Posted on 03/30/2011 9:04:55 PM PDT by DeaconBenjamin
Thanks for your analysis. Japan is a hardy country in most respects but this is definately going to hurt.
From the article...
“...Robert Peter Gale, a US medical researcher who was brought in by Soviet authorities after the Chernobyl disaster, said recent higher readings of radioactive iodine-131 and caesium-137 should be of greater concern than reports earlier this week of tiny quantities of plutonium found in soil samples.
But he added: “It’s obviously alarming when you talk about radiation, but if you have radiation in non-gas form I would say dump it in the ocean.”
Gale, who has been advising the Japanese government, said: “To some extent that’s why some nuclear power plants are built along the coast, to be in an area where the wind is blowing out to sea, and because the safest way to deposit radiation is in the ocean...”
The article also says they want to ‘tarp’ over any hot spots, so I take it water/seawater is not covering all the hot spots which means contamination is getting airborne.
Would be a lot better if the hot spots were completely covered with water while awaiting them to cool...they won’t say what the hell is really going on but they are really really sorry about the whole thing.
Japanese government (people) will be handed the costs of the bad portion of the company along with the ‘inconvenience’
Thus, it makes a lot of sense.
However, with that said, I have to fault some FReepers who fell into two (equally ridiculous) camps. The first camp is the chicken littles, who saw dangers that simply did not exist. This was never going to be a Chernobyl, even under the worst case condition. The second (equally dumb) camp is the Ann Coulter types with their 'radiation is good for ya you know' and other asinine statements trying to make this situation to look not so bad.
Like most things, the truth lies in between. The fact is, even if it is not a Chernobyl it is still a very very bad situation that is considerably worse than Three Mile Island. Both sides just made themselves look equally silly - one camp saying the world (or at least Japan) is ending, and the other claiming that this is the equivalent of eating many bananas a day and not an issue. Both sides are the enemies of nuclear power, with one camp making it seem like some veritable monster, and the other camp insulting the intelligence of folks with their 'rads are good' approach.
Nuclear energy is good, and advanced nuclear reactors (such as the ones in France, which uses a lot of nuclear power, and some ideas like the use of thorium) means that nuclear energy will probably be with us. However, I do wish the 'chicken littles' and the 'idiot Coulters' could just simply shut up.
Thanks for the common sense post. What the chicken littles don’t realize or do not want to read or hear, is that OUR nuclear plants have back-ups for cooling, which Japan obviously did not!!!
Mothra ftw!
Seriously, my thoughts and prayers are with the nation of Japan.
Obama pushes for nuclear power despite Fukushima
You do not judge a man by the color of his skin, you judge him by the color of his money.
Well actually, they did. They had both on and off site power sources plus batteries to operate the various cooling and circulating systems. Problem is, they lost all sources except the batteries in the tsunami for units 1-4. And, they only had a few hours of operation using battery power and a steam-driven circulation pump.
While we do have a few more system on plants that use similar-vintage GE reactors, the big issue for this plant was losing all sources of AC power. The tsunami was devastating, and well beyond the design of the plant.
He is correct. Broken clock - twice a day - and all that stuff. He is very correct in his statement.
The Japanese plants did have back-ups for cooling... large diesel gensets, which the tsunami took out.
The plant had battery back-up for eight hours or so of control and cooling operation without the diesels. Those ran down.
What ultimately failed here were engineering assumptions of how much water could wash in on top of the facility. The reactors shut down properly after the quake, the buildings and containment held through the quake with no problem. All of these problems at Fukushima ultimately are rooted in an under-estimation of the worst case tsunami event, and the subsequent inability to deal with the residual heat in the reactors after they were shut down.
The reason why there are so many “chicken littles” surrounding nuclear power is that a) the press has hyped the dangers far, far beyond what the data actually indicate is the danger (and there are dangers, to be certain, but there has been a deliberate disinformation campaign on nuclear weapons and power for the last 30 years), and this is received b) by people who are just plain stump-stupid about numbers, science, statistics, mathematics, medical statistical studies, etc.
Basically, while the liberal arts majors who get elected and spend inordinate amounts of time bloviating on the Boobie-Tube about “illiteracy,” they spend almost no time worrying about innumeracy.
And it is the innumeracy that has led to abundant chicken-littlism in the western press, and not just surrounding nuclear power. A great many people are quite simply fantastically stupid around numbers. You can see it in the discussions of radiation exposure and dosages - the cartoon from xkcd put the orders of magnitude into perspective for some people, but others simply gloss over it. And level of technology that is beyond people’s understanding becomes magic. Cell phone spread spectrum modulation? Well, that’s good magic. Nuclear radiation? Bad magic. But they both might as well be magic vapors in a bottle as far as most people are concerned. Rub the lamp the right or wrong way, the Genie appears and grants you your wishes... or kills you dead.
Want to prove this rampant innumeracy to yourself?
Go forth into the street and casually ask people how many millions are in a trillion. Go ahead, try it. You’ll be *amazed* at how astoundingly stupid your fellow citizens are. Heck, I see this out of supposed “conservative Republican” professional op-ed blowhards all the time, and it is the reason why I cannot watch TV talking head shows any more: people conflate “billions” with “trillions” all the time when talking about the budget, the outstanding debt, market capitalizations, etc.
When an engineer hears “billions” where he was supposed to hear “trillions” (or vice versa), his brain goes “Wait - WTF?@!” whereas the typical blowhard on TV with a liberal arts degree and JD blithely carry on, as tho billions and trillions were interchangeable.
What’s three orders of magnitude among supposedly educated people, anyway, right?
Go ahead, I encourage you to do the “how many millions in a trillion?” experiment. It will open your eyes.
When I’ve done it, and people get it wrong (as the majority of people do - I’m deadly serious, only about one in three people get it right - that there are a million millions in one trillion), I try to explain it thusly: “If you had a trillion dollars, you could spend a million dollars *every* day of your life and die with plenty of money left over. Let’s say your nanny or mother spent your million for you while you were too young to read or write or handle that much cash...”
They refuse to believe this. Go ahead, try it.
Then watch what happens when you go through the reckoning. You’ll see people’s true level of stupidity come to light. Once, when I multiplied mantissas and added exponents, I had one woman start shouting at me that “you can’t do that! That’s illegal!”
Riiiight.
And I agreed with his current views on this issue in my past, but the way this problem is being handled, demonstrates to me that humans may not be ready to play god, just yet.
All I can say is thank God!
What Japan needs is competence.
Markets reacted poorly to impending doom so (at least it appears to me) they have been giving a little bad news at a time. I thought as most here did that the plants were a loss. The story that accompanies that,an area unusable,how large we don’t know,on a small island nation is a real problem for Japan.
It's the Black Swan Event problem, inherent in human nature.
The answer is to always be a little bit more conservative than you think necessary.
Absolutely true.
Part of the problem here is that scientists’ ability to generate numbers for the likelihood of various risks is actually quite low.
For example: Let’s say you life in Florida. We all know that Florida is hit by hurricanes from time to time.
But how many of them will make landfall with winds over 150 MPH?
Don’t know.
What is the likelihood that one, just one, will make landfall in *your* area of Florida with wind speeds over 150MPH? We can agree that there is a non-zero probability of there being a 150+MPH hurricane where your house sits in Florida.
What is the likelihood that such a hurricane will hit Florida where you live *while you’re alive and living there*?
Now suddenly the numbers get real fuzzy again.
OK, so let’s say you want to design a house that will survive those winds, just in case. Engineers can do that. We’ll just pour a foundation a foot thick, walls 18” thick, filled with the proper amounts of rebar, keeping rooms relatively small, 6” of ferroconcrete for the roof and we’ll keep it to a single story, with steel pilings that go 50’ into the ground. Doors will have seals on them to prevent water intrusion, and will use retractable bolts to keep from being blown out in the wind. Windows, the few that there are, will have armored plate shutters that close in an lock over the windows.
That oughta do it, yea?
Oh, you can’t afford that? And the wife is screaming about the lack of decor and windows? Something about not wanting to use a powder hammer to nail up pictures of the grandkids? Why? She said she wanted a house that would survive a hurricane!
These are the sorts of problems that we run into when trying to design for ‘black swan’ events. People just don’t and won’t pony up for them.
Everyone wants to go to heaven, no one wants to die first.
I wonder if they will all combine to form a “Blob” of radioactivity. Maybe blasting the site with CO2 Fire Extinguishers would stop it.
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