Posted on 03/26/2011 6:46:40 PM PDT by Yossarian
This is about the absolute worse that could happen. Ancient reactors, poorly located, hit with one of the worst earthquakes in history, followed by a killer tsunami, in a plant that had repeated safety violations.
And at this point, not one person has died from the radiation, and only a couple people were killed at the plant from the initial earthquake/tsunami. And we are debating radiation levels getting to the point where there MIGHT be a small increase in cancers.
Meanwhile, they have returned to freshwater cooling at 2 of the 3 formerly operating reactors, and are nearly switched back on number 2. They have a large supply of fresh water arriving today by barge.
They have some major radiation to clean up, and tough times ahead. But this shows that nuclear, far from being the most hazardous, is one of the safest generating capabilities we have. If a tsunami hit a coal mine, it would have drowned more poeple than will die from this nuclear accident. A failed dam killed more people. gas explosions killed more people.
Okay, the Japanese regulator did not report a sharp elevation in radioactive contamination in nearby sea water.
Now we feel better, don’t we.
“And ... some of those units are a write off. That’s going to be expensive.”
You get the understatement of the day award.
I doubt ANY of those reactors (#1, 2, 3, 4) will ever run again. It will take 20-40 years to clean them up, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the total cost exceeds that of ALL the money TEPCO ever spent building ALL the nuclear plants ever built in Japan.
This is what’s going to kill the nuke industry. Not the fact that there may be no deaths and relatively few radiation injuries (but we don’t know that yet, and who can say what the long-term effects on plant workers will be). But rather, the [literally] astronomical cost of the cleanup, not only in yen spent, but the cost of the public attitude as well.
Well, a top executive was touring the hospitals personally apologizing to everybody he met. Which seemed to me to be very “japanese”, as in this country nobody could do that for fear of lawsuits from the “admission”.
It’s one thing to design for normal forces associated with natural environment.
It’s more presumptuous to design around an Act of God.
Design for a 9.0, ...He can make it a 10.0!
In some(all) things it’s better just to stay on His side and let Him handle the situation.
Of course, learning that the water was higher than the conservative limit for infants, all the adults stopped drinking the water and bought out all the bottled water; one would hope those with infants were able to get enough.
Not really. We simply are getting a better picture of all the problems, as they get a handle on them. It’s not like the highly radioactive water just leaked out yesterday — we found it because they are moving back into those areas.
The radiation in the sea is likely related to the work to re-fill the spent fuel pools. Instead of radiation leaking into the atmosphere and drifting everywhere, we have water runoff from their re-fill operations getting into the drains.
A 9.2 at the right place in our country would take out something like the hoover dam; it could drown thousands and wipe out entire communities.
It could have easily taken out the levee in Lousiana, at a time when nobody was evacuated, which could have killed tens of thousands.
There are any number of easily forseable possibilities that could kill thousands. For example, running an airplane into the twin towers. But would we have tolerated spending the billions necessary to protect against every one of these forseeable but highly unlikely possibilities, all over the globe?
It is simply cheaper in most cases to deal with the aftermath of the 1 in a million event, than spend billions on the million places where the 1 in a million event MIGHT happen, hoping to stop it.
Meatloaf, the Japanese press has been acting pretty responsibly, it’s the foreign press that is doing the scandal-mongering.
Nevertheless, there has been falsification issues with the TEPCO reactors for years. Inspections were gundecked, records were falsified, data was concealed, etc., these are issues that go back as far as 2002.
Whether or not any of these problems had any effect on the current crisis may or may not be the case, but you can damn well believe the questions have been, are, and will continue to be asked.
It’s not like Japan hasn’t been through some damn catastrophic events in the past. That little dust up called WWII comes to mind. Will this latest change their culture? Doubtful imho.
The only problem in this situation is that those record might have been lost.
I don’t mean the plant, I mean the outside response after the incident.
I don’t disagree with you. TMI cost almost a billion to cleanup and store in place.
I undertsand that. The press here has been their usual irresponsible self. TEPCO is in for the scrutiny of their lives.
Nuclear energy can still be the safest and cheapest. Look at India. What are they using Thorium?
I live in Bloomington, IL. There’s a nuclear plant just 20 miles from me. I think a fault line runs pretty close to it.
It’s been there so long, no one thinks about it...until now..
“Falsified reports” have nothing to do with this incident.
TEPCO is attemtping to handle the aftermath of a 9.1 earthquake and then a tsunami that knocked out their back-up power supply...
Nothing to see here. Radiation is good for you. So is cigarette smoke and corexit. sarc/
Nuclear power is still efficient and relatively safe. Russia and China are just a few examples of countries ramping up the use of nuclear fission into the future.
Those Japanese reactors are 40 year old designs, newer ones are much safer. Per kilowatt, nuclear is still the most environmentally friendly form of power generation.
“But this shows that nuclear, far from being the most hazardous, is one of the safest generating capabilities we have.”
Aside from the other things you mention, don’t forget the thousands that die every year from pollution related ailments.
Modern nuclear power plants would be far safer than these 70’s era designs as well.
Yeah, they should have had a firefighting tugboat with water cannon at the pier next to the plant within a day. That, plus getting the concrete pumper boom onsite ASAP to precision place the water delivery would have made a BIG difference.
The USA could have helped by flying in one of the GE portable generator sets and parking it on a barge full of Jet A, then towing it to the closest sheltered spot near high tension power lines.
Ooops! It looks like we did that!
http://streamingradioguide.com/radiochat/2011/03/16/ge-is-on-the-way/
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