Fukushima Nuclear Plant Explodes

I know a lot of pro-nukers are going to say things like "That's not really an explosion" or "the plants behaved exactly as expected" and "bla bla bla" but whatever, here's the film:

More like this

Greg, I agree that diesels are a huge problem.

By lumbercartel (not verified) on 12 Mar 2011 #permalink

This should be a wake-up call to the American nuclear industry. The new plants being proposed in the US are of old designs that are also vulnerable to this sort of problem. The old regulations here make it cheaper and easier to use these old designs for new plants instead of using new designs that are not vulnerable to such problems.

The regulations in the US need updating so that our new plants will have cores that can't melt down and cooling systems that can operate without pumps.

And produce byproducts that are easier to manage and that are less useful for nefarious purposes.

old regulations here make it cheaper and easier to use these old designs

FTFY

The regulations haven't been updated for thirty years. Palo Verde is nearing the end of its design life (and it's ten years younger than the ones causing trouble in Japan) despite being the newest plant in the USA. The problem is that getting a new plant design approved is not only hideously expensive but takes forever -- and at any step in the process the plant owner can get a red light which flushes the whole investment down the tubes.

Which means that about the only designs that make economic sense are ones from the 60s.

Which is, no matter what else you might think, insane.

By lumbercartel (not verified) on 12 Mar 2011 #permalink

I hope this doesn't scare the US into abandoning nuclear power as part of the answer to our energy shortages...but they do need to rethink the design. Was it the earthquake that did the damage, or the tsunami..or the combination?

Gwen, I'm no expert but from the news coverage I've been reading it's my understanding that the problem was that the cooling system depended on an external source of energy that couldn't be maintained for long without the rest of the grid. The actual explosion was said to have been caused by a pump failure when the technicians attempted emergency action to alleviate the heat and pressure build-up. So this is the kind of failure that could happen any time there is a prolonged power interruption to a plant that depends on active cooling.

It was the tsunami. The reactors shut down when the earthquake hit, the emergency diesel generators turned on and were running things just fine for about an hour until they got flooded by the tsunami.

Now that they know to design for a tsunami they know how to maintain power. Just put the emergency generators in a tsunami-proof vault underground with air inlets and outlets above the high water mark and maybe some valves to close them off if the water gets too high and maybe a pressurized water source. Maybe they should put the reactors underwater so that to flood them with water all they need to do is open a valve.

All this talk of âChernobyl-style meltdownâ is pure hype. If they tried to cause a Chernobyl-style disaster they couldn't. In Chernobyl the reactor fuel didn't melt, it vaporized when it went hypercritical and drove the reactor power a few hundred times normal maximum. What didn't vaporize promptly got vaporized when the white-hot carbon that used to be the reactor burned up.

We really need to wait until this is over and analyzed before judging whether nuclear power can be done safely. I suspect that there will be zero casualties due to radiation exposure.

daedalus2u, actually, it is too late. The Nuclear Power industry has been tested on two fronts again and again: Engineering and societal legitimacy. For the first, meaning, can they design kick ass reactors that are kickass safe, they've done reasonably well, considering how many reactors there are and the kinds of things that have happened to them. For the second, they've failed miserably again and again. In this case, telling everyone that everything is, can be, always will, and always was problem-free but then targeting 7.9 as the maximum possible earthquake and not considering that a major earthquake and a tsunami could happe together on a sea shore on the ring of fire and all.

The credibility of the industry was already destroyed. That is why there have been very few new nuke plants built in years in many parts of the world. This is the final nail in the coffin.

Any hope of eventually designing a relatively safe reactor that produces products that decay in less time and/or can be fed into other uses, and that don't make good bombs, has just vaporized because every time the Japan nuke agency says "Everything is OK" and that news is followed by a plant building blowing to bits on YouTube (or something similar) the entire world becomes one order of magnitude more cynical about the prospects of "safe nuclear"

Greg, I've heard that the nuclear waste from plants in the United States isn't useful for terrorists. If it's reprocessed then that involves products that could be used to make a bomb, which is why the US doesn't reprocess nuclear waste. Reprocessing greatly reduces the amount of nuclear waste, so some countries like France do it.
I read that a giant earthquake like this hasn't happened to Japan since the 9th century - so if they manage to deal with an earthquake this huge without a catastrophic radiation release, it ought to make nuclear power look pretty good.

Also,geologists didn't think this particular fault could make such a huge earthquake. They thought it wasn't long and straight enough.

Laura, that's not really true. No self respecting geologist would have ever ruled out an 8.9 magnitude earthquake in the spot it happened. It is true that other pats of Japan, not very far away from where this happened, are more likely to produce more severe quakes.

In any event, the quakes seem not to have been the problem, but rather, the tsunami. The place that was struck with this wave faces numerous potential sources of tsunami.

It really does seem to be the case that the Japanese underestimated the potnetial effects, and range of different effects of a tsunami.

Greg, to me, âunder controlâ means that they are going to keep radioactivity from leaking out. I think that when this disaster in Japan is over and cleaned up, there will be tens of thousands of deaths from the earthquake and tsunami and zero from radiation exposure. More people will be killed from fires from leaking natural gas than will die from radiation exposure.

I don't think the Japanese will abandon nuclear power based on this incident. The parts of the plants that caused problems can be retrofitted to other plants pretty easily. Maybe the US will abandon nuclear power. The rest of the world certainly isn't going to.

I presume the various plants were instrumented with accelerometers, so the actual motions of the equipment will be known pretty well.

I just realized, their use of sea water and boric acid is very clever. There is calcium in sea water, and that will react with the boric acid to precipitate calcium borate. That calcium borate will precipitate on the hottest surfaces. It will precipitate on the fuel where it is most needed.

Laura @ # 10: ... I've heard that the nuclear waste from plants in the United States isn't useful for terrorists.

You've heard wrong. Look up "dirty bomb".

By Pierce R. Butler (not verified) on 13 Mar 2011 #permalink

Pierce,
I was thinking of the possibility of terrorists making a nuclear bomb. That's what the US is avoiding by not reprocessing nuclear waste. Sure they could make a "dirty bomb", but that is far less of a concern than a nuclear bomb. The NRC says about dirty bombs: "Most RDDs would not release enough radiation to kill people or cause severe illness - the conventional explosive itself would be more harmful to individuals than the radioactive material. However, depending on the scenario, an RDD explosion could create fear and panic, contaminate property, and require potentially costly cleanup."

Pierce, how many dirty bombs have there been? As far as I can tell, zero.

The problem with a dirty bomb is that to be dangerous it has to emit a lot of radiation. For a terrorist to pick it up and carry it, it has to emit an amount of radiation that doesn't kill them in a short period of time.

Those two immutable aspects of dirty bombs make them pretty useless as a terrorist weapon. Radiation is trivial to detect. There are very sensitive instruments that can detect it to very low levels. It would be very easy to clean up the aftermath of a dirty bomb, and you would know exactly what the danger was the whole time and when it was finally clean enough to reenter the area.

A terrorist would do a more damage by carrying more high explosive than substituting something radioactive for explosives.

Main stream media could greatly reduce the impact of terrorists if they would not hyperventilate at every shadow perceived to be a boogy man. But the for-profit 24/7/365 ânewsâ cycle demands ever more compelling hysteria to sell tv ads.

What Laura was talking about was using fissionable material from reactor fuel to make a nuclear weapon. The fuel in Unit 3 was MOX, which contains plutonium. Making nuclear weapons from plutonium is pretty easy, but you have to separate the plutonium first. In spent fuel, even spent fuel with a lot of plutonium, there are a lot of radioactive fission products. Terrorists couldn't pick up spent fuel and carry it away with them because the radiation would kill them before they left the power plant site.

Laura, I've heard Susan Hough speak several times, and she is speaking correctly: The "Big One" was expected to be at a different location. But that never meant that a 9.0 could not occur where it did. She characterizes this quake as "a bit of a surprise" not an impossibility or an implausibility.

Critics of Nuclear Plants in Japan have been saying all along that the Japanese, like Americans as well, have understated and underestimated the threat from faults. Pro Nuke people have said the anti-Nuke peopole have been overstating their concern. We now know who is correct in this matter.

Daedelus: Radiaion has in fact leaked out, so I assume you would characterize this as "out of control" ...

Regarding outputs: Yes, dirty bombs are a factor, but I was actually thinking of something else.

You can design a system of plants to have some plants eat the waste of other plants. You can design plants to not prodcue easily purified or enriched products that could be used to make conventional warhead type bombs. You can design a plant to use cooling systems other than water which may be more reliable as long as they are built very sturdily. You can design a plant system that is cheaper per unit of power.

But you can't do all of those. The best way to get rid of waste is to produce waste that is used as fuel, but that fuel will tend to be enrichable and usable more easily as actual atomic bombs, for instance.

There has been talk of bringing back a new nuke industry in the US, with a system of plants that does the right combination of things so waste is reduced, threat of making bombs by rogue nations or dirty bombs is reduced, risk is reduced, etc. etc. A panacea-program.

It all sounds great, it all sounds plausible. But then you realize that you are hearing from, essentially, the same exact sources that said TMI could not happen, Chernobyl could not happen, and that what is happening now could not happen.

That is what I meant above about the social credibility. The nuclear industry and pro-nuclear engineers and others have zero credibility because of this sort of thing.

And Daedelus, in all respect, counting the dead from a 9.0 quake and mega tsunami as the point of comparison for safetey for ANY engineering endeavor is silly. By that standard, using a spare document box and a string as a safety restraint system for babies in cars is good because it is not the Holocaust.

(Sorry for Godwining my own blog...)

"the same exact sources that said ⦠Chernobyl could not happen"

In the 1970s in high school chemistry and physics classes, my teacher taught us that proper nuclear power plants are designed with multiple safety systems including thick steel pressure vessels and big steel-reinforced concrete containment buildings. New designs were supposed to put the reactor vessel below ground level, have automatic insertion of control rods, and so on and so forth. Chernobyl failed in all these design criteria; those reactors would never have been approved in Western countries.

Who said that the Chernobyl scenario could not happen?

Are we better off burning coal and putting its low-grade radioactive contents into tailings piles?

By Timberwoof (not verified) on 13 Mar 2011 #permalink

"And Daedelus, in all respect, counting the dead from a 9.0 quake and mega tsunami as the point of comparison for safetey for ANY engineering endeavor is silly."

I think his point was that the reactor problems resulting from a 9.0 quake and mega tsunami are much smaller than the direct effects of the quake and tsunami - and therefore, perhaps, not an argument against nuclear plants.

Here's a better analogy than your box and string example: prescription drugs are dangerous. Not good for children. So we put them in child-proof bottles. Then my house burns down! Some of the child-proof bottles melt! OMG! There's a drug release, children could be hurt! But... that's not really a good argument that child-proof bottles are a bad way to protect children, because the kind of disaster we're talking about that can break the bottle is going to cause a lot more damage than the bottle breaking.

Now, if it turns out that either a) the bottle breaking causes some measurable fraction of the number of deaths of the house fire, or b) actually, the bottle turns out to also break when left sitting in a sunbeam, then maybe, we should be worried about our bottle design and whether we should have prescription drugs in the house at all. But I don't think that this particular incident rises to that level yet, and, in fact, may even be evidence that our bottles hold up mostly well enough even in extreme conditions.

This is in my mind a huge deal and even if it isn't being viewed as a huge threat, whatever threat that this explosion does pose needs to be dealt with immediately. Japan has a horrible history with radiation, as they lost nearly hundreds of thousands to cancer in World War 2 as a result of nuclear explosions. The Fukushima Nuclear Plant has 2 other reactors which are damaged and are feared to explode, and if they do this problem could get much worse than it already is.

Also, this should be a world-wide sign that nuclear facilities need to be better designed to prevent explosions such as this, and to keep the worldwide population safe as an epidemic such as this. Tsunami's cause serious damage and we don't need to be making the situation worse by placing dangerous nuclear reactors in a situation where it may explode and cause disastrous results. Nuclear Plants need to be either proven safe from natural disaster, or they should not be made in a hazardous environment at all.

Timberwolf: "Who said that the Chernobyl scenario could not happen?"

Ah... well, the people who built it? Are you seriously asking this question?

"Are we better off burning coal and putting its low-grade radioactive contents into tailings piles? "

This argument is not about whether nuclear could be a better alternative to releasing ancient carbon. It is about whether or not we should believe that the nuclear power inudstry is capable of making the safest (in many respects)possible reactors, and being honest with the rest of us about what they are doing so we can actually make an informed choice rather than a choice based on bullshit, or a "choice" rammed down our throats.

M:"I think his point was that the reactor problems resulting from a 9.0 quake and mega tsunami are much smaller than the direct effects of the quake and tsunami - and therefore, perhaps, not an argument against nuclear plants. "

I'm sure he'll be a long to clarify, but that really is what I'm talking about. Do re-read my comment, if necessary. Calibrating the significance of the nuke-related events to ANY related or unrelated disaster is meaningless.

"Here's a better analogy than your box and string example: "

Almost any analogy would be better than my totally dumb-ass example! But, your example misses the point. My analogy to your analogy is like this:

"We are the pharm industry. We deal with dangerious pills but don't worry we put them in safe bottles."

"But how do you know this will really be safe in case something goes wrong?"

"Because we have a regulatory process that looks at all congingencies and produces safe pharm for your use in your home. Don't worry."

"Can we see your data, investigate more, challenge your assumptions?"

"SHut up. It's safe don't worry."

"Oh, OK."

Then later someone drops the pharm bottle on the floor nd the dog eats it in two seconds. Or closes the dresser drawre on it and it cracks and a pill falls to the ground and a baby eats it. Or, yes, there is a small house fire and a dozen bottles in the bathroom melt and now there is pharm-juice and pharm-dust in the ground water. None of these contingencies were considered during pharm-bottle design. Only the ability for a five year old to open a properly closed cap. Total fail. But, that's OK because the process of spreading pro-Pharm rhetoric and (and this is important) anti-anti-Pharm rhetoric was done very well, even better than the safety design, so it does not matter that the safety systems have failed.

"But I don't think that this particular incident rises to that level yet, and, in fact, may even be evidence that our bottles hold up mostly well enough even in extreme conditions."

Here you make a very serious mistake, or a least, miss my meta-point totally. It may well be that the outcome of this event is that we should be impressed with the engineering, even if a couple of the buildings blow up and there are two or three partial meltdown and a hundred people radiated moderately. But that does not matter because the way the nuke-industry works, we can't have this conversation in an open and honest and informed way.

Omar, surely there is some room for risk in what you advocate. "Proven safe from natural disaster" cannot mean absolutely, 100% impermeable. We shouldn't design nuclear power plants to withstand a direct hit from a massive asteroid impact, should we?

Determine an acceptable level of risk, and design for that. And I'm with M. If you're going to argue that you shouldn't build a nuclear plant in an area susceptible to earthquakes and tsunamis because people might die, you should also argue that you shouldn't build ANYTHING there. But nobody's criticizing Japan for that. (Although I do recall plenty of people criticizing the residents of New Orleans for building and rebuilding a city in that location.)

Omar, Do you have a link to support your completely unfounded and inflammatory statement that âhundreds of thousandsâ died from cancer?

The number of excess cancers from the atomic weapons use in Japan was not hundreds of thousands. It was not even tens of thousands.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10931690

It is probably not even 1,000.

"In 2002, the president of the country's largest power utility was forced to resign along with four other senior executives, taking responsibility for suspected falsification of nuclear plant safety records."

http://tinyurl.com/48kpnvt

Tom: Both of your arguments are absurd. While I agree that putting major population centers on highly active faults, near active volcanoes, or in tsunami areas is stupid, that has nothign to do with the decision to place or build nuclear power facilities. Again, I'm pretty sure I'm seeing Nuke-Industry talking points here .It's called the "Watch the monkey" method. Oh, you don't like me taking your money, endangering your family, imprisoning your children, whatever? Well, look at this other thing over here that is much worse! That's worse! Look at that thing! (and so on until the subject glances away from the real problem.)

Not, Tom, that's just dumb. And you know that.

daedalus2u, the study you cite does not address the question you asked. Let's take the wiki route:

Estimates of total deaths by the end of 1945 from burns, radiation and related disease, the effects of which were aggravated by lack of medical resources, range from 90,000 to 166,000.[1][45] Some estimates state up to 200,000 had died by 1950, due to cancer and other long-term effects.[3][6][46] Another study states that from 1950 to 1990, roughly 9% of the cancer and leukemia deaths among bomb survivors was due to radiation from the bombs, the statistical excess being estimated to 89 leukemia and 339 solid cancers.[47]

[1]"Frequently Asked Questions #1". Radiation Effects Research Foundation. http://www.rerf.or.jp/general/qa_e/qa1.html. Retrieved Sept. 18, 2007.

[3]Rezelman, David; F.G. Gosling and Terrence R. Fehner (2000). "The atomic bombing of hiroshima". The Manhattan Project: An Interactive History. U.S. Department of Energy. http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/hiroshima.htm. Retrieved Sept. 18, 2007. page on Hiroshima casualties.

[6]The Spirit of Hiroshima: An Introduction to the Atomic Bomb Tragedy. Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. 1999.

[45]"Chapter II: The Effects of the Atomic Bombings". United States Strategic Bombing Survey. Originally by U.S. G.P.O.; stored on ibiblio.org. 1946. http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/USSBS/AtomicEffects/AtomicEffects-2…. Retrieved Sept. 18, 2007.

[46]Another review and analysis of the various death toll estimates is in: Richard B. Frank (2001). Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. Penguin Publishing. ISBN 0-679-41424-X.

[47]"Frequently Asked Questions #2". Radiation Effects Research Foundation. http://www.rerf.or.jp/general/qa_e/qa2.html.

daedalus2u, methings your wings are smoldering. That study runs from 1958-1994. The bomb was dropped in 1945.

Greg, I'm a little confused about your stance here. Clearly, you don't think the nuclear industry has been transparent with their own risk analysis. But it's not apparent to me whether you think that the failure of the Japanese plant is acceptable.

Is it a problem that a nuclear reactor in coastal Japan isn't built to withstand a 9.0 earthquake and the resulting tsunami? (Granted, it might not have survived a smaller earthquake either.) Your comments at 12 and 18 to Laura suggest to me that you think it is. But you really don't make an argument to support it - all the arguments go back to societal legitimacy, as you called it.

I disagree with you that we can't use the effects of the earthquake and tsunami as a valid comparison to put the effects of the related nuclear disaster in perspective, and to determine what level of resources we devote to hardening the system. If you have a billion dollars to spend on earthquake safety, you'd be negligent to spend it all on moving/improving your nuclear plants.

Greg, yes there were hundreds of thousands of deaths. Most of them were prompt deaths due to radiation, not due to cancer. That is the only point I was trying to make. Yes, if you lump prompt radiation exposure deaths and cancer deaths together there were hundreds of thousands of deaths. If you only look at delayed cancer deaths, there were not hundreds of thousands of deaths.

If you look at tables 2 in this

http://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.1667/RR3049

The number of âexcessâ cancers does not reach 1,000. Maybe the number is off by a factor of 2 or 3, or 10, but there is no way it can get to be âhundreds of thousandsâ.

Actually Greg, it wasn't the people who designed Chernobyl who said it was safe, it was the politicians who ordered the people who designed it to design it that way who said it was safe.

Chernobyl was a modification of a design for a plutonium producing reactor. That was why they used graphite as a moderator, to get a higher capture of neutrons in U238 to make more plutonium. It was a reactor designed to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons that was modified and used to generate power. The reason for no containment vessel was so that fuel could be loaded and unloaded without shutting the reactor down. Quick turn-around and reprocessing of fuel is important to get âgoodâ plutonium for weapons. You want pure Pu239 with none of the heavier isotopes.

It is like the BP oil spill. The engineers doing the work knew that what they were doing was very risky. The managers ordered them to do it anyway. Same as with Chernobyl. Same as with New Orleans. The managers always say âno one could have predicted thisâ, when the technical people had predicted it, had warned the manager and the manager did it anyway.

The problem isn't in doing big and complex and even dangerous things, it is letting people be in charge of big and complex and dangerous things who don't understand what they are doing. The problem is picking people to be in charge based on how much money they have, how good looking they are, how well connected politically they are, how confidently they can speak and project; those things that people use to rank other people which have nothing to do with actual competence.

That is the problem.

I am not defending people who lie about how safe things are. Those people are usually the âpointy haired bossesâ and not the âDilbertsâ.

I don't know why you are defending those who lie about how unsafe things are. What we need is accuracy and precision.

Let's review my arguments, Greg.

1) Omar says "Nuclear Plants need to be either proven safe from natural disaster, or they should not be made in a hazardous environment at all." I argued that you can't be 100% safe, and you have to accept some level of risk. We do not spend all our resources to reduce risk to zero. We do not avoid doing things because there is risk. What's absurd here?

2) By building cities (hell, a whole country) in an area that has significant risk of natural disaster, the Japanese have implicitly accepted that risk. Given the results of the quake/tsunami (upwards of 10,000 dead, the costliest natural disaster in history) and for the meltdown (a handful of people injured, and a small amount of radiation released - so far), it's clear to me that the additional risk of the plant is dwarfed by the baseline risk. Given that, you simply don't need a lot of benefits to justify building nuclear reactors there. Again, what do you find absurd about this argument?

So the nuclear reactor exploded? I've been reading different comments on the explosion. This means there would be a measure of radiation exposures, but not very severe at this point, right? But say other plants explode as well, and there's a bigger explosion. Then wouldn't the radiation carry over all over Japan, and perhaps even to its neighboring countries such as Korea. What would happen then?

By Heidi Kwak (not verified) on 14 Mar 2011 #permalink

Tom: Stance? I'm not sure what you mean.

I have stated that the failure of the Japanese plant owing to loss of external power and loss of internal power is not acceptable.

Is it a problem that a nuclear reactor in coastal Japan isn't built to withstand a 9.0 earthquake and the resulting tsunami?

Apparently is is a problem. But that is of course not what happened. "A" nuclear plant did not have a problem. Apparently five of them are having problems, two very severe.

But you really don't make an argument to support it - all the arguments go back to societal legitimacy, as you called it.

I know this is a little complicated, and I can see that you are going to insist that my argument be repeated again and again for some reason. There are two issues here: The technological one ... were these plants built well enough and did they manage this disaster ... and for that we need to wait and see, but I'm thinking that dual failure on the power supply is a serious regulatory and design flaw. Having a system where hydrogen can build up and blow the roof off is probably not a good design and the fact that it happened twice makes it hard to argue that it was a total fluke. Having a partial meltdown in two plants is probably a problem, but if the plant design ultimatly leads to this being managable than that may be impressively good design. But it has not been managed yet. Relying on the nearby ocean as a way to cool your plant is not impressive from a planning, design, engineering, emergency response, or regulatory point of view. And so on. How is this not an argument for the plants not withstanding what happened to them?

I disagree with you that we can't use the effects of the earthquake and tsunami as a valid comparison to put the effects of the related nuclear disaster in perspective

You are abysmally wrong about that. Zero on the logic meter. I'll not bother explaining again why.

daedalus2u, the excess death study you refer to relates to continued effects years and years after the bomb was exploded. In the case of the study you cite, that is all post 1950.

it wasn't the people who designed Chernobyl who said it was safe

Did the designers say it was unsafe? IN any event, I'm not sure separating out design and regulation for pedantic purposes adds much to the argument that pro-nuke people insist nuclear is safe even while plants are in the middle of melting down and exploding.

I agree with you about letting people who dont understand be in charge, but where we diverge in our opinions here is that I think that the "Nothing is really wrong here" rhetoric adds to that problem.

I don't know why you are defending those who lie about how unsafe things are. What we need is accuracy and precision.

I'm not defending anyone. You on the other and have insisted that "under control" = no raditation gets out and b) the sitsituation is "Under control" yet radiation did in fact get out, etc. I'm arguing that this sort of rhetoric is unhelpful and that it remains to be seen as to what will really happen here . In my "news" bog post notice the headline that says "nuclear threat averted" from a couple of days back, before the leakage was known about (and sickened people), two building blew up, and two partial meltdowns occured.

What I"m objecting to is the utter lack of attention to actual reality that characterizes most pro-nuke arguments.

high frequency X low (non-0) consequences
vs
low (non-0) frequency X large consequences.

By Pick (on) Your… (not verified) on 14 Mar 2011 #permalink

Greg, One of the problems in dealing with radioactive materials is that the dynamic range for measurement with instruments is extremely large. There is appreciable background that is easy to measure with instruments. Slight changes to that background are easy to measure. The biological effects of low levels of radiation (within a few orders of magnitude of background) are extremely difficult to measure.

What is important are the biological effects, not the instrumental effects. The coupling between an instrumental measure and a biological effect is not well understood. The usual practice is to assume a linear relationship, then look at effects at much larger doses and extrapolate to low doses. This approach is known to be wrong. For some things it overestimates risk at low doses (there being significant effects of hormesis in radiation exposure), for other things it might under estimate it.

There hasn't been any data that people have gotten radiation sickness. People have gotten radiation exposure and people have felt sick. The only exposures that I have seen reference to are way below where any prompt radiation exposures symptoms are exhibited. I don't doubt that the people who were exposed feel sick, but I feel sick just reading about the destruction. I know that reading about the destruction has not caused me radiation exposure, so I know my feelings of feeling sick are not due to radiation exposure.

Do you have another source of data on cancer from the atomic bombs in Japan? There were many prompt deaths, but those deaths were not due to cancer. Maybe many of the people who would have gotten cancer died from starvation, infection, or something else in the terrible conditions in early post-war Japan. I haven't seen any estimates of how that would have skewed the cancer results later on.

I am not disagreeing that any release of radioactivity is bad. I am not disagreeing that these nuclear facilities have problems that need to be addressed in the short term and long term. There is a real danger of unknown magnitude from what is going on right now. Wildly exaggerating the magnitude of that danger is not helping. Wildly exaggerating the magnitude of the danger does increase the danger by producing panic and psychogenic symptoms.

There has been fuel damage. The release of iodine and cesium confirms that there has been fuel damage. Right now there has been no confirmation of fuel melting. Fuel melting is very much more serious than fuel damage. TMI had a gigantic fraction of the core melt. There is no indication that anything like that is happening here. From the quantities that I have seen mentioned, the amounts seem pretty small relative to the total core inventory. The total core inventory is gigantic. A release of 0.1% of the total core inventory would be catastrophic. A release of 0.00000001% might not be. Until we know how much has been released we don't know the magnitude of the problem.

There may have been no "melting" of fuel here, there certainly is fuel damage, but fuel damage can occur without melting. The zirconium casing is susceptible to oxidation, and if it oxidizes it will then leak. That leakage can occur without any melting.

I think there is confusion between "fuel damage" (which there has been), and "fuel melting" which is a specific type of damage which is much more serious. It is important to make the distinction because fuel melting can lead to the liquid fuel accumulating in the bottom of the reactor which is an enormous escalation in concern.

If the fuel stays in its normal position, even if it is damaged, that is not so bad. In its normal position water can flow around it, it is in the right place relative to the control rods, the instrumentation they have can monitor it.

Fuel melting can cause positive feedback because the first fuel to melt is at the top, as it drips down, it blocks cooling passages and adds its own heat to the hot fuel below. The heat generated per unit volume goes up, and the area for that heat to dissipate goes down.

daedalus2u: I'm not defending a particular positon on cancer and A-bombs in Japan. I'm just saying that the excess death data is only part of the story, and otherwise, I've provided a number of references, but not to a particular end. I have no dog in that race.

Greg, I'm trying to figure out whether you think it's acceptable that a nuclear plant in coastal Japan not be built to withstand a 9.0 earthquake and the resulting tsunami, and that it fail in such a way that there is a partial meltdown that releases an amount of radiation sufficient to kill a few people and cause a few cases of cancer. That's what I mean by "stance". I apologize if that wasn't clear, and I acknowledge that it's somewhat poorly defined. For the sake of argument, because we don't know how this will turn out, let's say that 20 people die of acute exposure and 100 people die of cancer an average of 10 years earlier than they would have otherwise. Let's say that scenario happens at two of the five affected plants. And let's say there are 20,000 people killed in total in the combined earthquake/tidal wave/meltdown disaster. I'd like to know where you stand on that.

Also, I think "is it a problem" was not the right phrase to use there - yes, it is currently causing a problem. No, the plants did not withstand the quake/tsunami. There's no argument there. But I meant "do you have a problem with it" - do you think that the costs outweigh the benefits?

I went back and reread, in case I'd missed something, and until your post at 34, you hadn't actually stated that the failure of the plant was unacceptable. You hadn't made an argument on the technical merits of the nuclear plants. (I haven't looked at any other blogs you may have posted, though.) You focused on the fact that the nuclear industry isn't good at informing the public of the risks (recall, risk is both odds and consequences) of the industry. That's what you called social legitimacy. By the way, I'm not insisting that you repeat that argument; I agree with it, although I think that much of the opposition isn't very good at it, either. Anyway, based on your response at 34, I understand that you do think that the costs outweigh any set of reasonable benefits, although I'd appreciate it if you'd revisit that in a little more detail.

Regarding the comparison between the effects of the quake/tsunami with the effects of the nuclear disaster, you'd have to have actually explained why that's so abysmally wrong once before you could do it again. You've given a couple of poorly thought out analogies. M distinguished your shoebox and string vs Holocaust example from the current situation based on the fact that the Holocaust has no relation to a car accident, but the earthquake and tsunami are quite intimately tied to the failures (although I agree that there are some design flaws, they weren't a problem in the previous 40 years of operation; presumably there are other plants with the same design that have also operated successfully). You say "Oh, you don't like me taking your money, endangering your family, imprisoning your children, whatever? Well, look at this other thing over here that is much worse!" That's essentially the same argument. Your pharmaceutical example, to the extent that it goes to the event vs other events from the same cause argument, actually makes my point, I think. If you shut a bottle in a drawer, nobody dies from anything other than eating a dropped pill. The ratio of dropped pill deaths to other deaths is infinity. Clearly, that is an important thing to consider in this scenario, and pill bottles should be (and are) made of plastic instead of glass such that this doesn't happen very often.

So, please, explain for the first time why it doesn't make sense to compare the consequences of the nuclear meltdown with the consequences of the quake/tsunami.

Tom, I'd argue that a nuclear plant built in Japan should be built to withstand a 10.00 mag earthquake and a tsunami, and both at the same time. I'm not sure what I'd define as "withstand." Hopefully, be indifferent to, but perhaps "get all fucked up but not release much radiation" is acceptable.

The primary problem really does seem to be the use of active cooling. This is a problem that can be fixed in future plants Indeed, most modern plants don't require active pumps to cool.

Greg, your definition of "withstand" is pretty much the standard in the safety profession. Everything from microwave ovens to lawn mowers to rockets to nuclear plants are designed, not to be indifferent to extreme environments, but to fail safely. You hit that on the nose.

As for the 10.0 magnitude earthquake, the largest recorded was 9.5 in Chile in 1960; that would be 3 times more powerful. I've found a couple of things online that say we can examine geologic records to study earthquakes 100,000 years in the past, but I haven't found any sources that say how often earthquakes that large occur. Ideally, we would say that we want to withstand anything that has a risk (probability x consequences) of killing x number of people in y years. But I think that, all else being equal, 10.0 is a reasonable standard for a nuclear facility built in the region. Since a tsunami is going to be caused by an earthquake of that size occurring off the shore of Japan, that's clearly part of the consideration.

There is a good post which I think is completely accurate and reflects what I think is and was going on.

http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/

This was linked to from skepchick by Evelyn's Dad who has read and vetted it. I have read and vetted it too. I see no errors in the above link. I agree that main stream media coverage has been terrible with multiple errors in each article that I have seen.

Just as a context point: 1) I am actually not well-versed on what the particular status of this present disaster is, and hope (but have no knowledge of the probability) that radioactive releases from the Japanese nuclear plants will be limited in scope and ultimate human health impacts. 2) I acknowledge the potential for large and frightening disasters from nuclear plants. 3) I believe that we should learn lessons from any plant failure, near failure, or event that raises the possibility of failure in order to make nuclear plants safer.

Having said that: you continue to have blinders on about this particular mode of analysis:
"I disagree with you that we can't use the effects of the earthquake and tsunami as a valid comparison to put the effects of the related nuclear disaster in perspective

You are abysmally wrong about that. Zero on the logic meter. I'll not bother explaining again why. "

When multiple different posters on your blog all seem to think that one approach is logical, and you are the odd-man out, you should perhaps spend a moment to consider if you might be the one at fault rather than flinging out phrases like "abysmally wrong" and "zero on the logic meter". To add weight to our argument, I will note that an MIT professor stated, on http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/03/13/japans-nuclear-crisis-l…, "We concluded that any earthquake strong enough to damage the reactor, and thus expose the public to harmful radiation, would be much more dangerous to the public in its direct effects, and that it would be more beneficial to devote efforts and resources to general preparedness."

In the absence of infinite resources, some limits on safety have to be accepted, and one of the factors in deciding which events a nuke plant must be resistant to is to consider whether the damage from the particular nuke plant failure mode is large or small compared to the damage from the event. For example, making a nuke plant safe against attack by the Death Star would be silly, because an intact nuke plant doesn't do us much good when the rest of the planet has been reduced to millions of asteroids.

I would argue that requiring that a nuclear plant be safe against a magnitude 10.0 earthquake regardless of cost might be excessive. Questions to examine when trying to decide whether a given limit is appropriate:

1) cost of the upgrades
2) probability of the event
3) co-benefits of the upgrades (eg, making the plant resistant to a 10.0 earthquake may also make it more resistant to plane impacts, terrorist sabotage, human error, etc., and so looking at each individually rather than collectively undervalues the benefit of the upgrade)
4) change in probability of failure modes before and after the upgrade and the magnitude of those failure modes in terms of human and environmental costs.
5) size of the event to be guarded against. This is important for two reasons: 1) honestly, we care less about small damage when there's bigger damage around, and that's the point many of us are trying to make (eee Death Star example). 2) in order to plan for unexpected, negative synergies - eg, if you are planning for an earthquake, you should realize that there may be simultaneous power failures, tsunamis, and slow response of emergency vehicles.

-M

What M said. One small correction to his link, which had a stray comma: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/03/13/japans-nuclear-crisis-l…

Greg, I don't know if the Preview button intentionally works this way, but when I clicked Preview to check my link and then posted from the preview page, I got a message that you're moderating comments, and my comment didn't immediately show up.

Yeah for those of you coming I really would recommend reading the JREF forum and actually nuclear experts on the matter. Greg is actually invoking a large number of fallacies and bizarre quotes that are steadily being debunked in this regard. For example, let us take the example of this little Glenn Beckish quote.

It all sounds great, it all sounds plausible. But then you realize that you are hearing from, essentially, the same exact sources that said TMI could not happen, Chernobyl could not happen, and that what is happening now could not happen.

What seems to be the problem here? Well. Chernobyl was in Soviet Russia. Mind you Soviet Russia wasn't particularly friends with the United States. So pray tell what sort of experts were saying that the reactor is safe when not everyone knew the reactors design.

Adam, I appreciate, and in fact, invite here as well as elsewhere, a rational and skeptical discussion of nuclear power. Your implication that I am looking for something else is very questionable.

But your implication that this decades old debate and the information liked to it is not tainted by both politics and by bought and paid for manipulation of regulation/regulators, industry 'experts' and, more generally, information, only serves one purpose: To date you.

Do you call everyone who seems to be disagreeing with you "Glenn Beck" Do you know what you can do with that insult, young man?

Tom @ 42

Actually a magnitude 10 quake is more than five and a half times as powerful as a magnitude 9.5 quake. This is because the Richter scale (to which the moment magnitude scale is calibrated) is a base 10 log scale based on amplitude of the shaking rather than the energy. For the energy it works out as about a base 31.6 log scale. This means that a 10 is not 3.2 times as energetic as a 9.5 but about 5.6 times as energetic.

By Brett Paul Dunbar (not verified) on 14 Mar 2011 #permalink

Thanks for the correction, Brett.

Greg, let me start by saying that I agree with your critics, and disagree with you, regarding:

[C]ounting the dead from a 9.0 quake and mega tsunami as the point of comparison for safetey for ANY engineering endeavor is silly.

We're not talking about "safety for ANY engineering endeavor" per se, but the safety under circumstances of "a 9.0 quake and mega tsunami". If the consequences of the quake/tsunami via the reactor failure are very small (say 2 orders of magnitude smaller) compared to the consequences via other failures (e.g. buildings and bridges falling over) then that constitutes reasonable safety design criteria. As long as these are the criteria that are communicated. The insistence that "everything's OK, go away" (assuming that's what the industry had actually been saying) is completely unacceptable, but we must remember that efforts to get nuclear power OK'ed have always been plagued by opponents with even fewer scruples when it came to truth, or reason.

Far more serious, IMO, is the lack of self-honesty in general in industries with extremely high critical safety and performance standards. IMO there has been a decline in honesty, and an increase in tolerance for dishonesty, since the end or WWII. CF the Challenger Disaster. (of course, it's also possible that during WWII wartime security measures were used to hide the consequences of such dishonesty, but they could also have been used to hide the quiet lethal removals of guilty parties by a general establishment with much greater incentives to prevent such behavior.)

It seems likely that right after WWII a greater culture of honesty, combined with a more reasonable attitude toward risk assessment, led to a proliferation of essentially safe reactors without a single fatality linked to accidental radiation (or any other plant accident or failure, AFAIK) to this day. This includes the recent situation in Japan (so far), but not, of course, anything behind the "Iron Curtain" where a culture of "honesty", if any, was unrelated to that of the West.

In view of the decline, it may well be that both the space program and nuclear power should be put on hold pending either new cultural attitudes or technology sufficient to achieve the necessary safety standards without requiring levels of honesty our culture can (probably) no longer provide.

There are alternatives to fission power, after all.

Adam, I appreciate, and in fact, invite here as well as elsewhere, a rational and skeptical discussion of nuclear power. Your implication that I am looking for something else is very questionable.

Really. So explain to me why you are complaining that nuclear reactors aren't defying the laws of physics?

AK, the logic that I was objecting to is this: You have an earhquake and a tsunami. The nuke plants partially melt down. We are concerned.

Then, a few hours later the tsunami hits california and 35 million people are washed into the sea and die. Now, our concern over the nuke plants in Japan is reduced.

As a citizen, I'm not interested in a safety estimate for a proposed nuke plant that compares it to a supernova destroying the earth or a visus kiling off half of humanity or a tsunami flooding the city. I'm intertsted in what happens to that plant under X,Y and Z effects.

If that is not what people were suggestion above, then we may be in agreement. If it was, we most certainly are.

Greg, I have to ask what form of power plant would have been acceptable to you under the circumstances in Japan.

The fossil fuel plants too have failed in many cases; most notably, the refinery/depot at Chiba is on fire. That's not too far from Tokyo, though I'm given to understand it's usually downwind... but I'm willing to bet that you'll see more adverse effects in Tokyo from that fire than you will from the reactor accidents. Given your standards, Japan should give up petroleum as it too is insufficently safe to store through a once-in-a-millenium seismic event.

Japan hasn't the land space for solar, wind, or hydroelectric capacity to serve its needs; tidal energy just isn't dense and steady enough to power an industrial society; powering the nation with fossil fuel is a nightmare from the AGW perspective and would be polluting as Hades, not to mention that it'd cause a huge spike in world fuel prices; geothermal is impractical now and a gamble for the future... what would fill the gap? I can't think of any solution that would be safer, yet would provide at least as much power.

One last point; to date, the amount of radioactivity exposure to plant workers during the accident according to reports is apparently equivalent to the same dose one would experience on one trans-Pacific airline flight. Even with the steam vents, even with the seawater deluge, even with the explosions... and even though the earthquake was 10x more powerful (perhaps up to 20x, given how often the Richter rating has changed) than the design specification.

Yeah, sorry, I'm still pro-nuke here despite this.

-- Steve

Greg, one of the underlying assumptions that we've been making to this point is that the earthquake, tsunami, and meltdown affect the same basic population. The fact is, there's not a lot that Mother Nature can do to a nuclear plant that doesn't come with huge direct consequences to the surrounding population.

As a citizen, I'm not interested in a safety estimate for a proposed nuke plant that compares it to a supernova destroying the earth or a visus kiling off half of humanity or a tsunami flooding the city.

I don't think daedalus was comparing the safety estimates. Rather, he was pointing out that the (fairly minor) issues at this power plant are conditional on something infinitely worse.

A thought experiment. Let's say the operators of power plant X in California do a full risk assessment. They conclude that the only way the plant could melt down is if a plague of brain-eating zombies sweeps across America, chowing down on at least 2/3 of the population. Under any less extreme circumstances the plant would be indestructible.

In this case, IMO the risk of meltdown would be acceptable. The only way the plant can melt down is if far more people have already died than could possibly be harmed by radiation.

Now let's consider Japan. The worst radiation dose that anyone there has received from the reactor is approximately what you'd get from a spinal xray. Under normal circumstances, that might be a valid thing to complain about. But when the circumstances that caused this issue also caused tens of thousands of deaths, worrying about the damn reactor seems seriously disproportionate.

By Corkscrew (not verified) on 14 Mar 2011 #permalink

Cork, I wasn't disagreeing with daedalus on that issue. I do like the Zombie idea, though. They could be hired to clean up the meltdown, too.

Tom: Exactly.

Greg sez: "every time the Japan nuke agency says "Everything is OK" and that news is followed by a plant building blowing to bits"

- but isn't saying "everything is OK" when it isn't deeply embedded in Japanese culture? - we're used to hearing glowing assessments of the Japanese economy just when it's at its most wobbly - so perhaps implying that this particular mud will stick to the nuke industry is making the wrong generalisation.

That said, the chances of safer nuclear (thorium,etc) being tried out here in Aus were already the wrong side of nil.

Both sides seem to be talking past each other here, not surprising since there seems to be a lot of that going around in general. One side says radiation and they mean a few unstable particles the other side hears radiation and think cancer. One side says "melt-down" and means a permanently broken core wrapped in steel and surrounded by concrete the other side hears "melt-down" and thinks mushroom cloud. The words being said have fundamentally not been the same words heard and then this has propagated by our instant electronic media with quoting and translation.

I will possibly add a new analogy, one from healthcare which is my own field that often struggles with managing risk and reward. People often complain of the "rug burn" associated with slamming face first into a fully deployed air bag. These same individuals often complain that if they had known about the risk of facial injury they might have gotten a different car. There isn't in fact a big auto conspiracy about this one. No matter how hard you try to see one. Airbags save lives.

I think the complaints about the associated radioactive release are similar. I don't think the comparison is that different either. The whole country was literally in a massive car accident. The fact that the death toll isn't in the millions is a tribute to the engineering of all of their structures including the safeties built into these plants. The fact that they didn't personally send you a message claiming that there might be an insignificant radiation exposure once every 100 years of operation isn't their fault. They just said the reactor is safe, which is completely true. You are just not accepting that the definition of safe means people don't get hurt, not there is no unstable particles.

qzl, a building blowing itself to bits is ok in the grand scheme of things pertaining to nuclear power plants. What is not ok is radioactivity leaking out.

I appreciate that those who are unaware of what the real issues are might not appreciate that a building blowing itself to bits is ok, so long as there is no leaking of radioactivity.

In the absence of the normal hydrogen ignition devices, the building blowing up might be a good thing. The hydrogen gets burned, the heat from that combustion causes the traces of radioactivity to be carried up. The building shell is now well ventilated so accumulation of hydrogen won't occur the next time. The now well ventilated building will dissipate heat better without using electric power to run fans. So long as the containment holds (and the building was never a part of that containment), there is no risk associated with the building being blown to bits.

Compared to tens of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings destroyed, a building blowing up is pretty minor.

Are people who don't understand the real issues frightened when they see a building at a nuclear power plant blow up? Yes, they are. I don't know what to do about that.

Yes - the roof has been blown off the No. 4 reactor containing spent fuel, and continues to burn. The No. 2 reactor has exploded at the suppression pool and is presumed to be leaking. They've begun reporting radiation readings in millisieverts, now. People living between 20-30m radius are being asked to stay indoors and not hang their clothes out to dry on a line.

Actually, Theodore, what's happening here is that one side is saying, "untrustworthy paternalism and corruption," and the other side is hearing, "ooh, eek, I don't know what radiation is." The first side is saying, "Japanese nuclear authorities keep telling us not to worry as they keep reporting worse news," and the second is hearing, "Duck and cover! Duck and cover!" The first side is saying, "Where would we be if the money spent on nuclear industry lobbying had been spent on distributed renewable energy?" and the second side is sneering at the people they think are scaredy cats.

Not much basis for discussion there. It's time to stop assuming people who don't agree with you 100% on the topic of nuclear energy are uninformed.

400 MILLISIEVERTS

I once told a man with cancer that instead of his prognosis being six months like it was when we told him the day before it was now six hours. That is terrible and part of working with the information that you have. Also as part of my training I was required to provide healthcare to a small town in the western United States dedicated to mining coal and then immediately burning it in a local power plant. The whole place was sick in both literal terms and in more general socioeconomic squalor.

Anyone with even a fraction of education got out of that place fast. Above mentioned coal-mining "accidents" are discussed already though the total health consequences for these workers are grossly underestimated. Even when things run just peachy they would literally need to work in hazmat suits to prevent the chronic absorption of small coal dust particles into their lungs and skin.

I think it is a grave injustice to ask these blue collar workers to die young and broken for our electricity, and then scream at an unknown risk of possibly being exposed once every 50 years. It isn't just about the numbers, but also whether that cost is distributed equally to society.

Wait, Thomas, who's arguing for coal here? Is that the only alternative to nuclear power? Really?

Ana: where'd you get that number? Watching the NHK feed, the PM stated a peak of 8217 microsieverts. Which isn't anything to sneeze at, but still.

Okay. Going to bed now.

I heard that number on NHK, from the science panel. TEPCO released the reading after the PM asked the public to stay calm.

It was a rather panicked conversation - I just listened again - readings were reported of 400mSv at No. 3 and 100mSv at No.1. I have yet to hear these numbers anywhere else, so far. I'm hoping for the moment that there was a translation or computation error.

Wow--reading some of these comments--even on a science blog--shows me that Eisenhower's goal of "keep them confused between fission and fusion" seems to have worked. At least four (4) units are in meltdown--let's not parse words here--meltdown. Who said zero radiation deaths will come from this? How uninformed, or biased--the US nuclear industry is hiring amoral bloggers, I'm sure.

The few system failures resulting from lack of depth in pumping systems and power supply and controls have started melts on Units 1, 2, and 3. The water in the spent fuel rod cask in the off-line reactor, Unit 4, seeped out, and now that fuel is burning. There's more than 50 times as much radioactive material at this one site, so this will boil and spit for months. Tokyo is already getting elevated readings, but the real jump starts tomorrow morning (US time).

The US nuclear industry can spin and spin, but it will happen here, too. These irrationally complex and dangerous systems should be shutdown. We'll still have to keep them separate from our biosphere forever, of course.

Maybe we can start minimizing risk by moving fuel from swimming pools to dry casks. That's the better way to spend billions subsidizing the industry--and make it safer. Spent the rest on jobs--insulation, better lighting, HVAC, and renewable energy. Nine reactors are in emergency condition.

By TooCheaptoMeter (not verified) on 14 Mar 2011 #permalink

Here's another mention of those earlier levels: "Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the radiation level reached 400 millisievert per hour near the No. 3 reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 plant Tuesday morning." -Kyodo news

But today is another day...

Compared to tens of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings destroyed, a building blowing up is pretty minor.

Yes, it is very minor. That this specific building is the containment structure of a nuclear fission reactor after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake is just extraneous, meaningless detail. Move along, nothing to see here. And thank you for shopping at K-Mart.

~900 millisieverts/hr observed around reactor no. 2 after the explosion -NHK evening broadcast

I'm fairly unhappy about the apparent fact that a spent fuel pond got out of control and exploded/burned. That's a little like losing a patient on the operating table during a very tricky operation because the ceiling light fell on them. It'd be funny. Except it's really, really not.

I apologize to Ana and everyone else for not being engaged in over he last several hours. Our household is in a state of disruption (nothing bad, just disruptive) and I was teaching last night. Aside from a brief check of the blog and Facebook during class last night, this is my first moment on the Intertubes since mid PM yesterday.

Greg, you say "exactly" like hazard to other populations has been part of the conversation this whole time, but you never gave any indication that it has. When it first came up in your response to Daedelus, you said "counting the dead from a 9.0 quake and mega tsunami as the point of comparison for safety for ANY engineering endeavor is silly." Since then, I think it's been clear in the discussion of risk that we're talking about the people who have already been affected by the quake and tsunami.

If radiation exposure at hazardous levels becomes more than a local problem (which likely includes a HUGE local problem), then the risk analysis was either seriously flawed or the accepted level of risk was too high (unless this earthquake really was an exceedingly rare event, but I don't think that's likely). I haven't heard that that's the case. But it is still ongoing.

Ongoing is an understatement. This entire conversation has been premature.

I have been trying to get good information on the status of the spent fuel cooling pool and haven't seen any. As long as they can keep putting water in them, there isn't a risk of them overheating.

If the water is boiling off, the increase in radation levels could be due to the loss of the depth of water shielding on top of the spent fuel and not due to leaking radioactivity. Refilling the pool will make that source of radiation stop.

Looks like it is getting worse--9 reactors in crisis, Units 1, 2, 3 boiling and spitting, in meltdown. Unit 2 is melting down, and, as Robert Alvarez predicted in his CommonDreams.org essay posted Sunday, the real threat all along is the decades of stored fuel rods--just like here. Drying off, catching fire--5o times the reactor's radiation now open to the winds. The gamma radiation makes the whole work site lethal, so only 50 workers (heroic, and with low life expectancy) remain.

Should the US military order our personnel to expose themselves to early death spraying water on Japan's reactors and burning fuel storage tanks (open and boiling) which will relight every time the water goes down?

Maybe the effort should be getting our fuel casks in dry vaults that don't need water for centuries. Bomb and earthquake proofing decades of spent fuel piled around every single nuclear plant in the country could be a better stimulus project than new plants.

If Pawlenty and others call the deficit immoral--presumably for it's effect on future generations--how are they so pro-nuclear? Bought off by corporate interests?

By TooCheaptoMeter (not verified) on 15 Mar 2011 #permalink

Greg makes a good point about the trade-offs for nuke plants. Ultimately, for developing countries with poor security standards, non-refinability of by-products is a serious goal. But for countries who are already in the nuclear club and for whom security is a relatively achievable goal, that seems like it should be a lesser consideration.

As for whether the video is an explosion, it's clear at the outset that for the simplest definition of explosion, this is the case. The question is really what kind of explosion was it, and what danger does/did it pose? Could very well have been a steam explosion, and what danger that poses depends on what the source of the steam was. There was some talk of it being a hydrogen explosion (plain old chemical hydrogen, not a tritium fusion explosion, obviously).

Clearly there is no danger of a nuclear explosion at the plant. But steam/mechanical explosions of the Chernobyl type within the reactor vessel itself are scary scary stuff. Steam explosions elsewhere may be equally dangerous if the water is contaminated with lots of reactive byproducts. Cesium is not your friend. And there are some isotopes of iodine that you do NOT want in your salt.

This whole time since the first reports of reactor problems started turning up Friday or Saturday, I've had Kurosawa's creepy (and wildly unscientific) sequence from the end of "Dreams" going through my head.

Clearly, the threat of tsunamis to the integrity of the plant was underestimated. Does the US have any nuke plants on vulnerable coastline locations? The only ones I know are much further inland, so they'd only need to be secured against flash flooding (especially from potential dam failures), high winds (either from hurricanes or tornadoes), and from earthquakes.

By lunchstealer (not verified) on 15 Mar 2011 #permalink

Hi all,

PLS watch following news video.

"Bleak condition of Fukushima workers blocks to solve the nuclear accident"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHLdOsGq1G8

After your watching, PLS expand this news to all over the world. Because Japanese government and TEPCO DO NOT understand that improvement of worker's environment is necessary . Japanese gov ,TEPCO and even Japanese need some pressure from foreign countries.

Regards