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FUKUSHIMA earthquake and tsunami thread and aftermath


geezer466

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HOLA441

According to the news "there are 4 reactors at Fukushima and there have been explosions in 3 of them and a fire in a 4th."

Apparently there are 6 reactors at the site affected so there seems to be a bit of numerical inaccuracy creeping into the news reports.

4 at Daichi - problems with all 4

2 at Daini - all shut down, no problems reported (yet)

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HOLA442

reactor 4 seems to be the big concern again now. they are unable to pour water into the storage pool.

I wonder what happened to the storage pools of the two buildings that blew up. What happened to the nuclear rods that were stored there?

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HOLA443

I think it's to do with understanding the risks of one and not the other and the fact that while the risks of nuclear might be* lower than coal, practically everyone understands the risks of coal but understanding the risks of nuclear requires trust in experts.

Trusting in experts carries it's own risks and these need to be added to the total.

*Might be higher, I have no clue about this stuff.

Similar for cars x airplanes.

Cars kill about 3000 people in UK every year .... airplanes statistically about 2.5ish .... nobody cares about road safety ... everybody cares if the airplane falls ... these humans ...

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HOLA444

Might interest you to know that the Chernobyl Committee is still active in Russia and Belarus, trying to help win compensation or care for victims. The effects are long-term, wide-ranging and not always predictable. The numbers of people affected by Chernobyl were also in the tens of thousands and after-effects are still ongoing, 25 years later. (Consider birth defects and 'in case' abortions - the resulting percentage of 'in case' abortions in Belarus is just staggering.)

Exactly how many people were affected by Chernobyl seems to be highly contentious. Greenpeace talks about hundreds of thousands of deaths, UNSCEAR talks about hundreds.

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HOLA445

Are you claiming uranium mining is completely safe and produces no toxic by products or enviromental degradation ?

nope; but you need 10000 times less uranium than the coal ... therefore it is safer !!!

coal power plant needs a train with coal every day ....

nucler power plant needs 2 coaches of fuel once a year ...

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HOLA446

whether readings go up or down is virtually unconnected with the amount of activity leaving the reactor site, it's purely dependent on wind and air currents.

If it goes down by a factor of 10,000 at place X in an hour it will almost certainly be going up by the same factor somewhere else.

Any reports of reducing radiation levels at this stage aren't necessarily good news unless you're living there or have to use the readings to decide what to do.

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HOLA447
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HOLA448

Please avoid phrases like "completely safe". Nothing is. All you can do is compare the risks of one thing against another. So I would hope no-one would claim that uranium mining and processing is completely trouble-free. The question is "Does it cause far fewer deaths and injuries and pollution than coal mining and processing?" To make it even more meaningful you should really add something along the lines of "per kWh of electricity generated from it."

Rather depends on what criteria you use. Per ton of pure Uranium mined the long term casualties may be higher than coal but not per kwh of energy produced per ton.

The two industries also have different histories which means that the risks of one have been studied over a longer scale than the other so the risks of activities such as coal mining and its associated diseases are better documented than for the nuclear industry which is notoriously secretive. This makes comparison and adequate risk assessment very difficult.

In addition the tacit assumption being made on this thread appears to be that if you have reservations about nuclear power you somehow must be a huge advocate of fossil fuels. That is rather a big assumption to make.

The problem is that the fat tail risk of extreme events is routinely underestimated in the pusuits of profits by all industries and the nuclear power generators are no different from the rest

Edited by stormymonday_2011
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HOLA449

the spent fuels pool at reactor 4 seems to me like an achilles heel of the nuclear plant.

there appears to be no major containment system here, and for all the safety mechanisms to prevent meltdown and containing meltdown, its quite possible the radiation leak will happen outside of the reactors, and simply from the storage area of the spent fuel rods.

Edited by mfp123
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HOLA4410

now; we know that the reactors at 1 and 3 have a containment vessel that will (hopefully) keep a meltdown in place.

but in reactor 4 which is just a giant cooling pool, this contains the spent fuel rods. these wont melt as far as im aware but they can catch fire if they are exposed to air, and release radioactive material into the atmosphere.

That does sound like something to be seriously worried about, more so than containment damage on reactor 2. Release of long half-life isotopes is the thing to be scared of, far more so than ones that'll give high readings for a short while but be harmless within a few days.

Edit to also reply to:

Rather depends on what criteria you use. Per ton of pure Uranium mined the long term casualties may be higher than coal but not per kwh of energy produced per ton.

I think you have to treat it that way - what are the costs involved in producing your ultimate goal (i.e. electricity).

In addition the tacit assumption being made on this thread appears to be that if you have reservations about nuclear power you somehow must be a huge advocate of fossil fuels. That is rather a big assumption to make.

I think it's a plea to keep things in perspective (that's how I use it, anyway).

Edited by Riedquat
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HOLA4411

The Union of Concerned Scientists in the USA who are basically in favour of nuclear power but have many reservations about current safety practises in the industry are well worth reading for a reality check on what is going on in Japan

http://allthingsnuclear.org/tagged/Japan_nuclear?utm_source=SP&utm_medium=head&utm_campaign=sp-nuke-head-3%2F13%2F2011-pm

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HOLA4412

That does sound like something to be seriously worried about, more so than containment damage on reactor 2. Release of long half-life isotopes is the thing to be scared of, far more so than ones that'll give high readings for a short while but be harmless within a few days.

some quotes:

If any of the spent fuel rods in the pools do indeed catch fire, nuclear experts say, the high heat would loft the radiation in clouds that would spread the radioactivity.

“It’s worse than a meltdown,” said David A. Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists who worked as an instructor on the kinds of General Electric reactors used in Japan. “The reactor is inside thick walls, and the spent fuel of Reactors 1 and 3 is out in the open.”

and :

People familiar with the plant said there are seven spent fuel pools at Fukushima Daiichi, many of them densely packed.

Gundersen said the unit 1 pool could have as much as 20 years of spent fuel rods, which are still radioactive.

We’d be lucky if we only had to worry about the spent fuel rods from a single holding pool. We’re not that lucky. The Fukushima Daiichi plant has seven pools for spent fuel rods. Six of these are (or were) located at the top of six reactor buildings. One “common pool” is at ground level in a separate building. Each “reactor top” pool holds 3450 fuel rod assemblies. The common pool holds 6291 fuel rod assemblies. [The common pool has windows on one wall which were almost certainly destroyed by the tsunami.] Each assembly holds sixty-three fuel rods. This means the Fukushima Daiichi plant may contain over 600,000 spent fuel rods.

The fuel rods must be kept submerged in water. Why? Outside of the water bath, the radioactivity in the used rods can cause them to become so hot they begin to catch fire. These fires can burn so hot the radioactive rod contents are carried into the atmosphere as vaporized material or as very small particles.

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HOLA4413

In addition the tacit assumption being made on this thread appears to be that if you have reservations about nuclear power you somehow must be a huge advocate of fossil fuels. That is rather a big assumption to make.

I think that assumption is there because fossil fuels and nuclear are, really, the only games in town right now.

I hear solar is changing greatly for the better but you might as well talk about extracting uranium from seawater - possible on small scale but a totally different ballgame if you are talking about powering entire nations with it.

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HOLA4414

4 at Daichi - problems with all 4

2 at Daini - all shut down, no problems reported (yet)

According to wikipedia there are 6 at Daichi and 4 at Daini.

According to japannuclear there are 6 at Daichi and 4 at Daini.

Interestingly when the Fukushima problems first started there was a radio report that there were 14 affected reactors in the area (suggesting that reactors nearby but outside of the Fukushima area were also affected) and all 14 had to be shut down - apparently also affected by the tsunami destruction of the diesel back up etc. *So it's just possible that some reactors outside of the Fukushima area are also affected by the earthquakes/tsunami but possibly not to the same devastating affect.

According to wikipedia the Fukushima 2 (Daini) reactors are also having problems with their coolant systems. So far that site doesn't seem to have had the level of problems experienced at Fukushima 1 (Daichi) - the Daini site doesn't seem to be rating a mention on the news at the moment.

*edit: although earlier in the crisis there were reports of an emergency at Onagawa nuclear plant, radiation 700 times over normal.

Edited by billybong
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HOLA4415
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HOLA4416

Exactly how many people were affected by Chernobyl seems to be highly contentious. Greenpeace talks about hundreds of thousands of deaths, UNSCEAR talks about hundreds.

Immediate deaths were in small numbers, it isn't how it works. Pripyat, the dormitory town for Chernobyl workers, had a population of 50,000. It wasn't evacuated for a couple of days. Many of those were of course affected to a greater or lesser degree.

Gomel, in Belarus, which received a hotspot, has a population of 500,000. According to the World Health Organisation, the incidence of thyroid cancer alone was 100 times greater following the accident.

And that's just two places.

It depends how you record the deaths - and the Soviets were not too conscientious about this. The highest incidence of immediate mortality was of course among the liquidators - practically all the firemen and helicopter pilots dropping sand on the fires perished.

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HOLA4417
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HOLA4418
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HOLA4419

Here is a link to some information. http://www.ippnw-students.org/chernobyl/energy.html

Some highly biased information, it seems to me.

The problem with this stuff is that everybody has an axe to grind, though the anti-nuclear campaigners have by far the biggest, it seems to me.

"Nuclear power powers the Bomb", ooo, scary. No bias there then!

I don't even care about The Bomb, beyond that we should have a few. That article is playing to its audience.

Edited by EUBanana
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HOLA4420
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HOLA4421

Probably a stupid question but when there is a risk of a nuclear power station suffering an integrity failure, is not an emergency protocol triggered where old fuel is moved off site, very quickly? Or is this not possible (and if it isn't possible to move quickly, why is it left in giant swimming pools really close to the reactor, with no significant containment?)

I am clueless when it comes to the science of all this, but given the way this has developed, and the PR responses, it's very clear that it's not under control.

Anyone want to estimate what burning 600,000 spent fuel rods would do to the environment? (Presumably there was a similar problem in Chernobyl so there may be some precedent?)

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HOLA4422
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HOLA4423

So... some time after the latest explosion, we still have no video or photo updates from the plant. Surprised that the media aren't making more of this fact.

I suspect many of the media at sat in their hotel rooms waiting for the first BA or Virgin flight home.

I was listening to one BBC reporter who is returning, I believe, today and I had to wonder why on earth he/she had gone out there at all.

I think it is spooking the journos. It is understandable. I would be spooked.

BBC now reporting that the US Navy is recording increasing levels of radiation over Tokyo but the IAEA are reporting that the Japanese are reporting levels falling at the plant gates.

Let's hope for everyone's sake that this can be contained with no more loss of life or illness.

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HOLA4424

Let's hope for everyone's sake that this can be contained with no more loss of life or illness.

Absolutely.

It's still wobbling out there

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Maps/region/Asia_eqs.php

Interesting there's been so few quakes anywhere else on the planet

http://satellite.ehabich.info/

Did you see about the GPS time issue?

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HOLA4425

Some highly biased information, it seems to me.

The problem with this stuff is that everybody has an axe to grind, though the anti-nuclear campaigners have by far the biggest, it seems to me.

I think the point is, that any such event affects vast numbers of people, even if not directly in terms of health.

There's no need to exaggerate. I've already mentioned just two towns with a populations totalling 250,000.

Following Chernobyl, children were evacuated from Kiev. Kiev has a population of 2,5 million. It is hard to take on board the sheer scale of the risk or emergency procedures involved . . . let alone the cost.

Just in from Kyodo

Kyodo is reporting Japan's defense minister Toshimi Kitazawa as saying the government is considering using SDF helicopters to pour water on the spent fuel pool - akin to the method often used on forest fires - but the measure is on hold due to difficulty assessing the potential impact on the submerged fuel rods and the personnel involved.

Really, this sounds more like Chernobyl by the minute.

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