for three days"."
At the other plant where cold shutdowns were achieved, Dai-nii (nii is two, ichi is one), a crane operator was killed by the earthquake. The two at this plant were apparently killed by the tsunami a while later (there were working in a low level of a unit and apparently suffered at minimum fatal trauma).
I think his point is that nuclear power is still safer (by number of lives affected) than, e.g. coal; and the fear of rare events (like this one) pushes back on what could be a very viable energy source with (relatively) few lives lost/standards of living reduced, compared to some other methods of getting electricity.
> I think his point is that nuclear power is still safer (by number of lives affected) than, e.g. coal; and the fear of rare events (like this one) pushes back on what could be a very viable energy source with (relatively) few lives lost/standards of living reduced, compared to some other methods of getting electricity.
Precisely. It's also crisis like Fukushima—using generations-older tech—that impedes development of safer nuclear generation technology (i.e thorium reactors, or even just better light-water reactors).
> I find it callous for you to brush aside the suffering of thousands of people by "The situation isn't good".
Perhaps I should have used stronger language. The situation is bad, most definitely, and Japan will be reeling from the effects for decades to come. Especially in the immediate area, and more depending on the extent of ground water contamination.
I'm just saying that the lack of education about nuclear power prevents us from moving forward with it, when deaths or disasters linked with other forms of power generation don't get the same media attention.
The analogy I've been using is air travel. Everyone knows the risks but we continue to fly anyway because planes just don't crash that often. Driving down the highway, which feels safer, is statistically far more dangerous.
That is an incredibly question. And I honestly have no idea. I would be interested in a more knowledgable person's thoughts on the matter. If it's you, by all means, please share :) If it's someone else, also please share!
I'll give you a hint: renewable and power grid technology are not stuck at where they are now. But they will be if we don't invest in it. Which is less likely if we build lots of present-day fission stations.
Sure, nuclear can improve too. But it's overpriced right now, and the costs are usually hidden. I'm not talking just about potential environmental damage, but even just maintenance, initial construction overruns, regular waste disposal, safety regulation... those are usually hidden or underestimated.
This factor of 500 you're talking about... I don't even need to read anything to guess that'd only be available maybe 50 years from now, and then only theoretically. But pro-nuclear activism will get you lots of today's crappy tech, and you'll be stuck with it for 50 years. And the worst part is you'll have spent a ton of money on it, diverting from much quicker advances in renewables (a term I'll continue to use because everyone knows what I'm talking about when I say it).
Today's nuclear (e.g. AP1000) is splendid technology by any measure. AP1000 builds are designed to last 60 years but should be economically maintainable for hundreds (life of the containment, which is the expensive part).
Amortized over 40 years, the nominal cost of nuclear is very low - on par with coal. The barrier to rapid buildout is the high upfront cost. Operation is almost free. Standardized plant designs like the AP1000 should cure most construction delays. The Chinese builds currently underway were ahead of schedule last I checked.
The externalities of energy sources are poorly studied, nuclear being by far the best-studied. In the US, waste disposal is fully paid per kWh and has been since the early '80s. Mining and everything to do with the fuel chain is far cleaner than anything else, including wind and solar (it was my job to study these things for a certain fruity company that has no vested interest in any particular technology). Regulation in the US is also paid-for by the industry (NRC charges astronomical fees).
As you probably know, safety per GWh is found to be on par with wind and solar by every study out there.
The factor of 500 corresponds to burning Th232 instead of U235 (490 precisely). Burning U238 will give you a factor of 140 instead. Either will additionally save the need for enrichment, though turns out to be a tiny factor. High-temp operation with either fuel will get you 5/3 in the thermal efficiency dept. Atmospheric pressure operation gives you something like a factor of 10 on plant materials, which is not terribly significant on a per-GWh basis.
All of these have been demonstrated - most decades ago. There's no basic physics, just engineering. 10 years to market for any serious effort. Where you might need 50 years is something like a dusty plasma reactor. Those directly convert fission energy to electricity (thus reaching efficiencies over 90%) and can also enable interstellar travel. Still easier than fusion.
For solar efficiency there's a factor of 3 to the Carnot limit and wind is less than a factor of 2 from the Betz limit. Further improvements can come by making the collectors lighter. But solar cells are already thinner than can weather the elements and so are mounted on substrates, under cover glass, on stands and tracking motors etc. About the best that can be done is mirrors with a central thermal tower, and this is being done today. Tethered wind has potential for reducing the utterly absurd material requirements of current turbines - Makani says a factor of 5.
Those are available improvements, since you mentioned it. Absolutes are what count. For solar, plan to cover about the same amount of land as has been paved to date (assuming ideal location).
I don't know what renewables are. Do they include geothermal? Howabout induced geothermal? What about fission (supernovae aren't renewable)? Biofuels (are fresh water, fertilizer, arable land etc. renewable)? Is wind renewable?
http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/2/1/2011/esd-2-1-2011.html
What about hydroelectric (we seem to have run out of rivers to dam)? Is there really agreement on which of these are included? I've been working in the field for five years and I haven't figured it out.
Atomheads roll out the strawman called coal and car accident statistics and make the baseless claim that no human has been killed as a result of a nuclear power generation, in terms of death per Gigwatt generated. Therefore, any discussion of the downsides of nuclear energy is just a bunch of ignorant rubes who lack an understanding of statistics.
If you mention the children born in the Ukraine and Belarus with horrific mutations and short lifespans, it will be either attributed to coal or spun to have nothing to do with the Chernobyl meltdown at all -- maybe the mother was playing with Uranium.
Radioactive material entering the water table causes huge explosions? And nuclear material in the water table falls out of the atmosphere[1]? Bullshit. Are you even paying attention to the claims you're making?
[1] Fallout specifically refers to radioactive dust created by an explosion which then falls out of the atmosphere, contaminating the ground - it's radioactive dust, not a radioactive solution.
I regretted not editing out that part of the quotation immediately after hitting submit, since I knew that although almost everyone would understand what I meant, there will always be someone who'll call it out in some heated nit-picky reply that ignored the obvious intent of my statement. Thank you, sir.
While I still firmly believe that it is possible to build and run a safe nuclear plant (as far as technology is concerned), I'm not sure anymore whether government is capable of coming up with the right safety regulations and policing them effectively to actually make it happen.
And I don't think power companies can be trusted to safely run power plants without oversight. For all I know there are some that are more capable than TEPCO, but the fact that there are companies like TEPCO (and probably many that are even worse) means you need someone to look over their shoulder.
I have to admit that prior to Fukushima, human incompetence did not factor into my opinion on nuclear power as much as it now seems it should have.
Maybe the IAEA could be brought in on this. They seem to know what they are doing?
With all this radioactive water leaking on and off for the last 2 months, and likely well into the future, it's probably way too early to declare victory. I'm not sure anyone fully understands what impact this might have yet.
Indeed. Chernobyl tossed a plume into the air, which was easily measured, traveled fast, and dispersed within weeks. This thing is in the ground water. It will be, what, months until it's clear where it's going in the aquifer? Years?
Do understand that's because the situation is not yet fully understood or controlled. These BWR reactors (Units 1-3) and their safety systems, especially the passive ones, are getting their first true test (unlike airplanes, we can't afford to test them to destruction, and Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were both of different design, PWR and the criminal (at least, illegal in the US) RBMK).
The situation is not good ... but I'm sure the environmentalists are sure the casualties in Japan from coal electrical plants in Japan and the PRC are much greater (and they're likely right).
They still have no idea where the leaked, radioactive water went, and it could find its way to the ocean or underground water sources. I'd say it sure is a potential problem.
Tourism just started to become a major source of income for Japan (and is obviously not the only part of the Japanese Economy that has been effected). So besides health concerns it is a problem moneywise.
Health >>> Economy. And would the tourists really show up in droves when the coastline was demolished for hundreds of miles and tens of thousands of people were killed, if only the powerplant hadn't melted down? I suspect tourism is out either way.
You won't be able to count. There will be a slight increase in the cancer rate for the next several decades until radiation levels subside to normal. It's like cigarettes. Nobody ever died from smoking a cigarette, but cigarettes have still killed a lot of people.
The result: estimated radiation doses ingested by people living near the coal plants were equal to or higher than doses for people living around the nuclear facilities. At one extreme, the scientists estimated fly ash radiation in individuals' bones at around 18 millirems (thousandths of a rem, a unit for measuring doses of ionizing radiation) a year. Doses for the two nuclear plants, by contrast, ranged from between three and six millirems for the same period. And when all food was grown in the area, radiation doses were 50 to 200 percent higher around the coal plants.
Or how about eating tuna every day and ingesting the mercury that primarily comes from coal burning for power generation?
No one in this thread has suggested that coal is safer. What I pointed out are the mistakes of the rabid defenders. They should pause, and think more carefully about the things they say. They'll do nuclear power much more good that way.
> No one in this thread has suggested that coal is safer.
But many are more eager to abandon nuclear than coal. I will be fair, however, in saying that at least some of them hope to abandon both.
And I will also say that if they can make wind & solar (or whatever else) work, I'm all for it. I believe that nuclear is a good engineering choice, but you can change that opinion by providing better technology.
The problem is that I am not one of them, but if I say anything critical of nuclear power, or the fukushima disaster, I'm immediately put in that bucket and the fangs come out. The rabid pro nuclear people sound completely unhinged. I think we should use more nuclear power, over coal, but I'm there enemy because I dared to say that something bad might happen at fukushima. I become one of "them" even though I'm not.
I apologize if my original replay came off a bit snarky.
I agree with you that it's really a shades of grey issue. I certainly don't think nuclear is the end all be all of solving our long term energy problems, but it's also not the boogeyman so many people try to make it out to be.
As far as pollution goes, my opinion is that modern nuclear is the best thing we have right now to bridge the gap to true clean energy (fusion, thermal, whatever). To connect this with your original comment, burning coal is like smoking cigarettes. 1 certainly will not kill you, but the aggregate effects of many plants (China was building 1/week at some point!) over many years is the real problem.
The biggest advantage of nuclear that I see is that it mostly concentrates and contains the waste. If we fully reprocess (something the US can't do now b/c of laws) there will still be some nasty stuff to deal with. Even then, I would much rather have it that way instead of just spewing the nasty all into the environment the way many coal plants do now.
Energy-producing fusion will require a neutron flux. That leads to nuclear activation and is significantly less clean than one might wish, but I certainly hope that the engineers find some way of making it work.
Define significant. How can they estimate them now when we still don't know how bad it is? What we do know is that it's been consistently worse than the official line, until they eventually admit otherwise, then it gets worse again.
The rabid defenders on HN have a worse track record than the Japanese officials.
It's an over-reaction to an over-reaction. It's the same deal when people talk about how you're more likely to get hit by lightning than end up in a terrorist attack, yet we spend so much time, money and resources trying to prevent the terrorist attack. People are just trying to put things in perspective since people tend to treat nuclear power like some sort of mysterious spectre that might sneak into your home at night and eat your children.
Let's suppose you have two choices for a particular service--one which causes constant danger, but when it happens, it may not even end up on the local news, and even there, as a footnote, and one which is very unlikely to cause problems, but if it does, it ends up not only as a global news event, but the name of where it happens becomes synonymous with the failure.
Which choice is safer? It's the latter, because the latter causes panic, which causes safety to be ratcheted up to ridiculous extents, but nobody notices the former until they go to collect the data, and even then, cognitive bias tends to mean that people still pay attention more to the latter.
So, no, it may not be «complete safety», but at this point, it's the safest option.
Can anybody who is going to make a political nuclear statement for either side please read the prior threads on this topic where your point has already been argued ad infinitum? Someone else already thought about it and used scare words to drive the point home more effectively than you can. I promise.
Another article with Fukushima in the title! Yay! Now I get to argue like a moron because it is a polarizing topic! Stupid {atomheads,hippies}!
Nothing has changed in Japan so there is no reason to expect the thread to change. Shut up, please, and do something productive instead of convincing other hackers with no power to make energy decisions about your take on nuclear power. I can recite this thread from memory it has been rehashed so much and I have flagged it as a result. What can possibly be discussed that hasn't been beat to death in the last two months?
For better or for worse, if something is on topic, it's on topic whether it has been discussed before or not. For example, there are several separate posts about FB, PR, and Google, with the same arguments being repeated. There is no reason to flag any of the stories or the discussions just because you've read them before and you are no longer interested. Skip the post, or skip the comments, you have the power to ignore things, use it.
There is a deeper issue here around whether threads should be merged is some manner. So far, requests for this feature have not been heeded. Until there is a merge threads feature, each post on the subject is a brand new canvas.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This is covered on TV news, incites political debate, and is exactly the same phenomenon that's been rehashed to death.
Except that this is actually news, and some of us are interested in ongoing developments in Fukushima. It's one of the bigger engineering stories going on right now, after all.
You don't have to read the comments or argue about nuclear power to be interested.
Are you saying that nobody has yet made the "this topic is exhausted" argument and that your comment is therefore more original than the anti-{atomhead,hippie} comments?
I'm really disappointed that this is the top voted comment at the moment. @jsprinkles, it might be worth considering that your tone mars an otherwise worthwhile post.
I read your response as "I disagree with you, so your 'tone' is unacceptable."
I'm glad someone is pointing out how polarizing this topic is. I'm glad someone is pointing out that people are shouting each other.
People speculate and they opine and they rant. That the highest voted post provides a third point of view ("Let's recall that we've already discussed this numerous times") is a relief.
Also, if you want to attack a viewpoint, don't attack its tone, attack its argument.
The fundamental disagreement I have here is that, in light of the political aspects (should governments allow nuclear power in general) this sort of thing affects all of us, and we all have a potential affect on the outcome, as political and economic actors.
If a news article is allowed to come out when "nothing has changed in Japan", and affect public opinion, I think we're allowed to deliberate it to do the same.
Fairwinds: Fukushima Groundwater Contamination Worst in Nuclear History
"That (contaminated) water is seeping into the ground table, and there will be contamination on that site for a long time to come. It could also move inland. This is ground water, it doesn't have to move out into the ocean. It is clearly moving into the north"
I don't believe that TEPCO is actively monitoring plutonium and uranium, which is heavy and more likely to seep into ground water than to be blown into the air. I hope that people in Tokyo do have some independent monitoring stations setup. Anybody know any links?
That is quite a logical leap based solely on the INES rating. Fukushima is in the same category as Chernobyl, but this is also the highest category there is, and Chernobyl was past the boundary by a huge margin.
For example, the criteria for the total release of iodine-131 in a level 7 accident is "tens of thousands of TBq". Chernobyl released 1.8 million TBq. Fukushima has released about 370,000 TBq so far.
Chernobyl had killed 31 people by this point while Fukushima has had negligible health effects so far due to much better emergency response. The INES rating does not account for this, only for the amount of material released.