Categories
Emissions Nuclear

Fukushima Daiichi Open and Update Thread #6

Time for a new Open Thread on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis. Please use this post to put any new comments about the situation (including technical information, situation updates, analysis, questions, reflections, etc.). Note that the Open Threads on BraveNewClimate.com are a general discussion forum; please follow the commenting rules, although the ‘stay on topic’ rule obviously does not apply as strictly here.

Analyses suggest most of the fuel in unit 1 is now the bottom of the reactor vessel (Image: Tepco)

For context, below is a brief list of recent events since the previous FD post. (For day-by-day detailed updates, I suggest you follow the ANS Nuclear Cafe news and updates (includes links to official reports like JAIF and TEPCO and news feeds from NHK, NY Times, etc.), see also NEI updates, and other links provided in previous posts.)

1) Fuel melt: Recent analysis suggests that the fuel assemblies in unit 1 were almost completely melted in the days following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. The ‘corium’ (melted actinide fuel, contained fission products, clad etc.) then dropped to the bottom of the reactor pressure vessel (RPV). It is now suspected that during the initial accident, the fuel rods of Reactor No. 1 could have been fully exposed for up to 17 hours, and the earthquake may have caused some structural damage that led to pipe leakage and other problems, in addition to the severe troubles caused by the extended station blackout following the tsunami (which remains the principal cause of the problems).

The temperature of the RPV is now in the range of 100℃ – 120℃, and so the core (or what remains of it) and RPV are stably cooled. That is, this  new information is part of a post mortem analysis of events and timeline of the accident, rather than a trigger for a new urgent crisis.

Despite this, this announcement inevitably led to a whole new wave of speculation (and hype), including rumours alleging “1) “melt down in unit 1 has burned a hole through the bottom of the containment vessel” and 2) “that there was a detonation of the fuel rods & pieces of fuel rods were found two miles from the reactors”.

What is the reality? A close nuclear engineer friend of mine says the following:

There is no evidence that the molten fuel has melted through the bottom of the reactor pressure vessel. The latest TEPCO analyses suggest the molten fuel is submerged in water at the bottom of the pressure vessel. Some TEPCO reports mention about “holes” in the containment vessel. What they mean by “holes” is that the seals on pipe penetrations, etc. may not be leak-tight, and hence steam and/or water leaks out of the vessel.

The second claim is absolutely not true. The site is highly contaminated. The radiation mapping of the site, which has taken more than a dozen surveys (because you can do just a few at a time) indicates the contamination is concentrated in the rubble. The steam vented to the reactor building would have carried along volatilized I and Cs, some of which were condensed onto the walls and surfaces, which then blew up in hydrogen explosion.

The soil sample around the site indicated detection of minute quantities of plutonium (some samples included both Pu-238 and Pu-239, and others just Pu-239). The magnitude was within normal fallout contamination ranges. It is not clear whether these Pu detections indicate they are old contaminations or fresh from Fukushima Daiichi.

2) Restoration roadmap timelines revised: Obviously, the more extensive fuel damage at unit 1 will hamper restoration efforts and set back the site management plans. Workers entering unit 1 to install a new cooling system encountered high radiation levels, although because of of protective gear the workers were only exposed to very little radiation (about 2 mSv). However, the company still expects the damaged units to be stabilized by the end of the year. To quote WNN:

Work has already started on constructing a cover over the damaged reactor building of unit 1 to prevent the spread of radioactive materials. Similar covers for the reactor buildings of units 3 and 4 are now being designed. Unit 2 will not require a cover as the reactor building remains intact.

The current status (17 May) of the roadmap can be read in these 8 diagrams (PDF file).

3) New theory for Unit 4 hydrogen explosion: An apparent contradiction at the unit 4 spent fuel pond was the lack of visual damage of the fuel assessmblies and the difficulty in explaining how radiolysis alone could have evolved so much hydrogen — especially if the fuel was never exposed to air. There is now a new explanation for the source of the fire. TEPCO stated:

The SGTS line of Unit 4 merges into Unit 3 exhaust pipe and it might be a case where hydrogen gas came from Unit 3 flew into Unit 4 reactor building. But this estimation remains presumptive and we have not reached to conclude that the vent operation at Unit 3 caused the explosion at Unit 4. And it is not clear the open/close status of valves in SGTS and when and what amount of hydrogen was generated/ flew in the Unit 4 as of this moment.

Some further details here. This is also a plausible explanation of why the unit 4 storage pool had a low level of radioactivity, and why the two fires extinguished themselves without intervention.

4) Worker death: A sub-contractor at the site has died — he had been working on the drainage system of the centralised radioactive waste store. Tests showed that the worker had not been contaminated with radiation (he was exposed to 0.17 mSv), and he appears to have unfortunately died of a heart attack (he was in his 60s). To underscore: sad as this is, ut is not a radiation-sickness-induced death.

5) Hamaoka Nuclear power plant shutdown: Run by Chubu Electric, Hamaoka may be closed, based on political edict. The site includes four ‘Generation II’ boiling water reactors opened between 1976 and 1993, and a new Advanced BWR (1,200 MWe) opened in 2005 (unit 5). As it turns out, units 1 — 3 may not ever be restarted, and further site reinforcement will be required before units 4 and 5 can resume operating.

But what if Japan decided to retreat from their plans to expand nuclear power to meet 50% of their energy needs by 2030? What would it cost them, in terms of (a) increased emissions of greenhouse gases, and (2) financial alternatives. In a superb analysis, The Breakthrough Institute looked at the possible alternative scenarios in their piece: The Costs of Canceling Japan’s Plans for Nuclear Power.

The bottom line is this: (i) if coal and/or gas is used, emissions will rise 15 to 26% and the cost will be $90 — 150 billion in capital costs and a $17 — 27 billion annual hit in terms of increased imported fuel (coal or LNG); (ii) if attempted with renewables, the cost would range from $330 billion (wind,  no storage) to $690 billion (solar, with some generous assumptions, representing a 190-fold increase in installed capacity). I’m reminded of what George Monbiot said recently, “The Lost World“:

The case against abandoning nuclear power, for example, is a simple one: it will be replaced either by fossil fuels or by renewables which would otherwise have replaced fossil fuels. In either circumstance, greenhouse gases, other forms of destruction and human deaths and injuries all rise.

Which do you want, folks? If you care about climate change mitigation and clean, reliable and cost-effective power, then it’s time to get real about nuclear energy.

By Barry Brook

Barry Brook is an ARC Laureate Fellow and Chair of Environmental Sustainability at the University of Tasmania. He researches global change, ecology and energy.

290 replies on “Fukushima Daiichi Open and Update Thread #6”

Hank, i just saw this comment

“”TEPCO is expected to submit a report to the Japanese Government today which will apparently assert clearly that there was NO damage to the reactor plants as a result of the Great East Japan Earthquake… The damage sequence began when the tsunami hit and triggered an essentially unrecoverable SBO accident scenario.””

http://atomicpowerreview.blogspot.com/2011/05/fukushima-daiichi-no-2-and-no-3.html#comments

the situation is not very clear and i think that neither Tepco nor the japanese Government are unhappy about this.

on the other hand i am quite sure that many people who are only slightly critical of nuclear power are watching the developments with growing distress.

the handling of the accident aftermath has been much much worse than even this pretty bad accident itself.

Like

Brian, on 24 May 2011 at 5:58 PM said:

Which suggests that, unless my calculations are wrong (entirely possible) there is a real likelihood that a substantial part of the current exclusion zone will be long term uninhabitable, unless levels drop.

The Chernobyl exclusion zone is some 2,800 sq km and the land was relatively low value. The Soviets chose not to mitigate.

If I eyeball the DOE/Mext slide then I guess an area of about 10km wide by 40 km long potentially needs mitigation.

Sunflowers are believed to bio-accumulate cesium.

The Japanese government is already forming plans to plant Sunflowers.
http://www.arirang.co.kr/News/News_View.asp?nseq=115717&code=Ne2&category=2

Removing the top few inches of top soil also works. This is already being done in selected school yards.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110512p2a00m0na010000c.html

If I look at the maps on pages 6 and 8 of this pdf from MEXT plans are underway for higher density ground monitoring in Namie Town and Iitate Village.

Click to access 1306253_052419.pdf

Like

R.L. Hails, the simple fact that you cannot argue about is that there’s no thermodynamic driving force in old spent fuel to cause a ‘Biblical disaster’.

You constantly mix highly energetic events (nuclear bombs, fresh spent fuel, operating reactors) with non-energetic events (spent fuel in dry cask).

Risk is simple. How many people die. Fossil fuels kill >2 million/year. How many will die due radiation from Fukushima? Zero or a few.

The simple fact you can’t argue about either, is that nuclear and hydro are the safest forms of energy generation. Oh sure dams ‘can’ burst, and reinforced concrete canisters ‘can’ burst but that doesn’t make them dangerous. Fossil fuels store their waste INTO the OPEN ENVIRONMENT *BY DESIGN*. This kills.

No offense but ‘experts’ such as you that can’t resist words such as “Biblical events” to describe old nuclear fuel that has no real threat in it are hurting the cause of our planet and our very own human development.

You experts much show perspective and be constructive in supporting and improving the safest and best form of energy we’ve got – nuclear fission.

Like

An Hiroshima event is technically different from the latent danger of Fukushima in that some ~ 95% of bomb effects are released as heat/ radiant energy, perhaps 4% is released as fall out.

The total (mean) energy released per fission for U235 is 202.5 MeV.

This energy is distributed, roughly, as 170 MeV in kinetic energy of the major two fission products, 5 MeV among an average of 2.5 fast neutrons, and 7 MeV in prompt gamma rays, for a total of 182 MeV in promptly released fission energy.

The prompt energy release is what determines the explosive yield of the weapon, and it amounts about 89% of the total energy release per fission.

The other 11% of the energy appears as delayed betas (6.5 MeV), anti-neutrinos (8.8 MeV),
and gammas (6.5 MeV). The anti-neutrinos
interact only very weakly with matter. So that amounts to another 13 MeV per fission that is released over time, as ionizing radiation, either betas or gammas from the decays of the fission products.

Thus, if the only fuel is U235, then about 93% of the total energy release per fission, that could harm people and structures will appear as blast wave, radiant heat, and prompt ionising radiation.

A further 7% is in the fallout. But it is the distribution
of the fallout that really matters.

If most of the vaporised bomb material goes up into the stratosphere, as it does in an airburst at sufficiently high altitude, and as it undoubtedly did at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then the radioactive energy carried in fallout is not very relevant to the bomb’s effects on people.

So while your numbers are roughly right, they are also quite misleading.

The yield at Hiroshima has been estimated at 13.1 kt TNT = 3.420994604 x 10^26 MeV, which would result, using the above figure for the prompt fission
energy, to 1.689×10^24 U235 fissions, or the fission
of about 0.66 kg of U235. We of course don’t know for sure the mass of U235 that was used in Little Boy, but the mass of the spike plus bullet typically said to have been about 60 kg, probably enriched to about 90%, since at that enrichment a gun barrel design could work, with less than a 10% risk of predetonation due to spontaneous fission of U238.

That I believe is the source of the oft quoted 1%
efficiency estimate for the Hiroshima bomb that
you repeat. The Nagasaki bomb was considerably more efficient and certainly used a far smaller mass of plutonium.

But all of these considerations are essentially irrelevant to the situation at Fukushima.

Fukushima can not be a fission bomb, but it can undergo a steam/ hydrogen explosion due to a mis op and/or natural cause. Or hostile action.

Chemical explosions due to hostile or other causes are theoretically possible, of course. But such statements aren’t very convincing without giving specific scenarios under which such things could very widely disperse a great deal of the fission products contained in the fuel pellets Remember that people have been evacuated out
to pretty significant distances from the plant.

It seems to me that the more worrying scenarios with respect to fresh spent fuel involve the potential for overheating due to residual decay heat with possible uncovery of the fuel, and the resulting possibility of a propagating zirconium-water reaction, which could evolve significant heat and potentially release and disperse fission products.

But action is being taken to avoid such an eventuality, at least as far as I can tell.

Like

sod, on 25 May 2011 at 1:26 AM said:

the situation is not very clear and i think that neither Tepco nor the japanese Government are unhappy about this

All anyone is going to be able to proffer until the reactors containment vessel is opened up is educated supposition.

Like

well, apparently Tepco has admitted they think the RPV in reactor #1 was damaged due to overheating and meltdown. They state that seals and other parts may have leaked due to the extreme temperatures. I believe that they previously thought that the RPV was damaged and created holes that were leaking but now its all about the temperatures that exceeded the design of the RPV and how that caused seals to leak. This was apparently T+18 hours from the quake.

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/25_03.html

Like

Tepco appaprently also has admitted that the ECCS for reactor #1 operated correctly after the quake but was then turned off for about three hours because of low temperature readings. It was turned back on 3 hours later. I wonder: faulty instrumentation may have misled the operators into thinking they did not need the ECCS on? distractions due to the tsunami? three hours later they got better instrumentation and turned it back on once they realized their mistake?

is three hours sufficient time to cause the reactor to heat sufficiently that cooling no matter what would be too little too late?

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/24_18.html

Like

Cyril R

“The simple fact you can’t argue about either, is that nuclear and hydro are the safest forms of energy generation.”

I understand completely your rationale for writing this, but from the perspective of a member of the Japanese public I very much doubt they would agree with this.

Consider this thought process from a Japanese resident:
1) Three nuclear plants exploded after an earthquake.
2) I was repeatedly told that they were designed to withstand earthquakes
3) ca 100,000 people have been evacuated; contamination levels and ongoing risk of further incidents mean there is no timeline for their return.
4) I trust the nuclear industry and nuclear power is safe

I don’t forsee many people reching step 4.

Like

Same problem here as with climate change — another case where computer modeling and inference from observations are available; but direct observations aren’t available and won’t be until it’s too late to deal with the causes of the problem.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-05-25/fukushima-containment-vessels-may-be-leaking-tepco-says.html
By Yuji Okada and Tsuyoshi Inajima

“May 25 (Bloomberg) — Tokyo Electric Power Co. said the containment chambers of damaged reactors at its Fukushima nuclear plant were likely breached, identifying additional source of radiation leaks that may exceed Chernobyl.

Computer simulations of the meltdowns of three reactors in March indicates holes formed in chambers, the company known as Tepco said in a report.

‘Unfortunately I can’t find any consistency in the report,’ Hironobu Unesaki, a nuclear engineering professor at Kyoto University, said by phone. ‘Tepco hasn’t released sufficient radionuclide analysis of leaked contaminated water. Now they’ve confirmed fuel rods melted, they should also release more data including plutonium and uranium readings….'”

Like

Something else you can’t see til it happens but can still prepare for — computer modeling anticipated the “amplification of slip near the surface” from the earthquake, too:

http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_18129927

“The fault that generated the Tohoku-Oki earthquake … report in the latest issue of the journal Science Express…. it ruptured in a “flip-flop” fashion — first breaking westward, then eastward.

… The second motion — generating magnitude-6.5 aftershocks — deformed the seafloor with such force that a huge tsunami was triggered.

… the two-faced rupture made the devastation greater than it might have been otherwise ….

“… what we need to figure out is whether similar earthquakes — and large tsunamis — could happen in other subduction zones around the world,” Beroza said.

The project was a collaborative effort. Stanford’s Beroza and graduate student Annemarie Baltay measured the energy released by the quake, while University of Tokyo’s Satoshi Ide modeled the slippage of the fault.

‘This amplification of slip near the surface was predicted in computer simulations of earthquake rupture, but this is the first time we have clearly seen it occur in a real earthquake.'”

Like

What do we know? What are facts? How does that comport, or contradict our previously held judgments.

US type designs, light water reactors, were based on a once in 10,000 year recurrence event, a core melt down with biblical (my term) consequences, . In fifty years, we now have suffered four melt downs. But not one person has died of radiation. The long term death from accidental release of radioactive isotopes, public health predictions, range from near zero, per pro nuke types, to millions per anti nuke types. (Climate change has similar scientific differences of expert judgment.) Fukushima was hit by an earthquake five to ten times larger than its design basis (depends on varying media reports). It almost made it. It was hit by a tsunami, over twice its design basis. And drowned the emergency generators placed in the basement. It took over two weeks to restore power, melt downs took hours. TEPCO lacks basic plant instrumentation data. The loops either do not exist, or were destroyed en mass. There are enormous gaps in our knowledge of what happened.

US nukes once were put on line for $200/ kwe; the planned facilities project circa $10,000/ kwe but one, in Texas, doubled in a few months, and was cancelled. We have no current track record.

I designed a score, that work, in the range of $800 – $1600/kwe. The last big one took over a decade to go on line. Current Chinese experience is more than twice as fast. (interest on construction loans is a huge cost consideration of any multi billion dollar investment.) I know the NRC does not know what it is doing. They were forbidden by law to consider costs, and by culture to be anti business bureaucrats. The Commissioners are political appointees, and reflect deep partisan conflicts. They are highly trained academics, or lawyers, with no real world experience. Billions are wasted, real problems are ignored. I had intense interaction when things were built, I am ignorant of what they have done in almost two generations.

Reviewing the cards, I judge Fukushima to be really dangerous (to Japan, not the US), in a meta-stable condition. The policy of storing generations of spent fuel in pools, because politics has frozen back end technologies, is a latent suicidal decision path. Spent fuel must go somewhere safe, contained in dry sealed containers, and located deep underground in one, seismically stable, heavy guarded government facility, and/or reprocessed. (This established policy is vehemently fought by the current Chairman of the NRC who worked for anti nuke factions in the US Senate/House.) IMHO, he is violating both the spirit and letter of the law defining radioactive waste management signed by President Reagan in Jan. 1881. His orders are being litigated.

Fukushima must force fundamental societal risk reassessment. The issues are technically related, but are essentially ideological in nature, i.e which authority do you trust? Citizens have been told, no problem, and, you are going to die horribly, by experts. This must stop, on both sides of the Pacific.

Like

Again as long as people who claim to be experts use the words “biblical” and “suicidal decision paths” to things that have the lowest impact of any energy generating technology, we will not advance our cause. I’m sorry to say this Hails but you’re being an extreme hypocrite, first talking about how some decades old fuel rods that sit in a concrete packadge is suicide, without presenting any plausible scenario why this would be so, and then, well then, you say experts say we are going to die has to stop.

Seriously dude.

It occurs to me that we just won’t solve the CO2 problem. We’re much more interested in theoretical debates than actually looking at reality. We’re not interested at all in comparing apples to apples and chosing the least horrible solutions.

The future is fossil – just as it is in the present. Buckle up. It may be a rough ride.

Like

R. L. Hails Sr. P. E., on 26 May 2011 at 5:44 AM said:

Fukushima must force fundamental societal risk reassessment. The issues are technically related, but are essentially ideological in nature, i.e which authority do you trust? Citizens have been told, no problem, and, you are going to die horribly, by experts. This must stop, on both sides of the Pacific.

Hear, hear!

The problem, of course, is getting everyone on the same page. Nuclear energy is beset by enemies from parts of the political and business sectors, and by opportunistic parasites that feed on fear. Putting an end to this, given how deeply it has become entrenched, will be a very difficult task.

Like

Hank Roberts, on 26 May 2011 at 12:00 AM said:

Quoting your bloomberg link

Now they’ve confirmed fuel rods melted, they should also release more data including plutonium and uranium readings….’”

Uranium and Plutonium measurements for the basements of the Turbine buildings were released on the 22nd of May –

Click to access handouts_110522_04-e.pdf

MEXT also did fallout sampling for Uranium and Plutonium on April 1st.

Click to access 1305381_0401.pdf

Like

Finally air sample measurements — taken from the concrete pump cranes:

— (Japan Broadcasting Corporation)
updated at 20:39 UTC, May. 25
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/25_07.html

“On Sunday, Tokyo Electric Power Company began measuring the density of radioactive elements above the No.1 and No.4 reactors.

The firm used instruments attached to the crane pumps that are injecting water into the reactors.

TEPCO detected 360 becquerels of cesium-134 per cubic meter above the No.1 reactor, where most of the fuel rods are believed to have melted. The amount is 18 times the allowable limit for the plant’s perimeter.

The firm also discovered 7.5 times the limit of cesium-134 above the No.4 reactor, which has no fuel in its core. The substance is believed to have come from the fuel storage pool and the neighboring No.3 reactor.

TEPCO says it will measure the levels of radioactive elements above the No.2 and No.3 reactors. It also plans to cover the reactor buildings with polyester sheets to prevent the further dispersal of radioactive materials into the air.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011 07:48 +0900 (JST)”

Anyone seen these published? I can’t keep up….

Like

> Uranium and Plutonium measurements for
> the basements
Thanks Harry; have you seen any trend-over-time charts lately? I recall charts a month ago; haven’t seen one lately.

The “Plant Status Fukushima Daichi” handout dated May 25th (handouts_110525_02_3.pdf) says they’re working on analyzing samples from spent fuel pools; no mention of further samples from groundwater or basement under the reactors.

“- We are conducting detailed nuclide analyses on the water collected on April 12 from the spent fuel pool of Unit 4.
– We are conducting detailed nuclide analyses on the water collected on April 16 from the skimmer surge tank of Unit 2.
– We are conducting detailed nuclide analyses on the water collected on May 8 from the spent fuel pool of Unit 3.”

Their 110525e10.pdf (the attachment to
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11052508-e.html
— one of the ten new press releases dated 5/25 today) analysis says:

“Detected density of Pu-238, 239 and 240 are the same level as that of the measured fallouts
in Japan in the cases of previous nuclear tests in the atmosphere. However, this can be considered to be caused by the nuclear accident of this time….”

Help interpreting this, does anyone know?

Does this mean the release of plutonium detected near the plants now is about the same amount that was measured some years ago from the Chinese nuclear tests?

Or are they saying the current accident released an amount comparable to what remains _now_ from the Chinese bomb tests?

Press releases are at:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/index-e.html

Like

Here’s the kind of info that ought to be being charted by someone over time (and accompanied with a lesson on detecting trends in time series data)

From IAEA’s most recent update:
http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/tsunamiupdate01.html

“The activity concentrations of I-131, Cs-134 and Cs-137 in seawater close to the Fukushima Daiichi plant at the screen of Unit 2 have been measured every day since 2 April. … There was a significant increase in levels of I-131 from about 8 to 80 kBq/L from 10 to 11 May, in parallel with the increase for both radiocaesium isotopes. This indicates that there is still some production of fission products. The I-131 levels decreased to about 20 kBq/L on 17 May.”

I wonder — anyone seen speculation or measurements on how long it takes for water from inside the pressure vessel to leak down to the seawater detection site? That would help guesstimate how long ago that iodine-131 was created (and so how much decayed away before it was measured in the ocean).

I wonder if they’re sampling water from underneath the pressure vessel as it leaks out, as well as when it gets down to the ocean. That would be much closer to realtime tracking what’s going on in there.

“Metastable” seems the right word for this.

Like

PS — warning — just because a press release says “significantly” doesn’t mean they did the statistics on a trend, though it would be very helpful to know more about the numbers.

Barry, have you covered statistics and trend detection here? I looked briefly and didn’t find it.

Detection of _very_small_ changes can be “significant” in the statistical sense — useful to try to track what’s happening inside the reactors — while not being “significant” in the sense of surprising or unexpected.

It’d be no surprise if, in a mess in the bottom of the containment, stuff is getting stirred around by the flow of water, that would let bits of fuel occasionally get close enough to produce some new short-lived fission products — that’s what tracking I-131 should help decide. I think.

But I’m speculating. Anyone know more?

Like

Here’s someone who did the calculus:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.0242v1

Deciphering the measured ratios of Iodine-131 to Cesium-137 at the Fukushima reactors
T. Matsui
(Submitted on 2 May 2011)

We calculate the relative abundance of the radioactive isotopes Iodine-131 and Cesium-137 produced by nuclear fission in reactors and compare it with data taken at the troubled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. The ratio of radioactivities of these two isotopes can be used to obtain information about when the nuclear reactions terminated.

“…. the data from water samples taken from four sub-drains near the reactor buildings show even more puzzling features, as shown in fig. 2.[14] In particular, the water samples from the sub-drain near the unit-2 reactor building show an anomalously high radioactivity ratio.[15], even greater than the upper bound given by (11) if the nuclear fission ends on X-day as indicated by the red solid line in the figure. If there is no strong chemical filtering effect in draining contaminated water from the reactor buildings, it would be difficult to understand the observed anomaly near the unit-2 reactor without assuming that a significant amount of fission products were produced at least 10 – 15 days after X-day.
The data from the unit-3 sub-drain before April 23 sit close to the decay line which fits to the sea water data, hence they may be understood as due to radiation from fission products produced before the X-day. However, the data of the unit-1 sub-drain and unit-4 sub-drain give high radioactivity ratio, even larger than that of the samples from the unit-4 cooling pool and from the unit-3 sub-drain. The data therefore cannot be explained by the contamination of the old fission products which had existed in the spent-fuel rods in the unit-4 cooling pool. The new data of April 25, however, show very different characteristics which are difficult to be understood unless there was considerable mixing of waters belonging to different sub- drains due to in-flow and out-flow of water through underground water channels.
In conclusion, the ratio of the measured radioactivity of I-131 and Cs-137 may be used to extract useful information about when these fission products were produced in the nuclear reactor complex of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant….”

Like

@ uvdiv 18 May at 10:48pm gave us http://i.imgur.com/xu0Pm.jpg and others asked for interpretaion – what does it mean?

In case no one has found a relationship between Bq/m2 and uSv/h, a ballpark relationship can be inferred from the simulations in :
http://www.sckcen.be/…/L2a_practical_aspects_of_monitoring_in_case_of_emergencies_Croatia_2010.ppt

On slide 7 is a scenario of 1.81 MBq/m2 of Cs137 (as indicator for other FPs including 70 MBq/m2 of iodine isotopes), on slide 23 is a dose of ~8 uSv/h from ground radiation.

This weak association suggests that the 3 MBq/m2 edge of the red coloured (plume running 35 km NW of Fuku. NPP) area would give a dose of 13 uSv/h. Temporarily, that rate would exceed 100 mSv/a, before reduction by die-away, rain and bioturbation.

Not enough to give me any symptoms, but the iodine might be a threat to children.

Like

Hank, as I read the soil plutonium detection notes, they mean they can’t tell whether the detected material was bomb-test-era or not. If it’s not, it’s in such tiny quantities that it almost could be (so really not a big escape of any sort) and it hasn’t changed since they started collecting (so no continuing build-up). The sampling for uranium and plutonium in the turbine basement water all came back completely negative (<x typically meaning below detection limit), so that could be a conclusive "no" depending on water connectedness.

it's possible that occasionally the loose fuel would get into a configuration for fission, but the figures from IAEA – despite their conclusions – don't really seem to be conclusive on their own. Certainly the decreases are not all attributable to half-life decay effects, and the increases may be nothing more than another more-contaminated pool finding its way to the sensing area.

I'm almost certain "significantly" is not used in any statistical sense. Note that a "configuration for fission" does not necessarily mean closer together; moderator is required between neutron and next fissile target.

Like

Just saw your next post (8:54AM) Hank… great paper, ratios of elements are fascinating; ratios of isotopes of the same element are even better, because they will behave compatibly in a chemical & physical sense also. As your reference bears out strongly, the picture is extremely confusing, and there is no clear winning explanation.

Like

Hank Roberts, on 26 May 2011 at 7:23 AM said:

Or are they saying the current accident released an amount comparable to what remains _now_ from the Chinese bomb tests?

Plutonium 239 has a half life of 24,000 years and plutonium 240 has a half life of 6,500 years. Even the Pu-238 has a half life of 87 years.

So the amount of plutonium in Japanese soil hasn’t change much in the last 30 years. The numbers Tepco is quoting come from the Mext Soil database measurements taken from between 1978 and 2008.

The ratio of Pu 238 to Pu 239 and Pu240 can provide dating with very accurate test equipment.

Like

> MEXT soil database
Wonderful reference, thank you Harry.

That found this, and the plutonium is arriving year after year, in wind-carried dust:

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2003/EM/b212560a

Recent trends of plutonium fallout observed in Japan: plutonium as a proxy for desertification
Katsumi Hirose et al.,
J. Environ. Monit., 2003, 5, 302-307
DOI: 10.1039/B212560A

“… Plutonium isotopic ratios in the deposition samples suggest that significant amounts of the recent 239,240Pu deposition observed in Japan are attributed to the resuspension of plutonium-bearing surface soil particles; resuspended plutonium originates from the East Asian arid areas. The recent increased tendency of 239,240Pu content in residues in deposition samples may reflect desertification in the East Asian continent.”

And that led to this:

Geological Disposal of Carbon Dioxide and Radioactive Waste: A Comparative Assessment

Advances in Global Change Research, 2011, Volume 44, Part 2, 515-537,
DOI: 10.1007/978-90-481-8712-6_17

Comparison Between Geological Disposal of Carbon Dioxide and Radioactive Waste in China

http://www.springerlink.com/content/p10wm430p35012w0/

“The large amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and the fast development of nuclear power plants in China pose challenges for the safe disposal of CO2 and high-level waste (HLW). Significant progress has been made in both areas. … Seventy disposal sites in 24 major sedimentary basins have been identified for CO2 disposal. The amount of spent fuel will reach about 82,000 t of heavy metal when all of the planned 58 reactors on the Chinese mainland reach the end of their lifetime. A target to build a national HLW repository in around 2050 has been set. CO2 disposal and radioactive waste disposal have much in common ….”

Like

DV82XL

“Nuclear energy is beset by enemies from parts of the political and business sectors, and by opportunistic parasites that feed on fear. ”

Yes, and it’s also beset by having overpromised on it’s cost and safety benefits, and refusing to openly address these.

In the ca 50 year history of civil nuclear power there have now been five significant meltdowns (TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushimax3). The latest has caused the evacuation of significant populated land areas for what is currently an indeterminate time. If the wind direction had been different it could well have been far worse.

If I wanted nuclear power to have a future I would be arguing for a wide ranging enquiry, supported internationally, into the technical, human and political causes of these safety failures so they can be addressed in order to help humanity fight climate change.

Given the very obvious failure of nuclear safety at Fukushima, I would not be calling those who oppose nuclear power “parasites”. Humility, not aggression is called for and would do your case much good.

Like

@Brian – As usual a total lack of perspective on the relative dangers between modes of generation are glaringly obvious here.,as is the tendency to overstate the magnitude, and the impact of these incidents.

Holding nuclear energy to a far higher standard then any other comparable technology, and accepting the overreaction of the authorities only indicates to me that you don’t really understand what is going on and have chosen to buy into the very propaganda that I was writing about.

This is the crux of the matter: broad acceptance of a narrative that is being managed by those that do not want to see nuclear energy grow. Those of us that have chosen to drill down deeper have found that deaths caused by coal, failures of hydro dams, and natural gas explosions, have taken many, many more lives than nuclear over any given period. This doesn’t even take into account the broad damage being done to the environment by these modes.

How many people do you think have been displaced by the creation of hydro reservoirs? Have you ever bothered to check? Yet you give more weight to those displaced by a natural disaster, than those displaced by their own governments in the name of ‘the greater good.’

Wakeup and smell the coffee – you are being led around by your nose for someone else’s agenda. Or at least stop defending them.

Like

DV82XL said:

Those of us that have chosen to drill down deeper have found that deaths caused by coal, failures of hydro dams, and natural gas explosions, have taken many, many more lives than nuclear over any given period.

Figures 1 and 2 here show what DV82XL is saying:

What is risk? A simple explanation

Like

DV82XL

I am, indeed, amongst those who have dug deeper and I have “bothered to check”. I fully understand the issue of overall deaths and absolutely agree that on that basis, nuclear is safer.

Also, on climate change, I think it’s almost inconceivable that without a significant increase in nuclear generation we will prevent catastrophic effects over a timescale of decades or centuries.

The point I am trying to make is that, this will not happen unless the very obvious failures of nuclear safety evidenced by Fukushima are properly and openly addressed.

Presented with images of exploding nuclear plants and extensive contamination requiring long term evacuation zones you will not gain support for nuclear investment without genuine change in how nuclear safety is managed.

You need to realise that to the public, five meltdowns in fifty years is not an acceptable safety record given these consequences. It is irrelevant whether people understand the more insidious effects of fossil fuels or not – the effects of nuclear failure are very, very obvious. Nuclear safety needs to improve, not because nuclear has a bad overall safety record, but to demonstrate that it can be good.

I was brought up within sight of a nuclear power station, I’m a trained engineer and I’m comfortable that the risk can be managed. But I can fully understand why, given Fukushima and Chernobyl, the public aren’t, and I do not accept that the design and operation of Fukushima was adequate.

Wake up and smell the coffee – to any ordinary member of the public, Fukushima shows that the nuclear industry cannot be trusted be safe.

Your desire to change that is doomed to failure by an aggressive response to challenge.

Like

Brian,

I’ve only just opend this thread and I haven’t read all the earlier posts, so forgive my lack of background.

My opinion on the issue you are talking about is different from most BNC regulars and very different from yours.

My position is that nuclear must be allowed to be cheaper than coal if it is going to cut world emissions significantly. 80% of the growth in world emissions between now and 2050 will come from the developing and under-developed countries. These countries will bur the least cost electricity technologies, If coal is cheaper than nuclear, they’ll buy coal.

It will not achieve what we want if we ramp up the cost of nuclear even further than it is now. In fact, we need to reduce the cost of nuclear considerably.

Nuclear is over regulated. The excessive regulation is not providing greater safety but is greatly raising the cost http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html . What will provide improved performance, efficiency and safety and lower the cost is to wind back the restrictions and let it go through the normal development cycle that technologies go through. DV82XL often points to the progression the aerospace industry went through and how safety improved as a result. We need to allow nuclear to go through the same development cycle. We can do that best by removing the excessive regulation and shackles. Luckily, China, Korea and Russia are doing that without any help from the West.

In my opinion reducing cost of nuclear should be our prime objective. Nuclear is already plenty safe enough and it will get safer as it develops. I understand the politics you are arguing about, but the issue of rolling out nuclear is not primarily an issue for the western democracies. The real issue is about giving it a cost advantage over coal and making it suitable for roll out to the developing world.

All this IMHO, of course. Now, having stirred the pot, I can sit back and watch the tirade :)

Like

Brian, I agree with you totally. I am a long time supporter of nuclear, but the outcome of Fukushima is not good. The contamination plume to the northeast is a big problem for Japan and the industry. The preaching to the converted mentality is counter productive and a big turn off to the average person in the street. The industry and government need to show humility and resolve.

Like

Rick, on 26 May 2011 at 10:19 PM said:
I am a long time supporter of nuclear, but the outcome of Fukushima is not good.

I think the outcome of Fukushima will eventually be that there is ‘life after a nuclear accident’.

The only explanation I’ve ever come up with as to why anti-nuclear sentiment is comparatively low in the US Southeast and comparatively high in the US Northeast is that the Northeast doesn’t suffer devastating Hurricanes.

If one lives in the US Southeast then every few years a big hurricane is going to come along and do enormous damage. The residents evacuate or weather the storm, then return and rebuild just as a matter of ‘normal life’.

In nuclear accidents, Hollywood and anti-nuclear advocates have sold a version of events that life wouldn’t go on, and if you were unlucky enough to survive you would eventually suffer a painful, lingering death.

The bulk of the ‘painful lingering deaths’ as a result of Chernobyl were from people who took up excessive alcohol consumption because they were convinced they would die a painful lingering death.

Like

I am a long time supporter of nuclear, but …

Emphasis mine. This phrasing is used by false friends.

… The industry and government need to show humility and resolve.

A “long-time supporter” of the sort who seems unaware of governments’ conflict of interest. They gain large revenues from natural gas, while to the nuclear power industry it is a powerful competitor.

Can anyone share some recent satellite or aerial photos of the FD1 site and vicinity?

Like

@Brian & Rick – The public only learns to live with risk when they have been inured to it. That is why the majority doesn’t think about the risks of hydro dams, or thinks too much about the land destroyed by coal mining. Its the reason people get in cars and aircraft, not because these things are intrinsically safe, but because they have become indifferent.

Things won’t get worse in the long run for nuclear because of Fukushima, it will in fact get better, simply because that’s how humans react. The only thing is that going to happen is that antinuclear demagogues will use it as a short term platform, but in the end even that will pass.

And like G.R.L. Cowan, I don’t give any weight to remarks that start, “I am a long time supporter of nuclear, but …”

Like

sorry if i did not reply to a couple of post, i have been busy elsewhere.

there are significant developments in central Europe. Switzerland has decided to (very slowly) phase out nuclear power as a reaction to Fukushima and growing protests.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304520804576345300167187410.html

In Germany the decision is no longer about a phase out, but about time. there is a strong push towards an exit before 2020, as even the extremely conservative Bavarian CSU now supports an xit in 2022.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15094846,00.html

Bavaria is the state with the highest percentage of nuclear energy in Germany, but also has access to water power. (alps..)

at the same time the European Union countries without nuclear power are organising a front against the countries supporting nuclear.

—————–

“What will provide improved performance, efficiency and safety and lower the cost is to wind back the restrictions and let it go through the normal development cycle that technologies go through. DV82XL often points to the progression the aerospace industry went through and how safety improved as a result. We need to allow nuclear to go through the same development cycle. We can do that best by removing the excessive regulation and shackles. Luckily, China, Korea and Russia are doing that without any help from the West.”

—-

i was seriously surprised by this suggestion. Nuclear power is very different from the aerospace industry. basically accidents happen less often but have a much bigger effect. (turning big parts of a country inhabitable, at least for a significant amount of time).

more, but smaller accidents are a much better environment for a trial and error approach than rare and big events.

basically we can not afford to have any nuclear meltdown incidents at all.

ps: the source you linked above looks horrible. the chapter about Chernobyl doesn t make any sense any longer after Fukushima, an accident in western type reactors.
the lessons from Fukushima also obviously contradict the meltdown chapter of the book.

Like

> phyast.pitt.edu, Cohen’s book

It says “The total cost of a power plant is defined as the total amount of money spent up to the time it goes into commercial operation.”

That’s not, nowadays, how the total cost is calculated.

But worse, look at the chain of logic he assumed back in 1990, leading up to arguing against the probable risk estimates published by the Union of Concerned Scientists:

“we calculate the LLE from reactor accidents according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Study which estimates one meltdown per 20,000 reactor-years of operation, and an average of 400 fatalities per meltdown.” (Chapter 8)

What are the current numbers? (We know “meltdown” isn’t well defined)

Events at Fukushima proved his, the governments’, and the industries’ assumptions wrong.

“… great care is taken in siting plants to avoid proximity to potentially active geological faults. (Widely circulated stories about plants being built on faults are not true).” (Chapter 6)

MARCH 17, 2011 Reactors on Fault Lines Getting Fresh Scrutiny http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704396504576204672681780248.html

“… One type of LOCA in which the ECCS would not prevent a meltdown is a large crack in the bottom of the reactor vessel, since water injected by the ECCS would simply pour out through that crack. This would not occur with pipe breaks since all significant pipes enter the vessel near its top.” (Chapter 6)

(water drained by leaks from control rod seals )

Continuing from Chapter 6:

“… consideration of the several “precursors” to core damage that have already been experienced in reactor operation. By noting what further failures could have caused these incidents to escalate into core damage and estimating the probabilities for these further failures, one can arrive at an independent estimate of the probability for a core damage accident….”
….
The RSS estimates that a reactor meltdown may be expected about once every 20,000 years of reactor operation; that is , if there were 100 reactors, there would be a meltdown once in 200 years.7 The report by the principal organization opposed to nuclear power, Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS),21 estimates one meltdown for every 2,000 years of reactor operation ….

If the UCS estimate is correct, we should have expected three meltdowns by now ….” (Chapter 6)
________________________________

Like

Hank Roberts,

You asked a question:

What are the current numbers?

But you didn’t answer it.

Please answer it yourself. How many fatalities? And please put your figure in perspective; i.e. fatalities per MWh of nuclear generation compared with fatalities per MWh of coal generated electricity – in both cases over the full life cycle. And averaged over a sussiciently long period such as 50 years. Refer to Figures 1 and 2 here, the accompanying test and the references for assistance:

What is risk? A simple explanation

Remember also that nuclear is getting safer all the time (Fujushima is 1950/60’s design), and will get safer faster if we reduce the costs so it can be rolled out faster.

Like

there is a new leak at Fukushima plant.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/leak-suspected-crippled-japanese-nuclear-plant/story?id=13691431

basically we always learn this, when water is missing, which obviously is too late.

Greenpeace has taken samples and has found high levels of radiation in all sorts of seafood. has the japanese Government or Tepco provided any data on this so far?

————-

in related news, Tepco is now saying that it did inject sea water longer than they originally said.

“The firm said it had continued to inject seawater into one of the damaged reactors soon after the March 11 tsunami, reversing an earlier statement in which it said it had suspended the risky measure amid pressure from the prime minister’s office.”

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2011/0526/Tepco-s-handling-of-Japan-s-nuclear-crisis-under-severe-scrutiny

the CS article also mentions the incredible possible cost of $130 billion.

Peter Lang wrote above about low cost of nuclear. it looks as if Tepco nuclear power is not cheap these days.

Like

hank:

cohen’s numbers are still considered correct for reactors like diablo canyon. Indian Point on the other hand was rated at one every 10 thousand reactor years and Fukushima? I don’t think Cohen would go along with giving that the “normal” gen two rating, given the siting and the clustering (given the siting).

At any rate, 3 reactor accidents do not prove cohen wrong. in fact, it wouldn’t prove him wrong even if F was legitimately rated at the gen two norm.

Chernobyl doesn’t count in Cohen’s calculus, btw, and as I said, neither should Fukushima. So it’s not three accidents, but two max, and not even that.

by the way, 400 or so reactors would change the accident ratio to once every 50 years. with ucs, that would be one accident every five years, Hank. so your implication that UCS is correct is incorrect.

400/20,000.

Like

(deleted – wrong thread. Re-post in Sceptics or similar CC thread – this is the FUKUSHIMA UPDATE AND OPEN THREAD.)

Like

Asahi has a very interesting post about robots that could be used after an accident.

http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201105260175.html

Japan had build several such robots, but put them out of service again, because the robots seem to have increased the awareness that an accident could happen.

i had wondered for a long time, why robot-nation Japan had to rely on US support to get machines into the buildings.

———-

Asashi has also conducted polls about support for nuclear energy in multiple countries.

http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201105260164.html

the result show a majority of opponents in several countries now, including Japan. there also seems to be a majority for keeping nuclear power at the level it is today.

barry ran a post about prominent people switching their nuclear views after the accident. (and many of them towards a pro-nuclear view!) now it looks like some of these changes might have been affected by the feeling that the Fukushima reactors had been able to withstand the earthquake very well and the limited evacuation zone 8and no deaths) giving the impression that the effect of the accident might be small.

Now it is turning out that much of this information was false. people in japan for example are buying geiger counters in great numbers which does not suggest a strong believe in their governments information.

Like

GRL Cowan and DV82XL. I repeat I am a long time supporter of nuclear power. Your somewhat personal and immature response is actually what I was referring to. The fact is there is about 800 km2 which will be an exclusion zone for many years. Green peace will have a field day with it. The reality is that anti nuclear sentiment has grown. You will not counter this by defensive and dismissive approaches. In public affairs perceptions are reality. Regulators must deal with this. In the west, the industry will take many years to recover. In the meantime we have to hope developing countries can pick up the baton.

Like

To follow on from Rick…

Consider the position of the nuclear industry.

The reactors at Fukushima were knowingly built in a seismic zone. They were designed accordingly. The design has proved inadequate and has resulted in a large area being evacuated for a significant time.

Some reasonable questions for the nuclear industry follow from this. For example, moving for specific to general:

1) Are there other reactors whose design is inadequate for known seismic hazards? If so, what should be their fate?

2) Are there other known and designed for hazards where the design of nuclear power stations is inadequate?

3) Are there hazards not designed for which in the light of learning from the impact of this incident, should be designed for?

4) Was learning from other incidents such as TMI implemented at Fukushima? If not, why not? How can we ensure this happens in future?

5) Have political imperatives undermined nuclear safety? Eg storage of spent fuel. Can the nuclear industry operate safely in this political climate and if not, how can it be changed?

This is an accident which should not have happened. To respond as you do by reasserting the safety of nuclear power, merely serves to reinforce the perception of a nuclear industry unable to build a culture which openly addresses genuine safety issues.

You are doing your cause no favours.

Like

Leo: Your approach is statistical, whereas climate models simulate the physics. It’s chalk and cheese. You come up with a 0.32 degrees per W/m2 and the other Hansen comes up with 0.75 degrees per W/m2 using Paleoclimate data … without simulating any physics. Here’s the paper:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2008/Hansen_etal.html

And another more recent piece:

Click to access 1105.1140.pdf

If you want somebody to pick apart your method line by line, you could try posting to realclimate.org … they have more climate scientists on board who might be able to spare the time and have the expertise.

Like

I nominate Steve Packard’s The Other Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant as a high priority for read and discuss. Daini NPP is only 6 miles north of Daiichi NPP.  I created a public Google Map if you wish to study the siting of the two nuclear parks.

Both plants were struck by the monster earthquake and 14-meter tsunami. The Daiichi NPP suffered three (of six) damaged reactors whereas all of Daini’s four reactors are safely in cold shutdown. What is the difference? Newer, improved designs. Steve summarized:

The conclusion that one can draw from the events at the two Fukushima plants is relatively straight forward: While the older BWR-3 and BWR-4 designs are sufficiently safe in most situations, their designs are nowhere near as robust and reliable as newer reactor designs. Of course, despite holding up so well against forces far beyond what designers had planned, the BWR-5 is, by today’s standards, old technology. Newer reactors are much safer still and have even more reliable passive-based safety features.

This is all the more reason why we should be building more nuclear plants. As newer reactors are built we will be able to eventually shut down the older reactors, thus improving economics and safety even further. The events in Japan do not diminish the picture of safety we have when it comes to new reactors. Rather than assuming that reactors will fail in the manner that they did at Fukushima Daiichi, we should consider how well they held up at Fukushima Daini. This is far more representative of new reactor designs, although those are even safer and more reliable still.

Like

“I nominate Steve Packard’s The Other Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant as a high priority for read and discuss.”

http://depletedcranium.com/the-other-fukushima-nuclear-power-plant/

—-

thanks for this link. even though i disagree with several points being made (and the conclusion, of course), i found the article to be a very good reading and full of good information. exactly the kind of stuff that made me read BNC!

i think the article should take a closer look at the emergency Diesels, as these were one of the main problems. (placement of the diesels was more important than reactor type, i fear)

i think the Fukushima lesson is simple: Nuclear power plants shall not be located at places that might be flooded. i was seriously shocked when i read in the German report of the reactor security commission, that water level of the highest expected flood would turn several plants into islands and would reach up to 0.5 meters below the entrance doors of the plant closest to my home.

Click to access sicherheitsueberpruefung_stellungnahme_rsk.pdf

( i would also suggest building nuclear power plants with the earthquake resistance of the japanese plants everywhere and NOT to build any nuclear power plants at all in regions that have extreme earthquakes)

—————-

on a different topic, it looks like the 7 nuclear power plants in Germany that were shut down after Fukushima will not go back online again.

http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/europe/news/article_1641889.php/German-environment-ministers-agree-to-shut-down-7-nuclear-reactors

Like

> BWR-3 and BWR-4 designs … are nowhere near
> as robust and reliable

Even two older BWR-1 and more BWR-2 reactors continue operating. It’s not easy to compare safety without considering the various upgrades and modifications available

According to the list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boiling_water_reactors

for example the last two BWR-1 reactors are currently operating, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarapur_Atomic_Power_Station

and they’re reassessing safety of those now.

Like

Rick, on 27 May 2011 at 6:16 PM said:

The fact is there is about 800 km2 which will be an exclusion zone for many years.

Since we haven’t seen the mitigation plan how much area will be an ‘exclusion zone’ for many years is supposition.

Here’s the radiation readings inside the ‘exclusion zone’. I would note that monitoring point #2, which is less then 10 km from the plant site has a radiation reading of less then 1 uSv/hr.

Click to access 1305391_0521.pdf

Like

@Brian & Rick

“You are doing your cause no favours.”

Well now that we’re clear on who’s side you are on….

The antinuclear side has been dropping comments admonishing nuclear supporters to tamp down the rhetoric in many pronuclear forums, generally hiding behind the ‘I’m a supporter of nuclear but’ line. What they would like is nuclear to go back to constantly apologizing, and looking at its feet mumbling when arguing its point. They seem to be distressed that we are taking more proactive tactics, because we are not making it easy for them to leverage Fukushima Daiichi to attack the whole industry.

Well too bad for you. We tried the soft approach after Chernobyl and wound up going nowhere for twenty-five years, it doesn’t work. We need to get the truth out and make sure that we don’t let our opponents set the agenda.

The fact that they’re trying to get us to stop means we must be doing something right.

Like

DV82XL, for the third time I am a long term supporter of nuclear. I started in uranium business 25 years ago and am still in it. I deal with public perception every day. After Chernobyl happened our rhetoric was that it was a Russian design and would never happen in the west. An arrogant response to Fukushima will not go down well. I believe the response of the British has been the best, measured but firm. It addressed peoples concerns but restated that there are no alternatives if you want to address climate change. Fukushima is a failure for the industry that can’t be repeated. The failure goes beyond TEPCO and Brian has touched on those issues. I believe IAEA has been a failure and needs to be revamped. I also believe we have learned a lot from the media coverage and debate about where the perception risks lie. It us clear the media and public are totally ignorant of radiation and scared out of their wits. Somehow we have lost this battle comprehensively since Chernobyl even though the research from Chernobyl suggests the fears are overstated.

Like

@Rick – If we have lost this battle comprehensively since Chernobyl, then perhaps you can expound on why, prior to Fukushima we were beginning what was called The Nuclear Renaissance, or why only ten minutes were allocated for leaders of the G8 countries to discuss nuclear energy at the summit in Deauville, France. There Nicolas Sarkozy summarized the discussion saying: “Many among the G8 think that there is no alternative to nuclear power.”

In another thread I wrote that the mood in Ontario, Canada is shifting with voters willing to embrace more nuclear builds, and the dumping of feed in tariffs for wind and solar. Perhaps you can reconcile this shift in attitude with your observations of public perception that you claim to deal with every day.

Like

Corrections to comment on Steve Packard’s The Other Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant: I have had time to review some of the 87-slide TEPCO presentation [PDF] from 24 May. Some of the data that Steve Packard used for his analysis has been updated and corrected by TEPCO. My take away is this:

1. The updated BWR designs at Daini were surely important but I don’t think decisive in the relative outcomes of the two NPP. It isn’t clear to me how the two sets of reactors handled the seismic accelerations — perhaps Daiichi suffered greater damage in critical components.

2. It is clear that the tsunami impact was significantly different. I don’t understand exactly why, but Daini experienced 14M only on the south side of unit 1 but overall the site was subjected to a 7M inundation. Secondly the flooding depths were less at Daini being sited 13 meters above sea level (O.P.) vs Daiichi 10 meters above sea level (O.P.)

3. The bottom line is that Daini retained enough electrical power to operate reactor cooling: one (of four) off-site power lines survived, and 3 of 12 backup diesel generators. We don’t know how Daiichi would have fared if the same power supply had survived there.

Like

DV82XL, Rick etal This war was lost on Aug 6 1945. TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima are only major battles lost during the retreat.

Don’t worry though, since wind and solar are in no position to take advantage of the losses.

Like

@ sod, on 27 May 2011 at 11:40:

( I would also suggest building nuclear power plants with the earthquake resistance of the japanese plants everywhere and NOT to build any nuclear power plants at all in regions that have extreme earthquakes)

I can’t agree with that approach, Sod. Empirical copycat design is not design at all. Structures such as NPP’s must be designed to suit the site, including earthquake risks as appropriate to that site. By all means, make the design robust, but to adopt a design standard that is appropriate only to a site on the other side of the globe is reckless and futile.

These things are all based on risk assessments, these days. What is the risk of each type of event? That should determine the response to the risk. High vertical accelerations? Horizontal accelerations? Flooding? etc – manage the risks for a safe outcome.

Like

This thread has been taken over by pro and con arguments for AGW/CC. This is not the place to discuss these topics. This is an OT for Fukushima not a general OT. In any case these opinions belong in the Sceptics section. All comments such as these have been deleted from this thread. We do not have the facility to re-post your comments so you will need to do this yourselves and continue the conversation in the right section of the blog.

Like

I see, this is the OT but not the OT.

If I want to post about AGW, I have to post on the “How to recognize that people who don’t agree 100% with BB on AGW, are skeptics, deniers and fools OT”

Therefore you dont exist and are banished, never to be heard of again..
MODERATOR
The thread is named “Fukushima Daiichi Open and Update Thread #6” – there have been 5 previous such threads.
The general Open Threads are up to number 15. If you wish to post any AGW/CC remarks on the general OT 15 you are at liberty to do so, however the “Sceptics” category includes posts by Barry such as “What if the sun got stuck? (Posted on 14 September 2008)” and “More ice, flat temperatures – what does it all mean? (Posted on 27 April 2009)” so this is where the responses to such arguments will most likely be read and where answering comments will appear.
Much of the discussion re AGW/CC that was going on in the Fukushima OT #6 by you and others, has already been debated in the relevant threads. It is BNC policy that off-topic comments, especially when they generate multiple replies and begin to clog the thread, be deleted and asked for a re-post in the correct thread. That goes for any off topic comments and not just AGW/CC. You are not being singled out for special, unusual treatment.

Like

@Leo Hansen – Rubbish. Even as the Cold War was sending kids like me cowering under our desks during nuclear attack drills, we were having the benefits of peaceful nuclear energy extolled to us by just about every form of media. The Atomic Age was everywhere from home design to product names and we believed we were on the cusp of a brave new future.

Antinuclear energy sentiments came much later, when the Ban-the Bomb movements started looking for something else to justify their existence after the START process got under way.

Like

DV82XL

“Well now that we’re clear on who’s side you are on…”

Really?

Why not *read* what I’ve written up the thread. (deleted inflammatory remark)

Direct quote from my response to one of your earlier:

“I think it’s almost inconceivable that without a significant increase in nuclear generation we will prevent catastrophic effects over a timescale of decades or centuries.

The point I am trying to make is that, this will not happen unless the very obvious failures of nuclear safety evidenced by Fukushima are properly and openly addressed.”

Hank – thanks for the link to inquiry. Personally I think something much wider than a narrow technical investigation is necessary, with international buy in if we are to retain nuclear as an option. Any chance or sign of that materialising?

Like

@Brian (inflammatory remark deleted)

The point I am trying to make is that, this [nuclear growth] will not happen unless the very obvious failures of nuclear safety evidenced by Fukushima are properly and openly addressed.

You do understand that the event at Fukushima was not a systemic failure inherent to nuclear energy, but that of a plant operator not having the necessary backups in place to deal with this emergency.

In fact one can conceive of similar incidents happening at, say a chemical plant, where a failure of a backup system, due to operator shortsightedness would cause a large scale event that released poisons, and required large scale evacuations.

The difference there is that there would be no calls from antichemical zealots calling for the closure of all CPI facilities or assertions that the event proved that this industry as a whole was unsafe, and should not be permitted to grow.

MOST nuclear plants operate safely, and as after TMI, Chernobyl, this event had national regulators crawling over the reactors in their bailiwicks, to cover their behinds. Notably there were no major findings suggesting that the world’s reactor fleet was unsafe.

You, and those like you are making a tempest in a teapot, and if as you claim, you are a friend of nuclear energy, then it needs no enemies.

Like

Its very easy to prevent Fukushimas with some simple enhancements.

Here’s an example of an activated carbon filter bed for cesium and iodine filtering:

http://www.emcelfilters.co.uk/nuclear_filters/divided_bed.htm

Someone explain to me why such systems were not installed in the emergency steam vent lines. There could have been a factor of 50000 less cesium and iodine with some simple activated carbon beds.

Anyway, installing those systems on the emergency steam vent lines is a simple and cheap alteration. Using 1 month of submarine (used by scuba divers) grade lithium batteries to power the valves and control room is also cheap (less than a million for a large reactor). A diesel generator on the top floor with direct DC connection to the cooling pumps would be nice also.

Just make the changes and keep the plants running. We can’t have them replaced by dangerous deadly coal and natural gas plants (or renewable energy that would otherwise have replaced other dangerous deadly coal and natural gas plants). Meanwhile we need 10 TWe of new reactors. These have sufficient passive and redundant features but should also be reviewed in light of the lessons of Fukushima.

Like

DV82XL Rubbish indeed!

The Nuclear Power debate is played out on the emotional battleground of FEAR not rational and logical thinking. You’re rational so you can’t accept that. People are first and foremost innate emotional creatures, but rational logical thought is a learned process.

The emotional FEAR battlegound looks like this:

Nuclear Power = Atomic Power = Atomic Bomb = wide spread death, awesome destruction, everlasting danger, invisible radiation, pollution of the food chain, cancer, pain, no means of protection, powerless, inexplanable scientific complexity, fear of the unknown.

The sight of the Fukushima plants exploded and Chernobyl exploded just reinforced this.

The majority of people feel like this. Even when they may have some rational thoughts, there is this gnawing FEAR in the back of their minds.

Nuclear Power opponents understand this and use it. You know all the examples of that.

Like

@Leo Hansen – it was this statement I was challenging:

This war was lost on Aug 6 1945. TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima are only major battles lost during the retreat.

I was there when everything nuclear, except the bomb was good from the mid-Fifties to the early Sixties.

Atomic Age Images

Like

@Leo Hansen

Maybe I am wrong but I think people are fearful because there always seems to be a lack of transparency and a feeling that the only people involved in this fiasco are the industry itself and the interested political players. Even IAEA seems to be part of the industry so how are we going to trust there assessment. They are unlikely to conclude that nuclear power is to risky. lol . I just wish there was an organisation with true independents at the heart of all this.

I suppose I look back at the collusion between the tobacco industry and governments (same with oil) to see that we get lied to and information is dumbed down to stop us mere mortals from having to much knowledge.

I am not sure if I am typical, however there is very little in the UK concerning opposition to nuclear, yet people I speak to have suspicions.

Like

Cyril says: Its very easy to prevent Fukushimas with some simple enhancements.

And goes on to describe activated carbon filters.

Cyril, you shouldn’t wonder why people don’t take nuclear advocates such as yourself seriously if you say things like this.

I completely agree that radiological releases caused by venting steam to reduce pressure in reactors could be virtually eliminated by this sort of technology. To describe the problems these reactors have had as fixable with this sort of technology is simply ludicrous.

If you’re not sure why that is, think: earthquake damage to cooling system, molten fuel rods, hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive water, hydrogen explosions, and on and on. The situation may or may not get substantially worse: hopefully the worst is over, the corium can be contained and cooled, and the decades long cleanup process can begin.

The rest of your suggestions are similarly optimistic. Having the control room powered up is great – if it’s not too radioactive to work in. Having electrical power for the valves is great – if the piping is sufficiently intact AND the entire cooling system is operational. Turning the valves on doesn’t help much if cooling water can’t be pumped in.

Your suggestions are a step in the right direction for sure, but to say a powered control room and an AC filter would have prevented problems at Fukushima is beyond the pale.

Like

Steve Moss, on 29 May 2011 at 12:06 PM said:

Your suggestions are a step in the right direction for sure, but to say a powered control room and an AC filter would have prevented problems at Fukushima is beyond the pale

So what else actually failed other than these, or was not a consequence of these such that the outcome would be a loss of containment event like the one experienced?

Your statement is without factual content, and thus of no value.

Like

Beyond the pale, nonsense; the ONLY problem for public health at Fukushima is the release of iodine and cesium that settled when the fallout came down. The iodine is now gone. The cesium is still there and is causing evacuation issues (not that I actually buy the external gamma dose risk from cesium, considering the Taiwanese cobalt-60 experience, but its a concern to the public and regulators).

The hydrogen explosions would be AVOIDED by having the vent line terminate to a hardened chimney ABOVE the reactor building. The hydrogen might still have exploded above that line, which would be spectacular, but not dangerous to the public, as it wouldn’t cause building damage.

For sure we don’t want reactors to melt down. But if you prevent major radionuclide release to the environment, by using simple passive equipment, then its not a public safety concern. For sure it costs money to build a water treatment facility and clean up the reactor site plus decommission the mess, but this is purely a financial issue, not public safety related.

I’ve suggested some other simple cheap improvements that must be made to older reactors if they don’t have them already. For instance a submarine grade lithium battery to power critical valves and instruments for a month or so (only a few kilowatts needed), extra diesel generators with direct DC connection at the top of the building, and passive hydrogen recombiners in the containment to prevent excessive hydrogen buildup. We’re talking about maybe 5 or 6 technical additions/changes, and yes this would clearly have prevented all damage to the reactor in the first place. Just make the changes and run the plants again. Replacing nuclear capacity with fossil is going to kill a lot of people prematurely and will pollute massively as well as adding more greenhouse gasses.

Like

Cyril R., on 29 May 2011 at 9:27 PM said:
“the ONLY problem for public health at Fukushima is the release of iodine and cesium that settled when the fallout came down. The iodine is now gone. ”

NHK is reporting today (Monday June 30) that Iodine-131 600 times the natiional safety limit were detected over the weekend in seawater samples near the intake to reactor 2.

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/30_01.html

“The operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant says it has detected higher levels of radioactive materials in seawater samples taken near the water intake at one of the reactors.

Tokyo Electric Power Company says it detected 24 becquerels of radioactive iodine-131 per cubic centimeter in samples collected near the water intake for the Number 2 reactor on Saturday.

The figure is 600 times higher than the national limit, though levels at the spot had been falling. A day earlier, a level 130 times the limit was detected.”

Like

Plubmlechook – near the intake, yes. No one of the public is swimming there. My perspective is public health. Which means the people outside the plant area. There are no dangerous levels of iodine activity beyond the plant borders. You can see in the seawater measurements that there are no dangerous levels of activity in the seawater at all because it mixes with a huge body of water:

Click to access ENGNEWS01_1305078136P.pdf

Almost all measurement stations can’t even detect the activity at all!

Like

there are rather significant news from Fukushima today.

The time plan was at least ambitious and it has been obvious for quite some time that Tepco would not be able to stick to it.

today Tepco had to report that two workers have been exposed to higher doses of radiation.

—
“TEPCO said a test conducted at an institute last Monday found 9,760 becquerels and 7,690 becquerels of radioactive iodine-131 in the workers’ thyroids. This means they are likely suffering from internal radiation exposure ”
—

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/30_18.html

i have been complaining about working conditions in Fukushima for a long time. (deleted personal opinion on other’s feelings)

Like

Sod, your reference does not support your contentions.

10 kBq is quite small, less than the natural radioactivity in a cubic meter of seawater:

http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/natural.htm

The human body contains 4400 Bq of K-40 and 3700Bq of C-14.

A smoke detector has about 1 microcurie of transplutonium, which is 37 kBq. 37000 Bq.

The exposure rates are not higher than previously reported and do not exceed the emergency worker limits.

Like

Plumplechook, on 30 May 2011 at 7:58 AM said:

The figure is 600 times higher than the national limit, though levels at the spot had been falling.

Tepco provide time series charts here for the radiation levels near the water intakes –

Click to access 110530e4.pdf

I would describe the trend as ‘bouncing around’.

Like

Sod,

Time will see these levels decay rapidly.

In a month’s time, they will be about 6% of the current figures, ie about 1kbq. What then? headlines from Sod, saying that these fellows have much lower than average I-131 in their thyroids?

Cyril’s point is a good one; you and the headline writer have hit the panic button a bit too early.

In Australia, we call it “Going off half-cocked.” I’ll let you find your own translation. It has something to do with the desirability of maintaining perspective and balance until you are sure of your facts.

Remember, newspapers are not written by medical experts or scientists or nuclear engineers or workplace hygeinists: their stories are selected to sell papers and the headlines are written to maximise the sales. Truth and balance and perspective and harmony and cooperation and honour do not sell newspapers. Drama does, even when confected.

Like

Sod,

“May exceed limit” is not the same as your “have been exposed to higher doses of radiation”.

That is called exaggeration and is not entirely truthful.

The truth is sufficient. There’s no need for embellishment.

Like

i did not exaggerate on purpose. just check a couple of headlines on the subject, and you will see the same thing:

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110530x1.html

“Exposure of Tepco pair exceeds limit
Cumulative dose of workers over new crisis cap of 250 millisieverts”

the simple truth is, that until Tepco confirms the dose, we will just never be able to say something.

even if their dosimeter shows a higher number, one could still argue that radiation was limited to the dosimeter, or that it failed.

Like

sod, harrywr2, also interesting to note that this report of I-131 exposure is almost certainly not health-threatening in any case.

Click to access tcadao.pdf

In conclusion, it is reassuring that the careful examination of over 34,000 patients who received substantial radiation doses to their thyroid glands from 131I did not reveal a radiation-related risk of thyroid cancer.

Like

Workers are all adults and are much less susceptible to thyroid cancer risks from radioiodine.

If you consider the link I gave above:

http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/natural.htm

And look at the internal dose due to naturally occurring radioisotopes which we’re all made of, you will see that the human body gets 0.3 or 0.4 millisieverts from roughly 8000 becquerels of activity in your body. This is similar to the thyroid iodine measurements in the highest worker exposures Sod mentions.

So if you find a roughly similar amount of activity in radioiodine in the thyroid, you will expect a similar whole body dose increment. That is to say, in the ballpark of 0.5 millisieverts. Now when we consider radioiodine’s beta decay tendency, this does mean the local dose (to the thyroid itself) will be much higher. So a question for the radiation experts – will the local dose be higher than 250 millisievert? Based on the small weight of the thyroid, it may well be, in which case Sod is actually correct.

Like

“-TEPCO does not at this time believe that the rain and wind from the approaching tropical storm will cause any severe problems at the site. TEPCO had sandbagged a number of electrical distribution panels, and has taken other measures to ensure continuity of AC power during the heavy weather.”

http://atomicpowerreview.blogspot.com/2011/05/fukushima-daiichi-sunday-529.html#comments

Has anyone any details on this storm? I can’t find any mention of it on the tropical storm and tropical cyclone tracking sites.

How would the accident site fare in a serious typhoon should one impact the area later this summer?

Like

(snip)
You need to realise that to the public, five meltdowns in fifty years is not an acceptable safety record given these consequences.

OK, meltdowns are bad, but I believe the public is including more than just civilian meltdowns in their assessment… 

SL-1 went critical and killed 3, Windscale burned, and K-19 radiation killed people. And we’ve got 8 (we know about) sunken nuclear subs. And while were at it, let’s add Russia’s practice of dumping nuclear waste into the Arctic Sea. God knows how much or where it all is.

Anyway, just saying… depicting 50 years of nuclear safety by saying there’s only been 5 meltdowns is not the whole story.

Like

R. L. Hails Sr. P. E.:
Your wisdom is appreciated. Nothing gets done if everyone agrees with each other. Cyril and Barry seem to only want concurring opinions here. Stand firm, its reasonably obvious that you are far more experienced and your assessments carry immense weight. Thx for posting.

Like

Actually I don’t understand the “excess dose” story at all. At the specified I-131 dose, they would be nowhere near the limit.

Based on the weight of a thyroid gland at 60g, the decay energy of I-131 of 1.55×10^-13J and halflife of 8 days, the total acccumulated dose of 10kBq of I-131 should be less than 25mSv – probably significantly less, because most gammas will not interact with nearby tissue. I expect medical radiologists have a formula for that…

In any case, medical doses seem to be in the many MBq range, so 10kBq is basically nothing.

Like

Shamus, I don’t want concurring opinions, I want people to come up with alternatives. Your links show that nuclear, including military nuclear power and research reactors, has killed thousands if not hundreds of thousands times less people than fossil fuels. A wind/solar+fossil backup grid is far more deadly than a nuclear grid simply because the nuclear grid requires much less fossil backup than the wind solar grid. Fossil fuels are the big killer. This is before considering greenhouse gasses at all.

Come up with a plan that adds up. Wind and solar don’t add up, unless you add a big fossil component. Which kills and pollutes.

Nuclear doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be better than everything else – which it has already proven to be.

That said, I believe that some technical additions must be made to older reactors, which we have discussed here and on other threads. Then we can keep these running and keep saving lives from fossil fuel deaths.

Like

shamus, on 31 May 2011 at 6:38 AM said:

Anyway, just saying… depicting 50 years of nuclear safety by saying there’s only been 5 meltdowns is not the whole story.

The current US NRC event notification report sequence is 46,723. The sequence was 35,207 on December 31st,1998. So 11,516 ‘radiation safety’ related events in 12 years. 1,000 incidents per year in the US alone. The reports include things like malfunctioning x-ray machines , broken road density gauges , missing/damaged tritium exit signs. oncologists ‘missing the mark’ on radiation treatments as well as things that go wrong at nuclear power plants.

The event reports are here-
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/event/

Like

(Comment deleted for violation of the citation rule.Please read the rules on the About page and re-submit with your refs/links so others on the blog may read and fully assess the information and not rely on possibly biased or cherry-picked comments.)

Like

agentm, on 1 June 2011 at 8:44 AM said:

forcing the utility to abandon the water entombment idea and try to install a new cooling system that decontaminates and recycles the radioactive water flooding the reactor’s turbine building instead.

A recirculating cooling system and a water reprocessing system had been planned since the April 17th roadmap.

Click to access 110417e15.pdf

Odd how it took nearly 3 months for those oil tanks to rupture and start spilling into the water.

The oil tanks were pretty much destroyed by the Tsuanami. They did have some heavy rain from a tropical storm. Maybe the water displaced the oil sitting in the bottom of the previously ruptured tanks.

While an explosion occurred near reactor 4 today, that appears to be the least of the problems at the Fukushima nuclear complex.

A tracked remote control bucket loader ran over a oxygen tank that was in a debris pile.

Like

DV82XL

“You do understand that the event at Fukushima was not a systemic failure inherent to nuclear energy, but that of a plant operator not having the necessary backups in place to deal with this emergency”

I think this is where we perhaps disagree. I think the accident has indeed uncovered systemic failures. Asking why the necessary backups were not in place would be a good place to start.

Such as:

1) The failure to adequately design for reasonably foreseeable events, and to heed prior warnings of this failure.

2) The failure to learn from incidents and improvements elsewhere.

3) The failure of the political system to allow for safe storage and disposal of waste, leading to the storage of large quantities of spent fuel adjacent to reactors.

4) The culture of the industry being to hide and reassure rather than openly address shortcomings.

Your reaction here merely serves to emphasise point (4). And to try and divide commentators here into pro and anti nuclear as your above posts do serves no useful purpose.

To deprive 100,000 people of their homes for an indefinite period is not a “tempest in a teapot”. The very fact that Fukushima opens up these questions is an opportunity to address them to give nuclear a credible future. To react by saying that it’s no big deal is to miss this opportunity and doom us to failure on climate change.

Like

Brian, the fuel adjacent to the reactors is perfectly safe; it was the fresh spent fuel stored above the reactor building that is not safe. In my opinion, this is a design flaw – you don’t store spent fuel high up in the reactor building in a pool with only electricity based cooling capability. Storing spent fuel in a large below grade pool of water is perfectly safe, as Fukushima proved, and so is dry cask storage, which is also fine at Fukushima.

I do agree that the design basis events were too low for this location and this is a puzzle and a worry – why did regulators allow such a small tsunami as design basis? Why did the designers allow such a low level of tsunami protection? Why was there no electric generator attached to the steam driven turbine decay heat cooling system? Why were there no high class carbon filters on the emergency steam venting lines?

These are all design flaws that must be fixed.

Like

@Brian, Apparently you don’t know what the phrase ‘systemic flaw inherent to nuclear energy’ means, because you list particular flaw of the power station in question. Systemic flaws are things like the production of CO2 and ash from coal, or the intermittency of wind and solar. Nothing that happened at Fukushima falls in that class.

Thus it is a unique event that must be judged as a unique event, from which for a power station like Bruce Nuclear in Ontario, which is situated on the Canadian Shield, 3000km plus from the nearest open sea, has little to learn. Attempt to tar the whole industry with this event is dissemination at best, outright mendacity at worse.

Furthermore if we are to learn, or say anything about the evacuations, it should be to roundly criticize the government there for overreacting.

Like

Come up with a plan that adds up. Wind and solar don’t add up, unless you add a big fossil component. Which kills and pollutes.
Nuclear doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be better than everything else – which it has already proven to be.

That really depends on who you ask. And five years from now, you yourself may flip on this, especially if solar continues to get cheaper, and most bet it will. Comment deleted – no ref to the article quoted – violation of the Comments Policy.)
My plan? Require every new corporation that builds anything to supply 5% of its own power from solar/wind/geo within the next five years. Require every new home built to do the same. Increase that percentage by 5% every 10 years or so. How many thousands of sq.miles of rooftops do we have in this world? Why not let’s cover them with solar cells?

Like

Not sure if this has been linked, if not I thought it might be of interest to folks here.

“Fukushima Revives the Low-Dose Debate”, a news piece summarizing a lot of the contentious issues that have been discussed on this blog. It remains contentious.

This is a news piece and not peer-reviewed, but nonetheless appeared in one of the more prestigious general scientific publications. I find it to be very reasonable coverage of the issue.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6032/908

Published in the 20 May 2011 issue (volume 332).

Like

Leave a Reply (Markdown is enabled)