Oh shit.

[Skykid]

I find some irony in the fact the one foodstuff Japan managed to royally screw is fish.

[Moniker]

Did no one learn anything from Godzilla? Honestly.

And one of the sacred seals is probably broken, obviously. A Gigantic Warship: Whore of Babylon approacheth!

[system11]

1) Humans need energy.
2) Nuclear is the only workable long term energy source we have developed.

Here are the options

1) Strip mine the entire planet until we've burned every possible burnable item and destroyed the habitat of all creatures on earth, or build more nuclear stations, nowhere near areas known for earthquakes (that was just stupid). As more are built the technology will improve.

2) Radically reduce the number of humans.

Pick your poison. You can't just stick your fingers in your ears anymore.

[trap15]

Exactly. Taking a stupid knee-jerk reaction to accidents of nuclear power is going to do nothing productive. If we learn from our mistakes and apply the new knowledge.... maybe we'll end up not falling apart in a few decades.

[Ganelon]

Special interest groups with significant affluence and influence...
Real examples of risk that play upon fear and justify looking elsewhere...
It's hard to blame folks too much for choosing the short-term solution. Posterity may think differently though...

[Ed Oscuro]

Many people think that the "fun times will end only in billions of years." Not so, actually. How many quality lives can you support given all the atoms in the universe?

With that death knell out of the way, solar energy is as interesting as ever. As the sun's always on, it makes sense to harness its energy as much as possible, since it appears wasted otherwise. (Of course, what would our nights be like if every distant star's energy output had been harnessed by alien civilizations since ancient times?) The sun irradiates each square centimeter of the Earth's surface (on average, of course, as some areas don't get light on the daily cycle) with an astonishing amount of energy, some of which is harnessed but much of which is reflected back into space or otherwise goes unused. Nuclear energy is probably useful in many contexts - you get a lot of power out of a relatively small amount of material, and probably has less impact on the environment in some ways than a comprehensive plan to harness solar energy (although siting solar collectors here and there outside orbit, or even a Dyson Sphere, would help that; not to mention that, in the more immediate term, we have a huge amount of infrastructure that could host solar energy collection - like roofs and even road surfaces, which account for an astonishingly high proportion of the surface of the United States). But it's not always economically feasible depending on lengthy approval processes and the expensive designs of new reactors. There probably isn't enough development yet of materials that can clean up radioactive spills (as well as conventional toxic ones from other mining sources).

Compared to coal, oil, fracking, and oil sands, nuclear energy appears to have a better potential to provide energy with less impact on the environment and particularly to require less damage to the stone foundation of many areas. The damage done to the mountains of West Virginia is shocking; it took ages to build up those solid foundations and it would take a lot of power to even try to begin to repair that damage. Some people have talked about a tradeoff between power and clean water, but the picture is certainly broader than that. You can have power, but to get it you have to make lots of tradeoffs. At some point you have to say you're using too much power and start finding ways to cut back, because that party can't go on limitlessly, especially with the short term (centuries-scale) growth predictions.

Few people seem to realize how narrowly short-focused many of our programs are. You continually hear people talking about dumping nuclear fuels in the sun. Does anybody out there know how a star works? I'm sure that all kinds of asteroids and nasty stuff fall into the sun all the time, but we shouldn't be adding onto that pile to hasten the sun's death.

[nZero]

Few people seem to realize how narrowly short-focused many of our programs are. You continually hear people talking about dumping nuclear fuels in the sun. Does anybody out there know how a star works? I'm sure that all kinds of asteroids and nasty stuff fall into the sun all the time, but we shouldn't be adding onto that pile to hasten the sun's death.

We could shoot tons of material into (more like at) the sun and it would just be a drop in the bucket.

No, the real risk there is that it involves launching radioactive material into space. I can't think of anything that we can manage to shoot into space with 100% reliability. Can't wait to have one of those rockets with a cargo of spent nuclear fuel fail to make orbit, topple over on the launchpad or explode in the upper atmosphere.

[Ed Oscuro]

We could shoot tons of material into (more like at) the sun and it would just be a drop in the bucket.

But that's exactly my point. People think that they don't actually make choices about longevity of systems because it's always assumed to be just "a drop in the bucket." Well, the truth is that's just a conjecture.

You also should note that I didn't claim it would represent a notable difference to the longevity of the sun, but let's assume for a moment the position of beings living (and depending on) the energy output of the sun in its later phases. Even seconds or portions of seconds might seem a considerable luxury.

(As an aside, though, it strikes me as meaningless to talk about "the real risk" as if degree is the same thing as absolute certainty of no risk or absolute certainty of risk. It might not be on the same schedule but that doesn't mean that it should be ignored. The study of history is littered with cases where people thought they could safely ignore trends on the fringe only to have them end up dominating.)

Bringing it back to a more reasonable timescale, it's likely within a few lifetimes that a lot of the greedy infrastructure we've taken for granted (not just air traffic and the automobile, but always-on servers ready to do what you'd like) will be resented as a waste of precious resources. Yes, I realize I haven't donated to the server yet.

[gabe]

Fukushima apocalypse: Years of ‘duct tape fixes’ could result in ‘millions of deaths’

http://rt.com/news/fukushima-apocalypse ... moval-598/

[Udderdude]

Nice to know the guys in charge of taking care of this have such a good track record ..

[BulletMagnet]

Aren't they always? Though it's not really their fault, of course, because the real problem, as always, is too much stifling and not-at-all-necessary industry regulation.

[DEL]

system11 wrote;

As more are built the technology will improve.

They only have to mess up once.
Mayak - 4X radioactive release of Chernobyl. Thankfully limited to the East Ural Radioactive Tract (EURT).
Chernobyl
Fukushima.
These accidents will be ongoing for thousands of years.
The safe storage of the spent nuclear fuel from reactors is also what scientists call a "hundred thousand year responsibility."

trap15 wrote;

Exactly. Taking a stupid knee-jerk reaction to accidents of nuclear power is going to do nothing productive. If we learn from our mistakes and apply the new knowledge.... maybe we'll end up not falling apart in a few decades.

I wouldn't say the 24,100 year half life of the most dangerous substance in the Universe Pu-239 causes a "stupid knee-jerk reaction."
As outlined above, some of the lethal radionuclides released from nuclear power station accidents remain utterly lethal carcinogens for thousands of years. A nuclear bomb contains a very small package of this material, but each power station (plutonium factory) reactor contains many tons of it. So a nuclear power station accident is hundreds of times more lethal than a nuclear bomb in the long term.
Although I will grant you that the yield of an SS-18 intercontinental ballistic fission-fusion missile is horrendous

[system11]

system11 wrote;

As more are built the technology will improve.

They only have to mess up once.
Mayak - 4X radioactive release of Chernobyl. Thankfully limited to the East Ural Radioactive Tract (EURT).
Chernobyl
Fukushima.
These accidents will be ongoing for thousands of years.
The safe storage of the spent nuclear fuel from reactors is also what scientists call a "hundred thousand year responsibility."

It's unfortunate. The alternatives don't exist though, long term. You have to deal with reality eventually - there are too many people and not enough power, and the former isn't going to get solved. The only serious predictable renewable is too expensive to implement (tidal power), the windmills are a dead end even to begin with, and nobody seems to have the appetite to carpet the Sahara with solar panels. In fact, most of the solar panels you see on houses at the moment are parasitic - read up on how they're actually funded (hint: we're paying for them).

Chernobyl was the only big failure of the technology, and that plant was old even when the accident happened. Fukushima is what happens when you build them in stupid places.

[Ed Oscuro]

So a nuclear power station accident is hundreds of times more lethal than a nuclear bomb in the long term.

Your analysis is good up to this point. Timescale matters but so also does the magnitude of an event. If a nuclear weapon is used it will readily kill hundreds of thousands to millions of people by itself, especially if deployed with the design of killing people.

That the nuclear reactor is "hundreds of times more lethal" assumes that all that material is efficiently spread to places where it will cause damage. I don't mean to pooh-pooh this; it is an amazing amount of material we're talking about. However, even using the widely accepted LNT (linear no-threshold) model for radiation exposure effects in humans, where all ionizing radiation exposure is assumed harmful, the dosage does matter. If the material is widely dispersed and enough is quarantined, then small doses aren't necessarily fatal. They may be causal (which is hard to prove of course) in creating cancers but that doesn't equate to the certainty of death from what is, as you point out, a small and efficiently used source of radioactive material in a bomb.

Probably it is more accurate to say that this condensed material is a source of contamination to the whole environment, which will harm and kill many living things, and represent a large source of pollution that people will either have to accept or forego a large part of the food chain (I recall that many threads on this forum have pointed towards a kind of resignation towards a dwindling population in Japan, and pressure on the food supply will not contradict those opinions).

On the bright side, there is probably a lot that is probably unknown and remains to be seen about cancer treatments and biological agents used to clean up radiological contaminations.

The "invisible menace" of radiation has been both a blessing and a curse. The unknown leads some people to shrug off dangers, and others to act. But amongst those who have been harmed, the mental health effects of not knowing have been deemed "the largest public health problem unleashed by [Chernobyl] to date." Obviously this does not warrant underestimating the effects of radioactivity, but the same is true for many other contaminants that are widely ignored by the public (i.e. mercury release by coal release), as this entry argues. There are many people who are intimate with the dangers of contamination that would argue for a public hue and cry over heavy metals in the environment from careless exposure by human activity, but they have only hurt the quality of life in one way, not made it unlivable. Perhaps at the end of the day the right answer is to see whether the lost potentials (intelligence lost to exposure, cancers, other injuries, deaths) are outweighed by the potential unlocked by the energy production. The question is whether the tradeoffs are nearly in balance or if they are wildly mismatched. My personal feeling (at least after reading the RT article) is that in many cases the potential of nuclear energy is not well matched to its dangers, and this is already evident in the fact that nuclear power has not been economical to produce in many situations, in part blamed on the safety and security requirements (ha) but also in part because energy is not in such short supply that we must accept such dire costs for producing it.

I think the really wide-view story here is the danger of the currently highly centralized models of production which rely on brute force to overcome the efficiency problems of distribution. Of course (as the Russian experience shows), centralization can allow for responsibility and professionalism that isn't likely to be seen by amateurs. However, everybody having a solar panel on their lawn is less likely to provoke a dangerous contamination era than a highly-concentrated nuclear fuel source in a power station, as you rightly point out.

[Ed Oscuro]

In fact, most of the solar panels you see on houses at the moment are parasitic - read up on how they're actually funded (hint: we're paying for them).

It seems like science fiction at this point, but one doesn't have to go to the Sahara to find desert-like areas ready for solar energy collection. In fact one can find a lot of ground covered by the urban deserts - roads and rooftops in urban areas. Sooner or later this will become a reality, because the advantages of local energy production far outstrip having a large area dedicated to energy production too far away to transmit effectively (or safely).

Any energy source is going to provoke costs to the consumer which go beyond dollars. Cost in terms of tax increases alone might just reflect the cost of shifting priorities towards more environmentally responsible energy production.

I will say this - everybody assumes that energy production costs aren't a problem for them, up to the moment that they begin to notice those costs transferring onto them. Some things go unnoticed - mercury and other heavy metal exposure is a great example - but having stately mountains demolished for coal, waking up to the smell of burning rubber when a nearby oil pipeline you didn't know existed ruptures, or having a nuclear power plant in your backyard melting down, will likely change one's opinion. Unfortunately there is no clear evidence that most people will feel the heat (or any other ill effects) from poor energy production practices, perhaps until it is too late, as may have happened with Fukushima.

And since when did Britain care about parasitic industries? Richard Branson is touted as a business guru and given a knighthood rather than recognition as the picky vulture of rail that has been subsidized by the British taxpayer for years. Yet you hear hardly a peep out of the public about what is, unlike energy, a completely indefensible shifting of their money without even the environmental friendliness assumed from solar energy production. Of course, Sir Branson still recognizes the need to protect the oceans. Does his background exploiting regulatory frameworks for personal gain in rail mean that frameworks that shift burdens are illegitimate?

Chernobyl was the only big failure of the technology, and that plant was old even when the accident happened. Fukushima is what happens when you build them in stupid places.

There's a bunch on the San Andreas fault, and Fukushima was as much a failure of taking shortcuts with design and safety as of poor siting.

[system11]

Chernobyl was the only big failure of the technology, and that plant was old even when the accident happened. Fukushima is what happens when you build them in stupid places.

There's a bunch on the San Andreas fault, and Fukushima was as much a failure of taking shortcuts with design and safety as of poor siting.

That's depressingly stupid, they shouldn't be there. And no, Fukushima is nothing to do with design and safety, it's to do with being hit by a tsunami because you built it by the sea in an area known for earthquakes. Would it have had a problem if a tidal wave hadn't hit it? No. There we go.

Not sure what all that stuff about Branson was all about, he has very little to do with my fuel bills paying shady companies to get rich by conning people into sticking poorly performing solar panels on their roof. Side note: I hate how they reflect the sun too - someone needs to work on that.

[GaijinPunch]

Chernobyl was the only big failure of the technology, and that plant was old even when the accident happened. Fukushima is what happens when you build them in stupid places.

They're built in stupid places for a reason. That ocean water keeps it cool. Obviously it was not an ideal design... nobody really thought that an Earthquake would make the land drop a few meters.

Would it have had a problem if a tidal wave hadn't hit it? No. There we go.

Also not a problem if you just raise the cooling system out of the basement.

Anyway, Japan has already figured out the problem. They just raise the legal limits of acceptable radiation.

[Ed Oscuro]

Beaten to the punch by a couple well-thought out sentences (no pun intended)! The first point, which I cover here, actually promises to be of historical relevance soon, if new designs can take over from water-based designs (which use water for cooling and steam generation).

And no, Fukushima is nothing to do with design and safety

Well, I'm not aware of any experts who agree with you there.

First a little bit about semantics, which I will admit are not the most interesting bit, but are still important to consider: Design is about engineering appropriately to the situation. Safety is (in part) about having the will and the expertise to maintain what's already been decided on as good practice, as well as keeping current with new developments to increase the safety margin when possible, instead of merely maintaining - but maintenance is a minimum, as is having a bureaucratic structure that can respond to disasters. Now, it may have been a simple matter of economics that enough concrete and shock-absorbing foundations to make the plant stable in the face of the earthquake and especially the tsunami would have rendered the decision to site in a risky place economically moot (one can get some idea of how the original contractor at Fukushima, a defunct American company called Ebasco, designed the plants with economic ideas in mind here), but even in this disaster that doesn't appear to have been necessary (and in many cases, building bigger makes it harder to deal with catastrophes - in any case Fukushima probably has a robust sarcophagus, which will need to be more durable and quickly built than that at Chernobyl, in its future, but that because of containment failure - the nuclear fuel literally burning its way out of its containment vessel).

I also wanted to say that I agree that nuclear power might be the right decision in some cases - but it should be remembered that if it is a good choice, it is a good choice because other energy generation methods can't be practiced less expensively or safely. For energy-starved Japan, oil shocks helped make the case for nuclear energy years ago. But if nuclear is to be a good choice, it will often be needed in places that are simply dangerous to site plants at - I'm sure you have considered why waterfront sites are popular for nuclear plants; as long as you are going to advocate nuclear energy, you need to recognize that one way or another you are looking at trading off economic value and risks. This is not to say the sites were good ones - but perhaps there were fewer practicable alternatives than might be assumed. Power cannot simply be sent from one end of a nation to another with ease.

Siting of the plant obviously exposed it to the major cause of the disaster, but design and safety issues made it worse, and there's widespread agreement they worsened it to the point where just a handful of newer components almost certainly would have made the difference between keeping some containment, and the complete containment failure seen here.

But backing up a moment to what your claim actually is - that the site itself was untenable, here is something that pro-nuclear power people can actually run with. To sum up the article: Even risky systems can be retrofit, on the European model, with systems to make them safer. Many things that needed to remain to keep Fukushima safe did not get destroyed or washed away in the earthquake and tsunami. Other things did, which I suppose could be called "secondary" infrastructure - batteries and power generation capacity for cooling is the big example. A haphazard mixture of relatively strong and weak components is what crippled the containment effort. It's a fundamentally bad design if your secondary source of cooling is generated by systems less reliable than the reactor itself (the diesel generators which were washed away or otherwise destroyed), and a flawed safety culture which allows critical "failover equipment" to sit unready for a disaster.

Some things offsite also arguably made the critical difference. Asked for simple car batteries to run the cooling system, TEPCO had its head so far up the bureaucratic apparatus they burdened the frantic employees onsite with paperwork requests and even told them to go out and buy some themselves to run cooling, instead of doing what they needed to organize moving the batteries from 50 miles away, as recounted in this documentary.

Siting can be helpful but it doesn't save a system if it is unable to cope with any kind of disaster. Extreme approaches to siting safety might relegate reactors to only generating nuclear power in small quantities in deserts far away from civilizations and natural phenomena...which would mean crippling the typical design of a nuclear reactor for cheap cooling, and crippling the ability to deliver relevant amounts of power to population centers, which often are in places that present elevated levels of risk. I'm not at all qualified to say from this comfortable chair how much the seismic history of Japan could have added to a discussion for continuous redesign of the plant, versus making the choice not to site there, but saying that design isn't a part of the problem seems to ignore that design is all about engineering choices relevant to the place you find yourself in, which seems very analogous to the decision to go with nuclear energy versus its alternatives in the first place. It also seems to me that a great deal of the damage was caused by the tsunami - which is to say that the loss of cooling could have happened at any plant which shuts down its reactors in the face of an impending disaster, only to have the backups be destroyed or found to be previously inoperative (onsite, reserve batteries were either dead or missing, and the generators were inoperative, destroyed, or washed away). There are nuclear power plant designs which do not use water to run its turbines, like the promising Gas Turbine Modular Helium Reactor design, but the flip side to being able to site away from water is that this likely represents another economic argument (to the company attempting to generate power) against the feasibility of the program in comparison to alternatives.

From a business perspective, some of the safety failures clearly are ironic outgrowths of safety demands since the early nuclear accidents; far away from being "too cheap to meter," reactors are so expensive to run that any place companies can overlook expenses is a place to try to get some profits back out of the system, as there is a lot of pressure to perform financially.

I also did not address a couple other points where your arguments do not work: The Number Two power plant at Fukushima, located south of the containment failure at Number One, continued to operate with cooling during the disaster. The difference in height of the waves was 4 meters - a 9-meter wave struck Number Two, and a 13-meter wave struck Number One. Of course, Number Two itself was thought to have barely scraped through, so what I differ with you were is not on the idea that plants should be sited there, but rather I disagree that you can't make the plants safe enough to survive or even hopefully continue on working after a disaster.

The other point, which I thought everybody knew by now, is that there has been a lot of disagreement about whether the vintage 1971 design of the reactor (it shows the kind of economic pressures on nuclear energy that a forty-year old design, which will take 40 years to be decommissioned after this accident, can be called "vintage") was up to the task, and there's also been some discussion about whether the design of that reactor - including spent fuel storage on a high level, where it was hard to get at, even when the cranes were still standing - was good. Quite soon after the tsunami one of the original designers revealed his reasons for quitting before the reactor was installed. I also recall some stories about flaws in the containment vessel itself.

I only mentioned Branson as an example of how selective people effectively are about "tax dollars at work."

Side note: I hate how they reflect the sun too - someone needs to work on that.

If you believe in global warming, then I don't see why you'd want solar panels not to reflect any sunlight they don't use. White or otherwise reflective roofs (and road surfaces) are much better at this than dark surfaces. That said, the shiny design for solar cells is clearly a problem from the perspective of people, but if I had to choose between needing to wear sunglasses (or learn not to look at roofs) versus have to deal with other forms of pollution, I would say it's a small price to pay. In any case, hopefully that design is on the way out; from an engineering perspective it seems wasteful to directly bounce a lot of the energy you are trying to capture right back into space from a mirror.

[NTSC-J]

http://rt.com/news/fukushima-apocalypse ... moval-598/

"No one can say or know how this will play out, except that millions of people will probably die even if things stay exactly as they are, and billions could die if things get any worse."

No one can say what will happen...except that probably the apocalypse.

[GaijinPunch]

http://rt.com/news/fukushima-apocalypse ... moval-598/

"No one can say or know how this will play out, except that millions of people will probably die even if things stay exactly as they are, and billions could die if things get any worse."

No one can say what will happen...except that probably the apocalypse.

Good freakin' gravy.... "news".
Those are Dr. Evil quotation marks, btw.

[system11]

Chernobyl was the only big failure of the technology, and that plant was old even when the accident happened. Fukushima is what happens when you build them in stupid places.

They're built in stupid places for a reason. That ocean water keeps it cool. Obviously it was not an ideal design... nobody really thought that an Earthquake would make the land drop a few meters.

By the ocean is reasonable, this is the problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Seism ... quakes.png

Japan is not a large land mass, just put them all on the west coast. That's not to say the west coast is immune to tidal waves, but if you've got one side with a history of activity and another side without, really - which do you pick?

Power cannot simply be sent from one end of a nation to another with ease.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC_Cross-Channel

Actually Brazil are building one which is nearly 1,500 miles, China already has one carrying power from one of their hydroelectric plants over 1000 miles to Shanghai. Europe has many existing links between countries. You certainly can send power quite a long way. This will matter more in the future because many renewables are very local in nature. You need a lot of sun, or fairly reliable wind, or a tide.

And no, having reflective roads is not a small price to pay, it's dangerous. The fact that the proposed panels have a textured top layer for grip may alleviate this. The build up of road rubber on top of them certainly will either way though. The problem of reflection actually has been fixed - anti reflective layers which allow the panel to absorb more light, clearly a good thing.

It would still be better to have a 75% smaller population though, from every way you look at it, other than a few generations of pain with pensions. Sounds drastic doesn't it? It would wind us all the way back to ... the 1950s, which are well within living memory actually, not long ago at all. This is one of the primary reasons that my interest in renewable energy / global warming / etc hysteria is fairly low. It's obvious what the biggest problem is, nothing we've talked about addresses the consumption of raw materials, deforestation and resulting extinction events. Who cares if we destroy the entire ecosystem as long as it's not via CO2 generation, right?

[GaijinPunch]

Actually Brazil are building one which is nearly 1,500 miles, China already has one carrying power from one of their hydroelectric plants over 1000 miles to Shanghai. Europe has many existing links between countries. You certainly can send power quite a long way.

What type of terrain does it go through. There is a formidable mountain range between Tokyo and that side of Japan. My guess is that will shoot the cost into the stratosphere.

[Skykid]

Anyway, Japan has already figured out the problem. They just raise the legal limits of acceptable radiation.

LOL!

[Ed Oscuro]

The HVDC Cross-Channel might be plausible - I just took a look at some of this (and also the section on high temperature superconductors) and the situation doesn't seem as dire as I had thought (me and my 1960s understanding of engineering, lol). If that could be done it would be great. 6% losses (or less) to distance seems to be worth it in order to get better siting of plants, although I think that if you get to a certain high level of losses then it makes more sense just to build wherever you can, as well as you can.

What type of terrain does it go through. There is a formidable mountain range between Tokyo and that side of Japan. My guess is that will shoot the cost into the stratosphere.

Costs are going to skyrocket! But this being said, I think most people will agree it may be necessary to do. The basic nucleus of the current tragedy is basically that people wanted to cut corners.

By the way, the latest news for Fukushima is that they are planning on freezing the ice. This will be the largest deployment of such a technology ever attempted, but it will certainly work quite well. It's a shame they didn't get started on it sooner and TEPCO quite apparently waited to admit they had huge leakage problems until after a pro-nuclear government was voted into office, which does not help the cause of nuclear energy.

It's important not to lose sight of that other huge energy-related crisis - global warming. It seems inevitable that we will end up with a major problem based on at least one of these issues, and probably both at once, along with many other issues of pollution. In terms of ranking crises, global warming seems to be the much bigger problem. It is one thing to be randomly irradiated, but another thing to have whole ecosystems dying off and morphing into unrecognizable forms due to temperatures the organisms cannot survive in. You can eat an irradiated fish, but you can't eat a fish that never existed because its ancestors died off.