Japan’s nuclear farce
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A plume of radioactive particles extending into the stratosphere from the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex makes a mockery of claims that Japan’s nuclear crisis isn’t comparable to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. The stream of nuclear contaminants are being driven by an intense heat source consistent with exposed fuel rods burning in air, the process that inevitably leads to meltdown unless massive and prompt intervention is successful. These radioactive clouds are now mixing with higher altitude air currents and being dispersed more widely across northern Asia and the north Pacific. They are being tracked by the international Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre in London, which is authorised by the International Atomic Energy Agency to alert airlines and airports to accidental releases of nuclear contamination. The VAAC this morning issued 10 nuclear emergency flight information regional advisories (FIRs) to enable airlines to route flights well clear of the hazard along air corridors across northern Asia, southern China including Hong Kong, all of Japan and Korea and the high latitude or sub-polar routes that are used to connect North America to dozens of Asia-Pacific cities. Qantas either has or will soon re-route its Narita flights to achieve a minimum time turnaround at the main Tokyo airport and return via Hong Kong, where there will be a crew change. This change will avoid overnight stops by crews in Japan for occupational health and logistical reasons, but the airline is closely monitoring the changing situation and all travellers (and on all airlines) are advised to check for late changes to the northern Asia flights. There is a line of six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima plant, four of which have now experienced one or more large explosions with the remaining two that had been taken off line before the earthquake and tsunami of last Friday now heating up to levels so dangerous Tokyo Electric is considering breaking down the reactor block walls to allow a build-up of hydrogen gas to escape. Exasperation with the quality of information coming out of the Japanese nuclear authority, the government and the Tokyo Electric company led to harsh words from the French nuclear authority this morning. It said the Daiichi accident could be classed as a level 6 event on the scale of one to 7. The Chernobyl calamity in 1986 began as a level 6 event and was then elevated to level 7, which until now consist of the only level 6 and level 7 events recorded. An official was quoted as saying “Tokyo has all but lost control over the situation”. This morning the Japan nuclear authority insisted that level 4, an event with purely local effects, was the appropriate level, which is clearly not what the normally ultra-tactful International Atomic Energy Agency thought when it directed the VAAC to issue the warnings to airlines, and also to the airports at which any aircraft exposed to radiation must be thoroughly decontaminated under international conventions. The major European and China flag carriers have variously cancelled services to Japan or re-routed flights to ensure that flight crew do not overnight in Tokyo, similar to the action that Qantas is about to take. The quality of information from the Japanese has descended into farce, with simultaneous claims that radiation levels are harmful in the Chernobyl-sized exclusion zone but did not constitute a threat to health. This follows the patently dishonest misuse of radiation exposure metrics used for the first 3½ days of the crisis, which understated the real levels by 1000 or three orders of magnitude. The US think tank, the Institute for Science and International Security, said the situation at Daiichi had worsened considerably and was now closer to a level 6 event and “may unfortunately reach a level 7”. |
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231 Comments
“…now heating up to levels so dangerous Tokyo Electric is considering breaking down the reactor block walls to allow a build-up of hydrogen gas to escape…”
I’ve said before that I’m not religious, but I’m praying like buggery now. Thanks again Ben for being so informed and informative.
In contrast, I’ve received 2 emails in 12 hours from the Brisbane Times telling me that radiation is falling. Although I trust Ben’s information more, I sort of prefer the situation as the BT see it.
But the nuclear spruikers are still saying nothing to worry about, everything is under control, don’t panic, we can safely build reactors in Australia because ……. Yeah sure.
Your evidence for your nuclear conspiracy is the actions of companies acting with the utmost caution due to public relations necessity, and you continuously claim any nuclear reactor science expert is either a liar or a nuclear apologist. The only farce here is your analysis.
Ben - did you see this?
A Wikileaks cable released yesterday from the US embassy in Tokyo directly addresses problems with the cost and safety of Japanese nuclear power plants, raised by a member of the Diet, Taro Kono, with US representatives in 2008.
“Member of the House of Representatives Taro Kono spoke extensively on nuclear energy and nuclear fuel reprocessing during a dinner with a visiting staffdel, Energy Attache and Economic Officer October 21. Kono, a member of the Liberal Democratic Party first elected in 1996, is the son of Yohei Kono, a former President of the LDP who is currently the longest serving speaker of the House in post-war history. Taro Kono, who studied and worked in the United States and speaks excellent English, is a frequent embassy contact who has interests in agriculture, nuclear, and foreign policy issues. He is relatively young, and very outspoken, especially as a critic of the government’s nuclear policy. During this meeting, he voiced his strong opposition to the nuclear industry in Japan, especially nuclear fuel reprocessing, based on issues of cost, safety, and security. Kono claimed Japanese electric companies are hiding the costs and safety problems associated with nuclear energy, while successfully selling the idea of reprocessing to the Japanese public as “recycling uranium.” He asserted that Japan’s reprocessing program had been conceived as part of a nuclear cycle designed to use reprocessed fuel in fast breeder reactors (FBR). However, these reactors have not been successfully deployed, and Japan’s prototype FBR at Monju is still off-line after an accident in 1995.
Kono said following the accident at the Monju FBR, rather than cancel plans to conduct reprocessing, the electric companies developed the Mixed Oxide (MOX) fuel program. However, Kono criticized the MOX program as too expensive, noting it would be cheaper to just “buy a uranium mountain in Australia,” or to make a deal to import uranium from other sources.
He also accused the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) of covering up nuclear accidents, and obscuring the true costs and problems associated with the nuclear industry. He claimed MPs have a difficult time hearing the whole of the U.S. message on nuclear energy because METI picks and chooses those portions of the message that it likes.”
http://213.251.145.96/cable/2008/10/08TOKYO2993.html
Really, the people who bombed Maralinga said it was lovely and safe too.
It is nothing at all like Chernobyl, where you miss the point ROSSCO is you forget what caused the problem in the first place. The only farce i see is the hysteria of anti nuclear zealots. We should have at least 6 reactors in Australia NOW!
Moderator: this comment has been slightly edited to remove a personal insult
The key information missing here is the nature and concentration of the “plume of radioactive particles”. If it’s low, it’s possible that that ‘don’t panic’ is correct. Certainly the latter is the message I get from another source I respect, which was published nearly simultaneously.
Hi Ben,
Two things - kind of important to me as I’m anxiously sitting here in Tokyo.
I’ve read a fair number of writeups about reactor design and what happens in critical situations which contradict the above (e.g. http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/). I realise there’s a lot of pro and anti-nuclear lobbying going on here, but it’s really hard to get accurate information right now. I must admit no experience in these matters.
For that reason, can you link to the original sources you quote in your article? There’s some dramatic claims in there, which I can’t discount, but I’d certainly like to go and interpret them for myself.
Second, can you comment as to your own qualifications and experience with regard to nuclear reactors? I’m not suggesting that you don’t necessarily have these, but with all the contradictory information flying around right know, knowing the author’s credibility to talk about this subject is proving important right now.
“… understated the real levels by 1000 or three orders of magnitude.”
That says it all, the never ending dishonesty from the pro nuclear crew is only paralleled by that of the pro fossil fuel, anti global warming industry.
“It’s all good, my greed and your willful ignorance allows us both to imagine a scenario that bears no semblance to reality”.
I agree with Michael L.
Lines like “mockery of claims that Japan’s nuclear crisis isn’t comparable to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.” hardly exhibit any neutrality in reporting or analysis on this issue on your behalf.
I’m never going to claim to be an expert on Nuclear safety, but it’s not necessarily that nuclear power or the reactors that are unsafe. We need to take into consideration all of the factors, and the major factors are that it has taken a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and a tsunami to get to this point.
This does not equate to nuclear power =evil, or that it can’t be safely used in other countries, including Australia.
What’s the basis for saying that the units snafu was ‘dishonest’ rather than inadvertent?
I also thank B Sandilands for the informativeness of his report.
The nuclear spruikers also say that these failures are very infrequent and unlikely to reoccur. While this is true, the consequences of nuclear failure are so great that even 1 may be too many for a very large number of people and for a very long time.
On Insiders last Sunday Andrew Bolt ranted at how appalling and inappropriate Kevin Rudd was for raising emerging problems with the powerplants. Barry Cassidy (who was anti-Rudd long before it became fashionable) agreed with him, and the panel degenerated into a bash-Rudd fest.
It is now becoming increasingly clear that Rudd was on the money.
Other than Mark Duffett, why is it that virtually everyone who is pro-nuclear power, and still singing its praises… and suspicious of articles like this - why wont they use their real full name? Do you work for the nuclear industry?… maybe you have shares in uranium mining?… are you on the staff of such companies?…. Mark and I don’t always agree, but I will read what he has to say and give it consideration. He is not hiding behind some pen name (I assume!)
Nuclear fission: plus ça change.
Thanks, Jim. I can assure you it is my real name - after all, who would voluntarily choose a name like ‘Duffett’?
All workers have now been evacuated from the entire plant.
W.T.F.???? All worker is now evacuated.. MY GOD.. That will definitely make it worse than Chernobyl.
Maybe they don’t know how bad it is or isn’t. After all those explosions, it’s possible there is no real way to tell for sure - radioactivity readings aside. I’ve been a bit cynical about the Japanese pronouncements on this issue since Friday night when the PM said all reactors were OK. where did that c0me from, I thought. But there is a need for some circumspection. Mass panic on top of the cataclysmic death and destruction of the last few days is unlikely to help anyone.
Boy, are there some necks being stuck out here.
Apparently the evacuations were only for 45 minutes (MSNBC/Reuters). The same source I presume David Dowell employed (ABC) also says “Radiation readings at the plant are fluctuating hour by hour, but not posing a hazard to health”.
Australian’s have now been contaminated and the nuclear dust is in the rain. Anything else you morons.
No name-calling please. It insults my intelligence more than the targets.
And while I’m at it, plurals don’t have an apostrophe: it should be ‘Australians have now been contaminated …’.
It seems inevitable.
There will be a melt down and once one reactor goes it will induct the others near it.
This induction effectively combines the core materials from all reactors and creates a feed back and unimaginable heat.
Wickipedia gives Liquid density of U238 at m.p. 17.3 g·cm−3 which means that the molten amalgamated core, being denser than the earths surface (approx 2.9) will sink into the crust.
The hole thus drilled will need to be capped quickly to avoid molten magma and dangerous gases, such as carbon dioxide, from the Earths core spouting all over the Japanese coast.
@Gavin - smile.
@Joanna - yes, about this and many other things.
@Ramastar - “…it’s not necessarily that nuclear power or the reactors that are unsafe. We need to take into consideration all of the factors…”. I’m not intending to be trite, but do you think this a bit like saying guns don’t kill people, people do?
It all started with the PM saying he had no report of nuclear leakage as the earthquake disaster unfolded. Such blatant spin. Even yesterday we were being told that all was well with the two decommissioned reactors.
Johnfrom….. safety aside, could you explain how we could have six reactors any other way than the government funding them out of tax revenue?
Joanna, did it seem to you that Bolter had recieved a briefing on which way to spin the nuclear leaks. His line was echoed later that long weekend by conservative politicians. And yes, it appears that what Rudd was doing was protecting Australia’s interests by asking the Japanese what the f*ck is going on. Insensitive maybe but that’s what he gets paid for.
Rudd was right to be strong about Australians there. That what we want in a role such as his. If he was sucking up to the Japanese and saying whatever they wanted him to say, we would criticise him for that. Give him a break.
The issue of pro or anti nuclear is simply that for Australia there are many, many better alternatives than nuclear power.
This was true before the earthquake.
Mark Duffet my source was the news conference by Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano.
He said the radiation level had fallen after 45 minutes but nothing about the workers going back in.
Let’s all calm down a bit, especially since we (or most of us) are 8,000 km from the action.
Trouble is, not even the genuine experts (Professors at MIT, CalTech etc) without vested interests can say either what is really happening or what the likely outcome will be. The information coming out of Japan and out of TEPCO is inadequate (and English translations dodgy, not to mention the common errors of mixing milli with micro and even Mega; I note that the pro-nuke lobby was scathing about the Japanese statements of millisieverts, believing it had to be microsieverts, but it turned out milli was correct — -even though that has dropped back at most sites; yet again measurement is now obviously both difficult and wildly inaccurate in open air; apparently it can be 2Megasieverts at the lip of a container with burning fuel — death in 2 minutes exposure).
The comparisons with Chernobyl are not completely silly or unwarranted. It is already worse than Three Mile Island because there, the error of turning off cooling was eventually corrected and the plant quickly shutdown even though a fair bit of the core had melted. At Fukushima we have three reactors that have been venting partially melted core over several days, plus one open-air fire burning off high-level radioactivity. Way beyond TMI.
On the other hand, Chernobyl went into full meltdown from full running power and exploded (steam explosion) soon after. At Daiichi three reactors have been shutoff (not technically cold shutdown) for 5 days now so one would like to hope this means a nasty Chernobyl outcome is unlikely. However, if they cannot keep cooling these partial meltdowns (and #2 is bad, just how bad they do not want to think about) then they can feasibly go into full meltdown, and no containment vessel will hold it for long. After only days or a week from actualy active fission, I do not know how much better this stuff is than the Chernobyl fuel, but spreading it around in a gigantic steam + hydrogen explosion is not something you want to contemplate.
(see my summary of events up to 8am this morning on Crikey Rooted blog)
Chernobyl didn’t have a containment vessel. As long as the Fukushima containment vessels
are secure, then panic shows a lack of understanding of comparative risks. While
containment is secure, then a meltdown won’t be life threatening. Three Mile Island had
a (partial) meltdown and the death toll was zero. Containment vessels are designed for
meltdowns, that’s their job.
Over the next couple of decades thousands of people living around the reactors will
contract cancer … from cigarettes, alcohol and red and processed meat. This isn’t a
theoretical possibility, but a certainty.
As long as the containment is secure, then any comparisons with Chernobyl are ignorant and ridiculous.
It sounds a lot to me like more than a few people commenting on this article are treating this topic like a debate where win at all costs is the name of the game. Ask yourselves what you want the death toll from this event to be during the next month. Would you be delighted if
it stayed at zero? or (probably secretly) annoyed? Everybody should want it to remain at zero.
Meanwhile the death and amputation count isn’t zero but rising from the Tsunamis, just like it did after the Boxing Day Tsunami. The bacterial infection risks aren’t theoretical or debating points either. They are ineluctable and horrible but haven’t attracted any media attention. There have been no amputation tallies, no “Will they get antibiotic deliveries in time?” stories, no “What happened to emergency antibiotic stocks — - were they sufficient? Who is to blame?” stories. Not one, but these critical medical logistic matters will save (or cost) far more suffering than this nuclear plant.
This discussion bothers me. These people are in mortal danger amid thousands of others who are already dead. It’s not some abstract entertainment to assist ideologues of one stripe or another to make a point. Where’s the empathy?
Thanks for the update Ben.
VAAC re-routing planes, US navy “repositioning” ships, chernobyl sized exclusion zone, yet no danger to human health certainly sounds like more coverup than fact from Tokyo Electricity and the Japanese government, which have “form” when it comes to spinning their nuclear situation. Legitimate questions and protest regarding location, operation and design of their plants have been stifled and spun for decades.
It must be really irritating for those who pronounce the benefits of nuclear power when the opposition are shown to be right yet again.
@John-from-smoking-ruin-where-planet-earth-used-to-be
Who would build these 6 nuclear power plants? Should we trust corporations, whose explicit mandate is to be to reduce costs and push risk onto the taxpayers? Perhaps you think we should trust a foreign government to build them for us?
“This discussion bothers me. “
Perhaps the tone of the comments here was set by the lead article.
Why is no one blaming the various levels of Japanese government for allowing and perhaps encouraging the building of towns in vulnerable areas?
And yet.
There is high criticism of Nuclear power as a concept and there is plenty of blame, and rightly so, for the power company s.
What I want to know is this:
where is the discussion about the corruption which led to this?
Where is the investigation into the politicians who were paid off to give these outdated generators an extra 10 or 15 years of life above the engineered design?
The sooner we get to the real issues the better.
As I’ve explained in Crikey and elsewhere my first exposure to the nuclear industry was with the late Professor Ted Ringwood at the ANU who lead the team that devised SYNROC. There isn’t much opportunity to write regularly on nuclear power, but I did have the privilege (or shared terror on occasions) of going climbing over many years with some nuclear physicists in the UK and France and Australia. Bulletin photographer Paul Wright and myself were lucky not to be locked up at Lucas Heights one day when we left the plant (where we had been shown the critical assembly bench which had been used in the Gorton era) just before the IAEA or its immediate counterpart sprung an audit without notice, which is their job of course.
However as to qualifications, mine are only in public administration and government, and horribly out of date I would guess. The principles of open and accountable communication of policies and actions are I think an appropriate basis for reporting ‘matters’. Not press releases or managed messaging.
The magnet in this aspect of the terrible story of what has happened to Japan since Friday is noting the simultaneous process of contradictory statements from the Japan authorities and government, and the avoidance of candor. It is inconceivable that the understating of exposure levels for the first 3.5 days was accidental, given that these are nuclear experts and nuclear administrators talking on the record in public. It was a very shabby and deceitful stunt, and one that embarrasses me because I should have been checking the metrics used from the outset.
I repeat, to my great peril in discussions like this, that I think there is a future role for nuclear energy, but not the processes as crude as those involved in replacing coal with fission as the means for using steam to turn turbines. I think that immobilising processes waste in a synthetic rock and putting back down the mines from which it was extracted is an elegant and sensible basis for future nuclear power, unless of course fusion is at last tamed on a commercial scale.
Now I might just go down into my lead lined flame proof bunker.
LindsayB I live a few kms from a nuclear reactor built by the lowest bidder, in this case Argentinians.
“for Australia there are many, many better alternatives than nuclear power.”
Do you have such great belief in that statement that you would be prepared to sell your hous eto buy shares in “Green Energy Companies”?
People in Spain did and lost their money.
Your better alternatives would lead us to pay five times the current rate for electricity.
I assume that you are probably supported by either your parents or the taxpayer at the moment if you have so little concern for power costs.
@GEOFF RUSSELL Posted Wednesday, 16 March 2011 at 2:56 pm
Geoff, Daiichi #2 has sustained damage to the concrete containment vessel, ie. the outer layer of the actual inner core. The only thing holding back a Chernobyl calamity is the steel — which, for sure, is a lot stronger than the concrete. The difference with TMI is that Daiichi has lost most of their ability to cool all of these things (cores and stored fuel in ponds). I remain sceptical that these containment vessels can actually contain a core in near-full meltdown due to failed cooling. The molten core will eventually melt any steel (and it would convert concrete back to calcium dust) and then it is all over in a giant steam explosion at the first rupture. If that doesn’t distribute the core over hundreds of sq kilometres then the molten core keeps burning through the ground (and concrete whatever) until it hits groundwater. Then another giant steam explosion…..
Stopping all this requires restoring some ability to keep cooling the cores — and it seems like they are still reliant upon firetruck pumps and hoses! And fuel for those trucks (apparently they ran out and that is what exaccerbated the #2 problem).
They have got to get serious cooling. It doesn’t look too rosy in that department and now the site is toxic.
As often is the case in such crises, problems compound and escalate. With radiation there is a horrible further problem of inhibiting access and repair or whatever.
I have no idea how this will pan out. Chernobyl is not the end of the world but one, let alone three (or x6 !), in a place like Japan…..
blogs.crikey.com.au/rooted/2011/03/16/japans-nuclear-crisis-the-technical-facts/
It may not be a deciding factor, but surely plate tectonics is a factor in this pro-vs-anti nuclear debate? After all, the probability of any Australian nuclear power station being struck by a significant earquake is close to zero. The NASA website will give you a map of earthquakes in the last hundred years or so of magnitute 3 or above, and Australia has a couple of dots. Japan is covered in them.
Remember, the magnitute scale is not linear, so a 4 magnitude quake is not exactly half as bad as a 8 magnitude quake (or anywhere near it!).
Australia’s worst ever quake (7 Magnitute) = 2 * 10^15 Joules.
Japanese Quake (9 Magnitude) = 2 * 10^18 Joules
Literally 1000 times as powerful.
Just sayin’ is all…
*earthquake.
Hehe earquake…
The reports coming out are pretty dire. Nobody knows if the containment vessels in reactor 1, 2 and 3 are secure or not. They may be leaking. Reactor 4, 5, and 6, along with the shallow pool containing spent fuel rods do not have a ‘containment vessel’. If the pool runs out of water, they will start to burn, and the radioactive smoke will enter the atmosphere without any control. The result will be worse than Chernobyl.
The death from the tsunami is indeed horrific, however there is not much you can do for the dead. My concern is for those who are still alive, and stuck in the surrounding area of the nuclear reactor. The decision to evacuate the workers is not a good sign, after another explosion from Reactor 3, the radiation inside the plant is still around 800 millisieverts, and if it remains at that level, the workers cannot continue to cool down reactor 4, 5 and 6. Right now, they don’t even know if one of the reactor is on fire or not.
At this point, there is no point in panicking : it’s already too late for that. >_<
DANR
You assume much and are wrong, I bought shares in geothermal power and I expect long term I will do v.well indeed!
danr: “Wickipedia gives Liquid density of U238 at m.p. 17.3 g·cm−3 which means that the molten amalgamated core, being denser than the earths surface (approx 2.9) will sink into the crust.
The hole thus drilled will need to be capped quickly to avoid molten magma and dangerous gases, such as carbon dioxide, from the Earths core spouting all over the Japanese coast.”
Please, please, please tell me that you’re trying to be funny….
@Damien
Good luck with that. I hope for your sake that your regulator has fearless and thorough auditors, and that your judicial system is tough enough to persue criminal actions agains corporate criminals.
congratulations. I hope you do OK.
There is a slow motion disaster occurring here with one definite causality.
Public trust in the nuclear sector is dead and buried and cremated! Dead and buried and cremated I tell ya, right where it belongs too.
Nuclear power is safe and cost-effective.
Climate change is a conspiracy by a tiny minority of scientists.
The earth is flat.
Quite a different view from that pumped out by the BBC etc in the last few days. Not to mention the string of “experts” who have played down the “incident”. Barry Brooks for instance, the local nukeflak.
One thing anyone can see- the info from the Japanese govt/nuclear industry has been confused, opaque and contradictory. The locals are well aware of the cover-ups and lying which has characterised the Japanese nuclear lobby for decades…which is why the “stoic” Japanese are so worried. They know their own political pondlife all too well.
Broinowksi said as much a couple of days ago.
One good thing might come out of it- squash the Oz nukeboys, who’ve crawled out of their concrete sarcophagi to save us from global warming. Back in your box, Barry.
Better say it again: stop arseing about with nuclear, “carbon taxes”, PV roof panels and wind and get on with basic renewables R and D.
There are fields in the good old US of A where there are upwards of 14,000 wind turbines.
They stopped working. Can’t afford to repair them, won’t pull them down, certainly not going to replace them.
A blot on the desert landscape.
A taxpayer funded green white elephant.
shooba - “almost zero probability” is not good enough to do it. In any danger analysis you ask two main questions:
- how likely is it to happen?
- what impact will it have?
If the first answer is “almost zero” but the second answer is catastrophic, then we still would not do the action.
It just is not worth the 1 in 10,000 - or whatever, risk.
Dan R tell me more about the fields of irrepariable wind turbines….
- is it a true story or an urban myth put out by the mining companies?
- is it partly true (numbers a lot less, the decision was political to not repair them, to pamper for the fossil fuel companies interests - like decisions to kill solar projects under George W)?
- you are just making it up off the top of your head?
I’d have a lot more respect for the writer if he didn’t start off by trying to get the name “Chernobyl” into the first paragraph. There is no comparison with the cuase of that event, the resultant explosion and release of radioactive isotopes and the natural events which disabled the cooling systems of these Japanese reactors. To make any such claim is playing with hyperbole, is not helpful, and in fact just feeds the panic merchants and those peddling outrageous claims of ‘apocalypse’, (and my god there plenty enough of those in the media at the moment).
Life is about risk, we deal with it everyday, and none greater than driving a car, where we’ve traded off speed limits to an acceptable number of fatalities. Sure, we could halve the speed limit and probably reduce the death toll by a huge percentage, but we don’t.
Cars will kill more people than nuclear reactors ever could, but there’s no hysterical talk of the automobile apocalypse.
As for the levels of background radiation increasing 20 fold briefly over Tokyo, the natural variability of ‘normal’ radiation world wide is much wider than this, and it appears to not have any effect on human health.
Rather than dragging out “Chernobyl”, some factual analysis of why this crisis has occurred and how it can be avoided would be more useful, but would probably not get the same attention as shouting “Chernobyl” during a nuclear reactor fire.
re. my statement
Lets assume the following:
1) alternative sources of energy are given the same level of support as existing fossil fuel generation or any proposed nuclear technologies (or alternatively existing subsidies are all cut back).
2) A mix of alternative energy sources are implemented - all in different locations.
3) The actual cost of existing coal generated electricity is only a fraction of our power bills the rest is transmission and overheads. For example if it were 20% and prices doubled then my power bill would go up by approximately 20%.
I won’t bother responding to the personal comments.
@Christopher Dunne - yes, Ben has got a bit hysterical here. This is not another Chernobyl.
@Frank Campbell - Barry Brook is not a nuclear shill. If you bothered to research him before you slandered him you’d find out that he has done substantial research into the various non-fossil fuel energy sources. This research led him to believe that nuclear was the best chance we have at avoiding climate change, which is his primary concern. You may not agree with him on his assessment but he is not a nuclear shill, paid or otherwise.
Please, please, please tell me that you’re trying to be funny….
Not funny - just thought provoking.
see the other nuclear doom thread
Sorry if you took that seriously MESKI.
Just using the same technique that was used to make Global Warming seem real.
A few scientific details eg. SG U238 and silica mixed with a bit of bull, and were off.
You may think it’s tacky to do that but very few people these days put themselves out to think and question.
If people can see they have been tricked by the post above then there may be a benefit.
They may consider whether they are being led up the garden path by the AGW proponents using similar techniques.
Didn’t the comment “and dangerous gases, such as carbon dioxide” give anyone a hint?
The problem with your little “experiment” danr is that you have demonstrated such a tenuous grip on scientific reality in other places that it’s impossible to determine when your crazy statements are genuinely held and when they’re not. What you hoped to achieve by doing this, I’m not sure.
No Jim , not made up, “fields of irreparable wind turbines”.
And if you can believe the source, the figure in one field alone was 14,000 mills.
That’s why I remembered it.
A quick search brought up this which mentions batches of 1,000 turbines: Self-Guided Tour to the Wind Farms of the Tehachapi Pass
you have demonstrated such a tenuous grip on scientific reality
By whose standards - yours?
@danr
how sure are you that you are correct re AGW, and where is the data to support your “global conspiracy” claims?
the vast majority of active, publishing climate scientists are confident to >98% that you are wrong, and have a vast body of data which overwhelmingly supports their hypothesis.
AGW denial is a political statement, not a scientific one. It is time to stop listening to the corporate spin machine, and read some real science.
Michael R James: According to BNC (http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/16/fukushima-16-march-summary/) the damaged torus hasn’t compromised containment. Also my understanding of containment is that the engineers calculate the total energy in the core and the containment is designed to be able to absorb all of that. Provided the fission has stopped there is no way the energy inside the vessel can increase.
This is what some Hawaiians think about putting windmills in their beautiful environment:
“California’s wind farms — then comprising about 80% of the world’s wind generation capacity — ceased to generate much more quickly than Kamaoa. In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply abandoned. Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills.”
http://storyreportscomments.blogspot.com/2010/02/abandoned-rusted-wind-turbines-reflect.html
DanR my questions still stand: how can they really be irrepairable? Perhaps it was a decision not to repair them under the guise of “too expensive” - to pamper to the fossel fuel industry lobby groups.
GrebB - according to Jim Green, Brook is a shill for the Nuclearists and has trouble getting his fact straight.
Brook is a strident nuclear power advocate and host of the bravenewclimate.com blog, which has received an astonishing 500,000 web ‘hits’ since the crisis in Japan began.
Brook has egg on his face. Make that an omelette. He has maintained a running commentary in the media and on his website insisting that the situation is under control and that there is no reason for concern.
One contributor to Brook’s website said: “Unfortunately, Prof. Brook has really abdicated a neutral position on this event. His clear support of nuclear power seems to have impacted his critical thinking skills. … Every time he states something in this crisis is ‘impossible’, it seems to happen the next day.”
Andrew Bolt at the Herald Sun has been urging people to read the “marvellously sane and cool explanation” from “our friend Professor Barry Brook”. Both Bolt and Brook claim that no more than 50 people died from the Chernobyl catastrophe.
The scientific estimates of the Chernobyl death toll range from 9,000 to 93,000.
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/45210.html
I have no doubt that your people “have a vast body of data”.
Unfortunately the data has to be coherent and prove something.
If you understand black body radiation and absorption spectra then you can see that the human component of CO2 absorbs 0.24% of all the possible IR that keeps our biosphere warm enough for us to keep on living.
This is the maximum possible and will be reduced where there are clouds in addition to the water vapour in suspension.
Water vapour is the main IR absorber by a huge margin.
Feedback loops, accelerating forcing s etc are fluff and bubble to disguise the fact than man and his CO2 emissions are not guilty.
@Jim Reiher,
Mathematically, the risk is as close to zero as it can get. Even if the risk was say, one in 100000 (and that’s a push), that would still mean Australia experiences one catastrophic, Japan-scale earthquake every 200 years. Add to that the fact that it would have to hit somewhere within 500km or so of the nuclear plant, and you multiply even further. It’s fair to say, therefore, that the odds of a Japan-scale catastrophic earthquake hitting within 500km of any hyopthetical Australian nuclear plant is about the same as being struck by two different forks of lightning at the same time.
All I’m saying is that if you look at it logically, taking into account the facts, it seems as though the threat of earthquakes is far from a compelling argument against nuclear power. Are there other more reasonable arguments against nuclear power? Absolutely. But earthquakes? Nope.
“DanR my questions still stand: how can they really be irrepairable?”
maybe the only purpose of building them in the first place was to cut some body a bit of profit out of the US taxpayers.
It happens all the time.
Is green energy more “pure” in this respect or do you think some people with good connections (eg Algore) might like to make a few bucks.
Once the mills are up and the profit made who cares whether they work or not.
gregb: “Barry Brook is not a nuclear shill.”
Come off it. Brook is constantly in the media spruiking nuclear.
Fukushima will soon replace Chernobyl as the worse nuclear disaster the world has experienced. The former power plant is burning, and there is nobody there to stop it from burning up further. The Japanese government is in ‘full spin and no policy’ mode right now.
@Danr
I took the trouble to look up your suggested reference “Self-Guided Tour to the Wind Farms of the Tehachapi Pass”.
If you think that article supports your earlier comment posted at 3.51pm you have SEVERE comprehension difficulties.
A little off-topic and not sure if this has been posted. Some interesting Chernoble photos and verbage here
http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/highres/highres.html
Having worked in the Nuclear industry, the one thing that was inevitable was misadventure. Or as our leader of the opposition would have it “Sh*t happens”.
No matter how hard we tried, human failure prevailed. The most memorable incident occurred when the Site Safety Officers were carrying a glass container of very low level liquid waste past the luncheon room. As murphys law would predict they dropped the container (which shattered) just as the crews left the room and walked through the liquid waste. Result was hundreds of shoes were collected and destroyed.
I don’t get it. If the VAAC in London has issued emergency FIRs, why does their website (metoffice.gov.uk/aviation/vaac/vaacuk.html) say “There are currently no advisories in force”?
“the vast majority of active, publishing climate scientists”
That’s just the point “climate scientists”.
In our own local university we have a highly respected person who works in the area of Climate. Research gives the capacity to predict and analyse weather as a core science.
His work is basic science and an offshoot is that it is of assistance to business in dealing with business modeling.
In the same university we now have a Department of Climate Change.
Ostensibly they do the same thing.
One is researching and expanding the academic horizon.
The other is following an agenda.
Try this one then, it took me while to find it.
This is what some Hawaiians think about putting windmills in their beautiful environment:
“California’s wind farms — then comprising about 80% of the world’s wind generation capacity — ceased to generate much more quickly than Kamaoa. In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply abandoned. Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills.”
http://storyreportscomments.blogspot.com/2010/02/abandoned-rusted-wind-turbines-reflect.html
The Times of India and the UK Telegraph report that Japan was warned two years ago that its safety rules were not up to date and a strong earthquake would pose a serious problem to its nuclear power stations, reveals a cable leaked by WikiLeaks . The country is now facing the prospect of a nuclear meltdown following a massive earthquake and tsunami.
The Telegraph reported that an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) official had pointed out in December 2008 that safety rules were out of date and strong earthquakes would pose a “serious problem” for nuclear stations.
The Japanese government had then vowed that it would upgrade safety at all its nuclear plants and it built an emergency response centre at the now stricken Fukushima plant that was designed to withstand a magnitude 7 quake. The earthquake that rocked Japan Friday measured magnitude 9.
A US embassy cable cited by The Daily Telegraph said: “He (an IAEA official) explained that safety guides for seismic safety have only been revised three times in the last 35 years and that the IAEA is now re-examining them.
“Also, the presenter noted recent earthquakes in some cases have exceeded the design basis for some nuclear plants, and that this is a serious problem that is now driving seismic safety work.”
The media report said safety warnings about nuclear power plants in Japan, which is one of the most seismologically active countries in the world, were also raised during the 2008 meeting of the G8’s Nuclear Safety and Security Group in Tokyo.
The cables show how Tokyo opposed a court order to shut down another nuclear power plant in western Japan due to concerns about whether it could withstand powerful earthquakes.
The court ruling said there was a possibility people might get exposed to radiation if there was an accident at the plant that built to withstand a mere 6.5 magnitude earthquake.
Shooba
I agree with you.
The Australian people aren’t stupid. It is inevitable that many Australians will start to think; if the Japanese had Hiroshoma and Nagasaki, and still went nuclear, why no us
Duh Syd Walker! Dontcha know that in danr-land “dozens of derelict mills” equals “thousands of derelect mills”. See dozen=thousand. Tut-tut.
Maybe we could burn trolls for energy. They seem to have a bit to spare.
@shooba
human nature, not natural disasters are the biggest threat to nuclear power. Cheap, poorly built and maintained, obsolete designed, poorly regulated, but politically well connected power stations will always win over safety.
Good engineers will be replaced if they don’t comply, builders will take shortcuts, regulators and inspectors will be bought off, government will be lobbied to allow plants to run beyond their servicable life, corporations who own the plants will be exempted from prosecution in the event of a disaster, and taxpayers will wear the costs if something goes wrong.
The best intentions will be swept aside by an ever increasing demand for bigger profits, risks will be placed on the public purse.
This is not a prediction, it is history.
Thanks Agra for a very illuminating comment.
As I mentioned earlier:
“What I want to know is this:
where is the discussion about the corruption which led to this?
Where is the investigation into the politicians who were paid off to give these outdated generators an extra 10 or 15 years of life above the engineered design?
The sooner we get to the real issues the better.”
There is money and influence changing hands.
All technology is susceptible.
We need go no further than air safety in Australia.
Standards have dropped. Read between the lines. Who profits?
Right on the money LindsayB “Good engineers will be replaced if they don’t comply”.
By the thinking which says we should shut down all nuclear power plants we should also ban flying. It is extremely dangerous when governments don’t enforce regulations.
Re-Joanna’s earlier point. I too saw Andrew Bolt get in to quite a tizz over this on Insiders last Sunday. Basically said it was a non-event and was outraged they Rudd had “demanded” that Japan keep us posted, It would be excellent if someone, perhaps Crikey, held him to account.
He also said that Chernobyl was widely overhyped and that only 5 or was it 50 people actually died…..
Christopher Dunne,
The awful C word was used this morning by ISIS and Stratfor, who are proxy links to what the USG experts think. I could hardly avoid it any longer.
Mark Duffett,
Hmmm. The site doesn’t even list several current volcanic ash warnings. I hope the airlines are getting direct mailings.
Michael R James,
Great lay reader friendly essay in Rooted. Have linked to it in the most recent Plane Talking posting.
@DanR
Putting the word ‘climate scientists’ and ‘vast body of data’ in quotation fingers does not qualify as an argument against a whole branch of published and peer reviewed science.
Many of your references severely lack any real or qualifying evidence that people in this thread who bothered to look have easily found.
These are links that even Andrew Bolt would resist using and you have not answered any points of order raised by them to any satisfactory degree.
I’m also having trouble following your ideology, as you seem blind to science but rather than follow the typical neo-con republican line of small KOCH flavoured government you are advocating intense government control and regulation of significant parts of our society.
Until you put some more rational thought into your responses that can’t easily be picked apart in under 5 minutes, I’m assuming you’re a paid Troll from the IPA or mining industry.
But @danr, when they do enforce regs, that’s “BIG GOVERNMENT” and we can’t be having that sort of Stalinist control of free enterprise, can we?
@danr
do you really believe your own bullsh!t, or are you paid to “contibute” to sites like this?
AGW denial is a political position, not a scientific argument, which you have aptly demonstrated by a continual refusal to provide any facts to support your beliefs.
Let me guess:
you believe the earth is 6000 years old, God will replace the fossil fuels as we burn them, if we destroy our planet, God will rescue us, and that free universal healthcare is a communist evil.
Or are you really an algorithm written by big oil to respond to keywords?
The view from Tokyo..
First, my qualifications. I am stuck in Tokyo, trying to assess the risks associated with staying put versus the risks of negotiating massively disrupted transport infrastructure to get to the airport with my wife, one year old son and frail mother-in-law, with the very real possibilty of radioactive fallout reaching us en route. I work as a translator, and have previously translated materials about the nuclear industry in Japan, so I was better informed than the average punter before this started, and I have been obsessively analyzing every scrap of information from both English and Japanese language sources.
I still don’t have a clue how this is likely to unfold, and almost of all of the Japanese experts on TV are now admitting the same. But this is what I have seen so far..
Earthquake.. what about the nuclear power stations?
— Don’t worry, they shut down automatically.
Backup power has failed so the cooling system doesn’t work.
— Don’t worry, there are backup batteries
The batteris are flat..
— Don’t worry, we can use generators
The plugs don’t fit..
— Don’t worry, we can use fire trucks to pump sea water
The pressure is too high to effectively pump water in, so the fuel rods have been exposed and are starting to melt
— Don’t worry, as long as the containment vessel holds, the radiation will be contained
The containment vessels have been breached on two of the reactors…
… and then silence. No new information for hours. If there was good news, I’m sure they would be shouting it from the rooftops. And while this has been happening, the scale of the problem has gone from a single reactor to potentially six. And if there is a massive radiation leak or explosion from any one of these reactors, then managing the other five will go from difficult to impossible.
In the background, we are getting two or three magnitude 6+ aftershocks a day.
Comparisons to Chernobyl are entirely appropriate, and it seems that the IAEA thinks so too.
Australia may not have that many earthquakes, but we get more than our fair share of cyclones, floods and bushfires. Nuclear power stations require huge amounts of water, and with all our droughts the only practical option would be to build them on the coast, and tsunamis cannot be categorically ruled out anywhere on the planet. There have been several tsunamis in our region lately, such as the S0lomon Islands a few years back, and there is evidence of a mega tsunami on the east coast of Australia about 400 years ago.
And that’s just the /known/ black swans.
shooba - you are right: there are plenty of good reasons not to go nuclear in Australia and the risk of earthquake is low down the list.
A quick list that comes to mind:
- how do we guarantee that radio active waste can be transported safely to whereever it is stored?
- that includes not just travel accidents but also theft for dirty bombs
- how do we address the documented and real health problems of mining towns and workers, around uranium mines?
- how do we store the radioactive waste for thousands of years?
- do we just use indigenous land like we did in the 1950’s for atom bomb test?
- what happens when uranium runs out?
- what do we do for the next 15 years while we are building the reactors?
- how do we guarantee no accidents?
to name a few…..
Oh, Stratfor used the word “Chernobyl” so that makes it OK to use without any qualifications or explanation of why this event is in no way comparable?
Really, this is sloppy journalism Ben, at best. I can tell you, from days of reading on this subject that Chernobyl released millions of times the radiation that has apparently been the case here, and there is very little quantitative similarity in even the worst case at Fukushima Daiichi. How about some balance by talking about the number of reactors that actually were not swamped by a tsunami and did in fact shut down without major incident?
Or would that introduce some comparative facts that might undermine the somewhat hysterical tone of your article?
The ABC put up an article about the superiority of thorium reactors. Of course I cant find it now but could find this:
http://abc.com.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2010/2852923.htm
To add to the farce, the Japanese military are now dropping buckets of water into no 3 reactor.
Video at NHK World service.
I would advise that the people here calling Barry Brook a “shill” should tone it down a bit. A shill is someone who is PAID to say certain things whether or not it is true and whether or not they believe it. Shills do not disclose that they have a relationship for the product that they are promoting. Does anyone have any evidence that Brook is in the paid employ of any company that is involved with nuclear power? Commenting anonymously on a blog does not protect you from defamation action.
Christopher Dunne,
How about a little reality. If the IAEA directs VAAC to issue 10 nuclear emergency FIRs to the airlines and airports is it not telling Japan that level 4 (with local consequences) is absurd?
If the French authority says it should be a level 6, which was where Chernobyl started, might that not suggest something else is going on?
And if the Japanese PM says, as he just has, that he needs foreign and in particular US assistance ‘to avert or avoid a catastrophe’ why do you think he used the word ‘catastrophe?’
Maybe they are all being a little hysterical.
I read it differently.
NHK English service is available from a variety of on-line TV streaming sites. Here’s one -
http://wwitv.com/tv_channels/6810.htm
That says it all, the never ending dishonesty from the pro nuclear crew is only paralleled by that of the pro fossil fuel, anti global warming industry.
“It’s all good, my greed and your willful ignorance allows us both to imagine a scenario that bears no semblance to reality”.
You missed out the tobacco industry, the asbestos industry, the gold and lead mining industry, the fast food industry, Union Carbide and the alcohol industry. Their product is absolutely safe, they will no damage, they observe all safety regulations, all toxic waste will be disposed of with due regard to the wellbeing of the community and the public can trust them to do the right thing every time.
NHK now says they’ve given up on the helicopters dumping water on the reactor as it was too dangerous due to radiation levels.
@Jim Reiher: I am pretty sure that those defunct windmills DanR is talking about are the Altamont Pass project, in the Oakland hills inland from San Francisco. This was the first modern windmill power project in the world (1970s?). I don’t think the scale is anything like thousands, maybe hundreds. It is true there were criticisms but it was the first…. and being American who like things to be as fast as possible the design was all wrong. These were the ones with blades that whirled around and killed birds — thus establishing bad PR that persists to the present day even though modern designs (mostly German and Danish) move very slowly and hardly ever (if ever) kill birds. So really those windmills are something to be proud of, even if they became uneconomic to maintain, they are really v1.0 (say the Apple Lisa) without which you (or your competitors) do not move onto v2 etc.
@Geoff Russell. You’ve been reading and believing all that stuff on BNC. Re the #2 reactor containment vessel I did not use the term “compromised” since that is a bit vague. I said that the outer layer, concrete, is broken from the explosions and stresses. It is, but I did not say the containment vessel is breached (if that happens the whole world will know about it within 5 minutes believe me, it will ring around the world on every media known to man). But actually, loss of the concrete does compromise the vessel which must rely solely on the steel (I assume the concrete provides extra strength if the vessel heats up too much, softening the steel, as well as resisting external shocks.
The other thing Barry Brook probably regrets claiming, is that these containment vessels will contain the fuel no matter what. That is simply nonsense. I think it comes from the misunderstanding about any original claim or design specification — which assumes some level of cooling. Once you have inadequate cooling, forget it. With full meltdown the fuel forms a pool which heats even more than the pellets — because it is no longer moderated. It can never approach criticality — ie. like a nuclear bomb, but low level fission continues so it just keeps heating up. At a couple thousand degrees (if not before, remember there will be intense steam pressure by then, it is like a massive pressurized can) the steel will melt or soften enough for welds to give etc. By memory (dangerous but you can Wiki this) it can reach up to 5000 degrees so absolutely nothing can contain it.
About Barry Brook. It is wrong to call him a nuclear shill (ie. implication he takes coin from the nuclear industry etc). Barry is entirely sincere about his position and we should respect him for that — in way that we cannot for others like Blot, Plimer, Switkowski et al. (Ziggy may well be sincere, despite his lifelong personal commitment, it is impossible to know. He has considerably stepped back from his gung-ho attitude on Sunday night). I happen to believe he (Brook) has got it very wrong. And it is a pity to see him put so much effort into such a dead end instead of putting that energy and advocacy into better solutions. I suspect he is very shaken by what is happening, though feasibly he may still believe that (so far) actually the ten reactors took the absolute worst that nature could throw at them, and “survived”. If the situation gets no worse and they all come under control, he may indeed have a point. But it won’t matter. Nuclear is dead in places where it is not already established or where representative democracy is strong. Please don’t call this gloating, but it might be a positive to come out of these terrible events: more of the world’s politicians might put a more serious effort into funding renewables. Japan has massive wind resources and could harvest it offshore (expensive but if they put their ingenuity into this….). If we had been funding these things for the last 4 decades at the rate the developed world has subsidized nuclear and fossil fuels, we would already be there (affordable practical green energy). It is an absolute bloody disgrace that Australia has not properly funded geothermal — perhaps it cannot live up to its promise but we should damn well know by now, because if it works it could be magic.
@Ben. Tx.
GregB, it’s the standard device for those with no knowledge, no substance, nothing but their certainty in their own opinions, to accuse anyone who out-argues them of being a paid shill. Those who make that accusation should be marked and ignored.
Michael James: (i) [Moderator: this line has been edited. Please no personal jibes]
(ii) I first saw Altamont Pass in calif. in 1986. I was amazed. Thousands of short dead wind turbines. Rusting away. Forests of them. The pass is rare if not unique- funnels wind.
They certainly spun fast and killed birds, but not as fast as modern turbines and with a tiny bladespan. Too short to bother most raptors. The next generation (now rusting away also) killed more.
(ii)
It’s a common illusion that big modern turbine blades spin slowly. It appears so at a distance. At 80 or so metres, the span is as big as a cricket oval. At a height of up to 150m they make a mess of raptors. Wind companies routinely lie about turbine speed as they lie about everything.
The blade tips are spinning at 270 kph. Eagles seem to have no awareness of the danger. There is also severe turbulence around these things. The abrupt pressure changes are believed to kill the innumerable bats that die: their lungs burst.
(iii) therefore to say “modern designs (mostly German and Danish) move very slowly and hardly ever (if ever) kill birds” is false. Bob Brown, after demanding wind turbines for Tasmania, got them in the NW. By the end of 2008 he was demanding an immediate moratorium on turbines in Tasmania- because they were slaughtering the rare Tas. subspecies of the Wedge-tailed eagle. In 2010 I think there were 22 successful fledges in Tas, and every one was killed at Woolnorth.
Brown is the ultimate hypocrite (I say this as a Greens voter until recently): he still demands turbines on the mainland, where they are killing wedgetails right now.
(iv) to say that current turbines are the necessary (if absurdly uneconomic and useless) step before the next generation is false: gigantism has made them more expensive still and with a far worse environmental footprint. By definition they are no solution to any energy problem- they struggle to manage 20% of capacity and cannot power a single lightbulb 24/7. Continental high pressures mean spreading them around doesn’t help. In the recent SA heatwave (SA claims 20% of power needs are met by wind- which is nonsense) , they managed just 1.5% of production. And of course they ahve to be backed up 24/7 by FF powergen.
Hi Lin
re : “do you really believe your own bullsh!t,”
get a job or an education or preferably both.
“when they do enforce regs”
If people keep voting in pollies that dont enforce regs what you get is
Modern Day Society
Scary
And by the way, I would think if there’s any ulterior motive behind those arguing for calm, it’s because the Japanese are dealing with a major catastrophe, many thousands dead, many more thousands homeless, an unknown number still to be rescued, in cold and deteriorating weather, with rolling power stoppages, and a volatile power station crisis, and the last thing they need is the ill-informed, tunnel-visioned panic of all the world’s media crowing “I told you so” and “run for your lives.”
Australian man is asked by his son in Tokyo yesterday “Is it the end of the world”. Father replies, not just yet, and we are going to the airport for a trip to OZ …. now.
Based on an anecdote on ABC PM tonight.
My question - how many people in our Immigration Dept can speak Japanese. Maybe we will get that 100M population Frank Lowy, and Harry Triguboff are so keen on.
Only alot sooner than we expected. As long as they are made to play Aussie Rules and NO SUMO!
Ben, I do not wish to play down the seriousness of the cascading problems at Fukushima Daiichi, caused, I might add, not by an earthquake, but by being swamped by an enormous tidal wave that has virtually wiped out their capacity to cool down the reactors (which did in fact shut down correctly). These are not insignificant or trivial events, but they are not anywhere near, by massive orders of magnitude, what happened at Chernobyl.
My point is that you could, as a journalist, help spread information that gives readers some perspective, and not just parrot the extreme statements that others have resorted to. I thought questioning everything, even the comments of ‘experts’ was the basis of good journalism. Crikey prides itself on looking behind the soundbites of others and putting the ideas in a broader context, but you seem to be in fact hiding behind them in this instance.
It is a complex subject Ben, just parroting the hyperbole of others does not make it any easier to understand in a broader context.
thorium LFTR, anyone?
or even 4th gen reactors that don’t use water?
No matter which way you slice it, nuclear is dead. Can anybody see a citizenry sitting idly by while a nuclear power plant is built? The tsunami sealed it. And even if, magically, the catastrophe Fukushima Daiichi were to end today, the pictures shown and the fears raised are enough, I think, to have forever closed the book on nuclear power. No matter how much redundancy in safety systems gets promised by the nuclear industry it will not be enough to overcome the intense feelings and fears brought about by the catastrophe Fukushima Daiichi.
It is clear the Japanese government cannot avoid dissembling. And supporters of nuclear are worse than Dr. Pangloss. Hardly the stage from which nuclear can launch a comeback.
To put a Japanese spin on it, sayonara nuclear power
Just to clarify: there are 55 operating reactors in Japan. The plant at Fukushima Daiichi ( that’s Fukushima ‘the first’) has six units which were inundated by the massive tsunami one hour after the two fully operating units shut down, as designed.
There was a very minor fire at one plant (Oganawa) which was even closer to the epicentre, but there was insignificant radiation released and the whole plant has shut down safely.
So the plant that was swamped by the tsunami is what we are dealing with, not the other 49 reactors in Japan. These units are water cooled, and not having water to remove the residual heat after the main fission reaction is stopped is the problem (plus some outside containment problems also caused by the tsunami).
Chernobyl was operating at full power when the cooling water was accidentally shut off, which caused the reactor to overheat and ignite the graphite it contained as a moderator. The graphite exploded the reactor, which had no containment, and spewed the contents of the reactor into the atmosphere…a major catastrophic release of radioactive material.
Two things: Fukushima’s reactors were all shut down and hence the energy in the reactors was a tiny fraction of Chernobyl’s, and more importantly, they contain no graphite to ignite. Sure, some of the reactors may melt down their contents, but there will not be a massive explosion of nuclear material as in Chernobyl, and, there are quite substantial containment structures in place that will not see this stuff ejected like a volcano as it was in Chernobyl. It may leak locally, but spread a “plume” (as Ben puts it) like the Ukrainian reactor did, is either sloppy journalism or intentionally hyper-dramatic.
This is a very serious incident, and it isn’t over, but to make comparisons with Chernobyl can only be done through ignorance or an intention to over dramatise it.
It’s telling when the best one can say about Fukushima Daiichi is that it’s not Chernobyl. Put that on a tshirt and see how it works. Nuclear is dead, killed by the wooden stake driven into its heart by the tsunami.
Why do we keep comparing Fukushima to Chernobyl? If it is worse than Chernobyl we should be comaring this disaster to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I am not sure we have a single expert on nuclear energy in Australia ( we do not train nuclear specialists) but we have plenty of ‘concerned’ Australian citizens.
All those concerned citizens should rather stop and think about the napalm, phosphorus bombs, depleted uranium and other weapons FREELY used in some countries against civilian population. Many children are dying from bombs and bombing related diseases.
And us, bigots, worried about our safety? Nice. Shall we protest against highly radioactive full body scanners?
And we have a field day again!. Those Japs, again. First, the whales and now Fukushima. We may forget the II World War because we kindly accepted apology.
What about thousands of people killed by the tsunami itself?
Hey Mucky, love your vampire analogy, but how about we just wait and see what the real lesson of this event is. Perhaps the lesson may be that nuclear reactors can withstand the biggest recorded earthquake, but not so good with being inundated by water.
I’ll wait and see, but you’re welcome to keep us amused with your prognostications.
The view from Tokyo:
— Don’t worry, we’ll just drop buckets of water on it from helicopters…
Don’t laugh, this was the only good news for about 12 hours - the only new news, in fact, except for “there is a column of smoke coming from … one of the reactors, we’re not sure which one”. And of course the radiation levels above the plant were too high, so they had to give up on the helicopter plan, not that it was ever a serious plan anyway, they just had to say /something/.
They then wheeled out the emperor to give a condolence speech to the victims, which distracted everyone for a while and gave the media something else to talk about.
There are been some very well written, very technical explanations about why everything was going to be OK, which was very reassuring until I realized that some of the key assumptions that they made simply did not match the unfolding reality. Mainly 1) that it would be possible to successfully pump seawater into the core, and 2) that the containment vessel would not be compromised.. and I’m sorry Christopher Dunne, but that’s what they think has happened. (Source: Japanese TV and the Japanese language version of the Nikkei newspaper, although that article has since been taken down, presumably to avoid panic) Neither of these assumptions are true.
I was very calm until about midday yesterday, when Edano (the calm, clear official who had been giving reassuring press briefings every few hours) broke into a cold sweat in the middle of his press conference. Yesterday was freezing cold here, and /nobody/ is using electricity for luxuries like heating. He had no answers then, and there have been no answers since.
The latest news is that they are “making preparations to pump water to cool the reactors from the ground”. That was two hours ago — five and a half days since the crisis started.
Roquefort, what about thorium LFTR technology?
The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor: What Fusion Wanted To Be
plus the ABC notes above on the technology, and simply google the phrase for more info.
Anybody got the numbers on hand: how many nuclear reactors have been built since 1986?
If Chernobyl did not “drive a stake through” the nuclear industry’s heart, it may just be a little premature to claim that the problems at Fukushima Daiichi will.
By the way, does anyone know why the plant Fukushima Daini (ie the second), just 11 kilometres away, is not in the news?
Well, the 4 reactors there, like all the others except at their sister site, have not been damaged by this colossal earthquake.
Now, where’s that stake…
Thank you Christopher. Why couldn’t a journalist say that? It would be nice if Australia could stand for a bit of calm and moral support at this distance, while the situation is still developing and rescue crews are still looking for survivors. It would be nice if we could read a few words about those survivors and rescue crews in between all the nuclear commentary.
No good film out of Chernobyl. It was only one reactor. After Chernobyl the nuclear industry assured the world they had learned their lesson. So, here we are on the coast of Japan, the land that gave us the world tsunami, and they didn’t plan for severe inundation from the sea. Nice planning, I guess you’ll do better next time.
Chernobyl didn’t kill off nuclear because the stake missed the heart (if the nuclear industry really has one). This time that row of reactors, steaming, belching out clouds of radioactivity, is killing off the industry. Sure, Japan has a lot of reactors. Now, go and build new reactors to replace those that have just died. Who in Japan will say yes?
John Reeves, there may be breaches of the containment, but what there most certainly will not be is a massive explosion of nuclear material like there was in Chernobyl. The difference is not trivial, and it should be made clear that there will not be a need to evacuate Tokyo. Apocalyptic statements about what’s happening at Fukushima are just that.
It is, as you say, a really serious event, but let’s keep it in perspective.And, every day that passes, the energy in the reactors is diminishing rapidly, and whatever the outcome, will never be anywhere even approximating what happened at Chernobyl.
Chernobyl fallout covered the entire Northern Hemisphere and the impacts continue to this day.
Lest we forget.
@john reeves - thanks for bringing us some perspective. I’m sure your fears must be somewhat allayed by the chorus of experts AKA Crikey commentators. I cannot presume to offer advice, being as I’m many miles from trouble, but if it was my ass on the line, I’d be getting the flock out of there ASAP.
Now if you could just stop bleating into your soy-frappachino and embrace the hard facts
Looks like I wasn’t the only one with doubts about this story: http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/airline-business/2011/03/japanese-crisis-that-nuclear-w.html
This still leaves some serious questions unanswered, though. Are we to infer that an aviation advisory of strangely obscure provenance is the only evidence for “a plume of radioactive particles extending into the stratosphere” “stream of nuclear contaminants” “radioactive clouds” (let alone “driven by an intense heat source consistent with exposed fuel rods burning in air”)?
If not, what other evidence is there?
No problem Freecountry, it’s been a very tumultuous time for Japan, the world’s media, and of course us here in Australia of late. What’s concerned me most has been the poor quality of reporting, and the the incredibly polarised opinions about nuclear power, the poor understanding of radiation hazards and the somewhat bizarre disjunction of the ‘green left’ who on the one hand deplore the non-scientific posture of the AGW denialists but who revert to gross exaggerations and ill-informed statements about anything to do with nuclear power.
It’s been fascinating to watch, but a little disheartening when I really do understand the crisis we face with our addiction to fossil fuels.
@Flower,
Exactly. As long as these catastrophes remain in the northern hemisphere, the fission fanciers sit smugly at a safe distance.
Moderation shmoderation. This is a repost.
Looks like I wasn’t the only one with doubts about this story: flightglobal.com/blogs/airline-business/2011/03/japanese-crisis-that-nuclear-w.html
This still leaves some serious questions unanswered, though. Are we to infer that an aviation advisory of strangely obscure provenance is the only evidence for “a plume of radioactive particles extending into the stratosphere” “stream of nuclear contaminants” “radioactive clouds” (let alone “driven by an intense heat source consistent with exposed fuel rods burning in air”)?
If not, what other evidence is there?
@Christopher: I sincerely hope you are right. And I’ve read a convincing account from a nuclear expert that there will not a /massive/ explosion, but he and several of the other boffins on TV here are upfront about the possibility of at least a moderate sized explosion releasing materials from the core.
I accept that it is probably unlikely that we will experience sustained high levels of /radiation/ here in Tokyo, but given that we regularly get sand blowing in from the Gobi Desert here, I am skeptical about claims that /radioactive material/ won’t reach here and enter the local water supply.
I am not fazed about being exposed to radiation, but I don’t want radioactive strontium in my bones or radioactive iodine in my thyroid. More to the point, I don’t want these things in my baby son’s bones, etc, which is why we are getting out of here first chance we get.
I’m sorry, but I’ve heard phrases like “impossible”, “most certainly will not…” and “will never be” quite a lot in the last five days, but the “impossible” keeps happening with disturbing regularity, so forgive me if I remain cautious, and if I remain dubious about similar claims for thorium, etc.
Ardent pro-nuclear advocates are welcome to swap places with me any time they like, on condition that they bring two or three of their loved ones with them.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, other than I share the planet with another 6.3 billion people and I guess have a passing interest in how we are going to live together. But I must say that I’m a bit bewildered by Christopher Dunne’s replies. He claims the three things that concern him most are the “poor quality of reporting, … the the incredibly polarised opinions about nuclear power, [and] the poor understanding of radiation hazards”. If those are your three greatest concerns about all of this then I really pity you friend. What worries me most, just to “share”, are the fates of the Japanese devastated by the earthquake, tsunami and the unfolding nuclear power accident. I’ll start there and let my concerns cascade from there.
And Freecountry reiterates my point. The story out of Japan is powerful and media are focusing, perhaps too much, on the nuclear question. Therein rests that nasty wooden stake aimed at the heart of the nuclear industry. It’s clear that the nuclear story, at least for now, in the media is top dog. Already the story is tragic, and I can’t see how the nuclear industry will survive it. Unlike Chernobyl, which happened, “over there” and with virtually no “vision”, this one is filled pathos, good video and a lousy outcome. And the best nuclear proponents can say is “look, it didn’t happen to the other reactors.” Of course, the reply is that even happening to one is too much and not what the industry promised.
sorry, that’s 6.8 billion, I’ll share it with everybody!
Flower, the accident at Chernobyl was horrible, it killed people near the event, and it did cause some thyroid cancers in children subsequently. But one of the predicted effects, a big increase in leukemia in the exposed populations has not been detected.
The epidemiological data just does not show any significant increase in leukemia, which was not what was expected. Our understanding of radiation exposure across populations is not all that complete, but the evidence for there being a huge number of cancers attributable to Chernobyl is just not there.
Fear and irresponsible crisis reporting abound, way too many necks being stuck out here and abroad it looks like, I guess it’s too much to ask our media for balanced reporting.
Headline in a swedish newspaper (DN.se).. ‘Downfall on the way to Sweden’, the article then goes on to say in the first sentence ‘within 2 weeks radioactive downfall from the damaged reactor will be noticed in Sweden’
…
Last sentence in the paragraph..if you get that far..’only with our most sensitive meters will we be able to notice the effects of the leak from Japan’
By the time you’ve read the headline you’re probably starting to head down to your local swedish nuclear bunker.
Mucky, my ‘concerns’ related to this post and the various comments, and the whole anti-nuke slant the media seems to have adopted.
My concerns for the Japanese after what has happened to them are ineffable.
Sorry if you were confused about that.
Within the hastily built Chernobyl sarcophagus is some 200 tonnes of nuclear fuel — nearly all of the amount originally contained in the nuclear reactor — which is now mixed in with the building itself.
Twenty five years after the carnage, the European Union and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development are now leading a drive to construct a gargantuan steel arch to encase the exploded reactor and the “sarcophagus.”
But they still need $1 billion for the project, which has only just started and has doubled in cost to nearly 1.5 billion euros ($2 billion). The current funding will only allow work to continue through the beginning of next year and the new sarcophagus is expected to last for 100 years. Hopefully, Momma Nature, outraged by the pillaging of the hazards in her waste repositories, will refrain from trying to get even.
Unperturbed Russia (Rosatom) is busily flogging its nuclear reactors to developing countries while Western nations are contributing big bucks to clean up the abominable radioactive mess, scattered throughout Russia.
Roquefort, what about thorium LFTR technology?
The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor: What Fusion Wanted To Be - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8
plus the ABC notes above on the technology, and simply google the phrase for more info.
The man on the clapham omnibus: when the next tsunami drowns Sweden, I hope you’ll apologise for your flippant remarks!
Dunno why some crikey journos moderate all URLs in comments as though they are going to be relentlessly spammed or something. Others don’t.
I’ve just seen a tweet that claims that there was a spike in the radiation levels in Fukushima city of 500 times background levels.
Sounds pretty scary, huh?
Well it would if you didn’t know that background levels range widely across the earth, and that one population in India lives (due to uranium and thorium naturally occurring in the groundwater) long and healthy lives with 200 times the average level of background radiation.
So, just how scary is a “spike” of 500 times the background level?
See what I mean?
@ Christopher Dunne: “Our understanding of radiation exposure across populations is not all that complete, but the evidence for there being a huge number of cancers attributable to Chernobyl is just not there.”
Yes it is Christopher. The above information is the world according to the IAEA and you must have missed the link I provided on the other thread:
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2010/2010-04-26-01.html
“The authors examined more than 5,000 published articles and studies, most written in Slavic languages and never before available in English.” The IAEA officially gagged the WHO in the 60s from speaking without permission on nuclear incidents and the IAEA have censored scientific and medical information published by experts in affected areas.
And who is the head of the World Nuclear Association? One Ian Hore-Lacy an Australian and former biology teacher who joined the mining industry at CRA (now part of Rio Tinto) in 1974 and who finished up in Corporate Relations. He then took over the role of General Manager of Australia’s Uranium Information Centre and we all know how uranium mines are managed in Australia – leaks, spills, poisonings, contamination, threats, cartels and explosions.
Oh, and just to put things into a personal perspective: I’ve set off geiger counters myself after having what I called the “shiny sugar” for a PET scan.
It’s quite surreal hearing the thing go off, and realising it’s actually inside you. But the good news was the PET scan showed I no longer had any highly metabolising cancer cells in my body.
What it took to get to that condition I won’t describe!
OK, the latest tweet:
The peak hourly reading today in Fukushima-shi equaled 1/2 a chest X-ray.
…so there you have it, APOCALYPSE!
(long echo chamber reverb on that by the way…so much scarier, huh?)
If we have to build a Nuclear Power Station , the 1st one should be in Sydney Harbour . Builder and owner to supply Warranty and own insurance for the Full Life of the plant. Any Tenders ???
@Christopher:
First of all, I mentioned you by name not to pick a fight but to bring you up to date with the latest reports, and to highlight the fact that highly unlikely events have in fact happened repeatedly in the last few days.
Yes, there is quite a bit of bullsh!t in the media coverage, but there has been no shortage of “bullsh!t” in the “hush, hush” messages two. I’ll give you two examples.
The “radiation is part of life” argument — Yes, this is true. But the radiation is a cumulative issue, so if 500 times background level is sustained for about two or three weeks you can expect serious health consequences. And the radiation that has leaked so far is trivial compared to what might happen if the containment vessel explodes — especially with all that spent fuel in cooling ponds on the roofs of some of the reactors… Let alone what might happen if the core explodes. Unlikely scenarios, perhaps, but quite plausible, especially since the four explosions and two fires so far all took place at locations that were supposedly under control, and right now there not even a semblance of control.
More to the point, there is an important difference between radiation versus radioactive materials. If you ingest strontium your body mistakes it for calcium and puts it into your bones (in fact, strontium is absorbed far more readily than calcium). As a result, radiation is injected directly into your bones (which are factories for your immune system as well as structures to hang other tissues on) for a long, long time - damaging DNA, destroying white blood cells and eventually causing leukemia. All the soothing noises about radiation from iphones and aeroplanes will not change this reality. There has been no mention of levels of cesium etc in Tokyo, and there is no way that they are not measuring it.
Second, the “the chances of total catastrophe are vanishingly small” argument — Some people know more maths (probability and statistics) than is really healthy, and they start to mistake it for reality. One example is the idea that you can confidently use past experience as a reliable guide to future outcomes - even when the world has been turned upside down, as it has in that area. Another example is to think that if there is only a 1% chance of each reactor going ballistic then the chances of all six going is only one in a trillion. Mathematically convincing, but actually dangerously wrong. If even one of them goes there will be no way that they can get the other five under control. And yes, I am including reactors #5 and #6 in this scenario (and the spent fuel on their roofs) because the temperatures in their spent fuel ponds have been gradually rising, which is what is suspected of causing the explosion and two fires in #4, which was supposed to have been totally under control, and which has probably been primary responsible for dangerously high levels that already exist within the plant that are hampering control efforts.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m saying I think that there will a total disaster, just that I think it would be foolish to dismiss it as a possibility, and that I find the “it won’t matter anyway” arguments seem to rely more on wishful thinking than evidence.
Personally, I’m outa here first chance I get. More than happy to sublet our house to you while we’re away…
I have been advocating the view that nuclear is dead; that the story of Japan’s nuclear will overwhelm the nuclear industry’s ability to come back. Maybe I was wrong, my wife just sent me this:
POLITICS: Democrats, supporting Obama’s all-energy push, rally around nuclear power (03/16/2011)
Evan Lehmann, E&E reporter
Democratic lawmakers and administration officials defended nuclear power yesterday, appearing to isolate calls in their party to slow or freeze plans for new plants until the deepening threat of radiation in Japan is understood.
Democrats are faced with a sensitive balance as critics within their ranks argue that the Pacific disaster is evidence that fault line facilities are a risky option burdened by the absence in the United States of a spent fuel depository.
But the criticism comes as President Obama is redefining the Democrats’ energy position to closely reflect Republican goals promoting a buffet of energy sources. If Democrats and their environmental allies threaten to make nuclear power plants more difficult to build, they could diminish Obama’s ability to negotiate a clean energy standard with Republicans. Allowing utilities to comply with the standard using nuclear power is seen as a key carrot to win GOP support.
“He believes that our energy future will be best served by the approach that he’s taking, which is to take an all-of-the-above approach in terms of our goals to reaching a clean energy standard,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said of the president yesterday.
“Nuclear is one of those sources,” he added. “And he believes that we need to proceed responsibly with the safety and security of the American people in mind, and if we do that, that nuclear can continue to be an element in our energy arsenal.”
Lieberman says no moratorium
The perils of deteriorating nuclear reactors in Japan are driving discussions in Congress. Both chambers received large-scale briefings by nuclear industry representatives on Monday. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) will appear on Capitol Hill today to brief lawmakers.
The Democratic message appears to be jelling. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), who urged a slowdown over the weekend, said yesterday he doesn’t support freezing construction of nuclear power plants, or delaying permitting.
“I don’t favor a moratorium,” Lieberman told reporters. “I’m a strong supporter of nuclear power plants, because this is American-made energy; you don’t have to rely on anybody overseas. And nuclear power plants don’t emit air pollution in the traditional sense.”
“But we would be irresponsible if we just didn’t step back for a moment and see if there were any lessons to learn from what’s happened in this disaster in Japan,” he added, saying the NRC should conduct a safety review to determine if construction standards should be “altered in any way.”
Chu also said permitting for new plants should not be disrupted. “I think if you look at the process in which the NRC approves going forward with new construction projects and nuclear reactors, it’s a thoughtful process,” Chu told reporters after appearing before a House Appropriations subcommittee (E&ENews PM, March 15).
The messaging appears to isolate Democratic lawmakers who have called for no new plants to be built where earthquakes occur.
Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) called for a moratorium on Friday. Yesterday, he and Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.) requested information from the NRC about the construction of several plants, expressing concern in a letter that “reactors located in seismically active areas are not designed with sufficient levels of resiliency against the sort of earthquakes scientists predict they could experience.”
Freeze conflicts with loan guarantees
The letter says Markey has identified eight nuclear reactors located on the earthquake-prone West Coast, and 27 others located near the New Madrid fault line in the lower Midwest.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, indicated that she supports a slowdown in nuclear construction.
“We can’t just move forward until we know that our plants are safe and that we can build them to withstand this event,” she said yesterday.
Carney said any moratorium would conflict with an $8.3 billion federal loan guarantee approved for Southern Co. and its partners for two reactors in Georgia. Other guarantees are pending for projects in South Carolina and Texas.
Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), the assistant majority leader, whose state overlaps the New Madrid Fault in the South, expressed environmental concerns about the storage of used fuel rods. But he believes nuclear power will remain an element of a clean energy standard.
“I don’t think we’re going to take it off the table,” he said. “It’s a major part of the energy picture in America today.”
Sharper expressions of support came from lawmakers whose districts have nuclear power plants, which can provide strong revenue sources through taxes and employment opportunities.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), whose state hosts Calvert Cliffs, a nuclear plant owned by Constellation Energy, dismissed the notion of freezing new construction.
“I think we’re now just reacting to headlines,” she said.
Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 Democrat in Congress, doesn’t support a moratorium, but he does want to see a safety and design review of reactors. Still, he expressed doubt that the level of destruction in Japan could occur in his state.
“I don’t think Calvert Cliffs is going to see a tsunami out of the Chesapeake Bay,” Hoyer told reporters.
Christopher Dunne,
You are out of your depth, and quite inaccurate as to what has been reported here. We dealt with the situation at Danini (Fukushima No 2 plant) as good news and reported it prominently. If you use the search function and do a bit of reading instead of posturing you will possibly discover that we have never entertained the possibility of a nuclear bomb type explosion at Fukushima and refrained from suggesting the event would be comparable in a quantitative manner with Chernobyl until France, the US authorities, and what is now a growing number of previously unconvinced and recognised nuclear industry authorities began to reconsider that possibility.
Your strategy here seems to be to ascribe to Crikey reports including mine a number of common failings in other media reports that we have gone out of our way to avoid, including accepting at face value anything from a power company with a long record of dishonesty.
Your own commentary is full of notablely ignorant observations. For example,
‘the energy is diminishing day by day’. Not if it isn’t cooled. And that is the whole point of the immediate crisis this hour. There is no cooling taking place at the site. There are (reading the US material, which comes straight from its nuclear agency) no accurate readings of radiation levels within the stricken reactors. It says it believes the fuel rods in reactor No 4 are completely exposed. You need to review what fully exposed spent fuel rods mean, especially in terms of the evaporation and drainage of the material dissolved in the now baking dry storage ponds.
Quote from Professor Brook’s blog March 12 - “There is no credible risk of a serious accident.”
So you trust what he says?
Can you picture the public meeting over building a new nuclear power plant?
NUCLEAR POWER: “My experience with nuclear power goes back many years to being stationed onboard the USS Enterprise, the first nuclear powered aircraft carrier,” he said. “I knew it was safe then, and I know it’s safe now.” (John McCain)
CITIZENS: Uh, did you not see the news in March 2011? Those plants didn’t look very safe to us.
NUCLEAR POWER: We are concerned about safety. The events in this group are postulated
i n order to establish performance requirements for the safety systems of the plant.
They include refueling accidents, loss-of-coolant accidents, steam-line-break acci
dents, and rod drop or ejection accidents. In addition, very severe postulated natural
events form part of the design basis conditions. These include a tornado substantially
more severe than any yet o bserved; flooding to a level corresponding to the Probable
Maximum Flood as established by the Corps of Engineers; the Probable Maximum
Hurricane as defined by the National Weather Service, if the plant i s located along
the Atlanti c or Gulf coasts; and for all sites a very large earthquake.
The potential radiological consequences of all of the events and accidents con
sidered in the safety analysis are expected to be well within the NRC siting guidelines.
The reason for this low level of consequences from the design basis accidents and
natural events i s that engineered safety features are provided to control them.
E n gineered safety features include such systems as emergency core-cool ing systems,
the various designs of reactor containments, hydrogen control systems, containment
atmosphere sprays, and special filtering systems. The net effect of the engineered
safety features in a plant is to provide a series of overlapping safety systems and
physical barriers to prevent significant releases of radioactivity.
CITIZENS: Uh, ok. You look like a thoughtful guy. You’re an engineer and you think about this stuff. Still things didn’t work out too well in Japan did they?
Now, what about nuclear waste? That proved to be very hazardous in crisis that struck Japan.
NUCLEAR POWER: “All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.” (Ronald Reagan)
You’re fukushimed, nukies. Face facts.
And the climate cult’s political meltdown should end your brief renaissance.
Roquefort - An Australian journalist now enter the meeting.
JOURNALIST: Is this meeting still going on? What are you all still doing here? Don’t you know there are already nuclear reactors in operation within 500km of here? What about your children!
NUCLEAR POWER: Excuse me, but what are you talking about?
JOURNALIST: Ignore him. You should all be outside fleeing for your lives, not indoors with the windows closed. You should be milling around at your train station waiting for a train that isn’t full. Your local traffic jam needs you. Authorities in neighbouring prefectures should be trying to find shelters for you, not looking for survivors, burying the dead, and trying to relocate the homeless.
A government representative enters the meeting.
GOVERNMENT: Excuse me, but do you have any qualifications for making these recommendations?
JOURNALIST: I read the newspapers in Australia every day, do you? I read Crikey. What do you know about nuclear power, you bought-and-paid-for big business shill? We know more about nuclear power than you do, that’s why we don’t have it. If you know so much, how come you still have it? And we remember Maralinga!
GOVERNMENT: So let me get this straight. You believe being Australian and reading the newspapers qualifies you to give advice to our citizens on how afraid they should be?
Frank Campbell - your tone of crowing at other people’s misfortunes will come back to haunt you.
Thanks, John Reeves, for you posts here. They are chilling. I wish the best for you, your family and all the people in Japan.
As much as we can come up with rational arguments for nuclear power, the events here, and media’s “obsession” with it, show that it is just too scary because when it goes wrong, it goes horribly wrong. I’m reminded of a Jawoyn person who’s father helped stop the uranium mine at Coronation Hill in Kakadu National Park. He said his grandfather had told his father, “Don’t you let them dig up that ground, because if you wake up that fellow that lives under there he will burn up the world.” It gave me chills when I heard that. Not rational at all, but that old man just might be right.
Barry Brooks, by the way, is not a paid shill, but he is a nuclear ideologue, and he is a brilliant and gifted professor - in population ecology. He has no background in nuclear engineering or risk management.
John Reeves
A friend of mine is in Japan at the moment his name is Alan Reeves, do you know him and if so is he OK?
I’m no nuclear expert and I reject the implication that you have to be one to have an opinion. From what I read this does have the potential to be a Chernobyl type event. From what I read the spent fuel stored in unit #4 is where hte biggest problem lies. I read that this is not in a containment chamber and some of the spent fuel here is in the highly dangerous MOX fuel (mixed oxide fuel) category.
There is considerably more radiation contained in the spent fuel than in the reactor cores, and spent fuel can also suffer a meltdown if cooling cannot be maintained. There are 20 years worth of spent fuel at Fukushima 1 and it is the spent fuel that they were trying to cool with helicopter drops. A fire in the spent fuel has the potential to spread Caesium 137 and plutonium 239 very far and wide. Plutonium 239 has a 24 000 year 1/2 life.
I’m predicting nothing but I am worried for my friend and all others and while hoping for the best I personally would be preparing for the worst as a non expert would be expected to, I suppose.
Woke up this morning to rather bad news.
Japan is experience a nuclear crisis right now, however the discussion has degenerated into an ideological fight, straw-man arguments, and names calling. This is the irrefutable fact : if those reactors are not cooled, Japan is screwed.
The original article is not an attack on nuclear power. It’s an attack on the behaviour of the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric. The US Army have just flown some heavy duty water cooler to Japan, however the Japanese government have not yet asked for help. They’re only ‘ready’ to ask for help. Instead, the Japanese government want their police to use water cannons to cool their reactors.
When the radiation level flared up on Wednesday, the Japanese cabinet’s response is to ‘pull out the workers’ for their safety. It has gone far, far beyond the point of concern for worker’s safety already. Those reactor MUST be cooled regardless of sacrifice. This is a harsh thing to say, but if you just leave the site to explode, the spent fuel rods in the pool near reactor 4 will be sending radioactive fumes into the atmosphere for the next few months. If the reactors suffer from a partial meltdown, the radiation in the area will make it impossible for the worker to venture out and refill the water in the pool. This is the issue at stake.
This is not ‘media hysteria’. If the reactors do blows up, the result is very, very bad. Japan may need to relocate the capital back to Kyoto. So let’s us all hope and pray that the reactors do not blow up.
I would like to thank Ben Sandilands for replying to the comments here. It is all to common for writers to post an article and then ignore the comments. I have one question that does puzzle me. Why is it the anti AGW crowd are often also advocates for nuclear power. You all know the ones I mean. Why are they saying we don’t need it as we have so much coal to burn for cheap electricity. I have never been a rabid anti-nuke but I just don’t trust the corporate mentality of the people who would be in overall charge of the design and running of these plants. They seem to have no sense of responsibility.
B*gger that sentence meant to say. Why aren’t they saying we don’t need it as we have so much coal to burn for cheap electricity.
Interesting question, David.
I suggest 2 explanations. First, views about humanity’s Progress being associated with increased technological intensity and sophistication may over value the benefits of technology and under estimate its problems, both in causing global warming and in risking radiation either from accidents or from storing nuclear waste for the next few thousand years.
Secondly, some may think that if they are opposing the green movement on 1 issue they should oppose it on all issues. I suspect that this is the reason for the Australian’s strange and inconsistent positions on many issues championed by the Greens.
@ Frank Campbell: “Brown is the ultimate hypocrite (I say this as a Greens voter until recently): he still demands turbines on the mainland, where they are killing wedgetails right now.”
Frank – this US study on bird deaths in America should get your feathers ruffled:
Vehicles: 60 million to 80 million bird deaths
Buildings and windows: 98 million to 980 million
Power lines: tens of thousands to 174 million
Communication towers: 4 million to 50 million
Wind generation facilities: 10 000 to 40 000 (end quote)
a) Mining industry: Heavy metals, cyanide, arsenic, radiation, carcinogenic hydrocarbons. Depositions of fallout on soil, crops, air and water? Who would know the true figures of bird morbidities/mortalities in Australia? Censored by the industry and sycophantic regulators!
i) 2009: Olympic Dam: Tailings storage facility: “Fauna mortalities associated with exposure to the acid liquor of the existing tailings dam at Olympic Dam were 895 in 2005-06, 311 in 2006-07 and 282 in 2007-08. As well as birds, seven species of mammal and eight species of reptiles have been killed. BHP Billiton recognises these figures underplay the impact because of the removal of carcasses by scavengers or the sinking of dead birds before detection.”
ii) Magellan Metals alone killed 9,500 native birds in 2007 – poisoned by lead. Well they are the ones we know about!
iii) Newcrest Mining slaughtered 6,500 native animals over six weeks. Many were emus. They are the ones we know about!
iv) Oil slicks - think BP and Montara and the hundreds of catastrophic oil spills before that
b) Cats - millions of birds slaughtered anually
c) Pesticides: The bald eagle in the US went almost extinct before DDT was banned for use on crops in 1972. Now there are an estimated 100,000 bald eagles. Australia’s regulators (industry shills) did not ban DDT until 1987. Australia continues its use of pesticides that have been banned in some sixty countries.
d) Climate change/global warming: Killing millions/billions of birds every year
e) Shooters
f) Agriculture - pest poisonings including non-target native birds
Frank - Wind power remains a concern in this regard and studies are being performed to mitigate the problem of bird kills but it is certainly not Bobby Brown who is the hypocrite. I’m looking at you pal.
The most destructive feral on the planet? Homo saps!
I agree, it is an interesting question. I think though that even climate change deniers realize that fossil fuels are a limited resource, so its not so much about the impact on the environment rather than what to do when they run out.
Doesn’t Australia have 100 - 200 years of proven coal reserves and so it is not yet worth worrying about exhausting the supply? Oil is different, of course, but I would think that nuclear energy would substitute mostly for coal fired generators.
David Dowell,
Speaking for myself I have no axe to grind for either discrediting AGW risks or promoting nuclear power. But I do think panic serves no useful purpose, either for reducing emissions or protecting people from radiation accidents. People being urged to stampede against the advice of the Japanese government may be in more danger of exposure than if they stayed inside and took the precautions their government advises. Many of them have nowhere to go, in a country still reeling from last Friday’s carnage.
At a time like this the international media should be supporting confidence in the government trying to balance multiple risks on the ground, not undermining it with accusations of cover-up and words like “Chernobyl” and “apocalypse”.
On the wider question, the world energy markets play a huge role in lifting people out of starvation and the daily struggle for survival, to the point where they can plan beyond surviving the next winter. Simply turning out the lights for hundreds of millions of people, based on the argument that if Australians can afford to consider trillion-dollar investments in renewables then so can everyone else, will not have the effect that the well-meaning scaremongers think it will.
@Gavin - well in that case David’s question still stands. Plenty of coal, no environmental impact - why go nuclear at all.
And finally, I cringe at our loss of face when we talk down to a country that not only has unrivalled technological sophistication, but which knows more about natural disasters and radiation catastrophes than the rest of us ever want to know.
@FLOWER Posted Thursday, 17 March 2011 at 12:35 pm
Bravo, a bouquet of the finest to you. Frank cannot get over petty personal NIMBYisms with those windmills near his country property.
And I assume those stats are per annum? The figure for wind turbines still seems high — are we sure those are not old. One can understand the problem with the old style fast-turning blades but with the modern ones, any animal that manages the feat of getting itself killed is really a case of deserving a Darwin award. (I resisting making an inappropriate joke about Frank….)
I think some people believe that humanity progresses by increasing the intensity of its use of technology and by using more sophisticated technology. On this view nuclear energy is more advanced and thus advances human progress more than coal. So while nuclear energy may be more expensive initially (as cars were initially more expensive than horses) humanity will benefit in the medium term by adopting the more sophisticated technology. As some might say, the stone age didn’t end cos we ran out of rocks.
Thanks for the replies to my question. FREECOUNTRY I didn’t mention stampeding anywhere or turning out the lights. I was interested in the contradiction in the argument that we go nuclear when we have boundless plains with lots of coal under them. Surely nuclear is an expensive replacement for coal. I think there is merit in the argument that if the greenies are against then they are for it. Or to put it another way if it doesn’t radiate or emit we don’t want it.
Japan has suffered a dreadful disaster and nuclear power and has made a complete pest of it self in the middle of it. Thousands of refugees and thousands dead and yet in the middle of it we have exclusion zones causing chaos for the recovery.
David, I know you didn’t mention those things; I did. My reason for doing so was to answer your question: some of us are concerned with avoiding panic and irrationality, rather than trumpeting our cynical evil investments at the expense of human lives.
Consider Gavin Moodie’s point. The fact that the start-up cost for lighting up a society might include high emissions, should be balanced against the longer term prospects. Even setting up a renewable power station might involve temporary high energy usage and portable diesel generators on the building site, so what? People living in the dark may need cheap coal to get them over a hurdle before they can lift their sights to the luxury of saving the world from carbon. Until then you have crises caused by rising food prices relative to income, such as what’s happening now in Libya. Try telling the Libyans that what they need now is renewable energy.
Of course, in an international ETS regime, we could probably get poor countries — where labour and land is cheap but coal requires international transport from far away in Australia — get them started with renewable power in the first place, much more cheaply than we could replace non-EOL infrastructure here. That means every billion dollars we invest in renewables could do far more good in foreign aid to greenfield poor regions which have no power yet, both in the short term and the long term, and with humanitarian and economic benefits that dovetail with emissions reduction. But whenever this is mentioned, Greens cry out ignorantly that this is cheating and avoiding responsibilities. You just can’t reason with them.
@ Free Country: “Panic, stampede, apocalypse, scaremongers, trillion dollar investments in renewables?”
That’s a load of old cobblers FC and you know it. The Japanese victims are not stampeding or panicking. They are rightly concerned about potential exposure to radionuclides and they have every right to be and that includes concerns for their young children who are more susceptible to the insidious health impacts of radiation than adults.
You have conveniently forgotten about the UN’s report on the trillion dollar damage to the environment caused by big polluters every year. The environmental carnage caused by the nuclear industry is well documented and just to remind you, the taxpayer has picked up the massive tab to remediate contaminated rivers and soils in Australia - a legacy of uranium mines abandoned by the hit and run uraniuam industry.
Further a company whistleblower produced documents that show BHP using manipulated averages and distorted sampling at the Olympic Dam project to ensure the figures are below the maximum exposure levels for workers, set by government. In addition, the levels of polonium-210 at OD breached health standards.
Whenever adverse documented facts are raised the nuclear proponents on these threads throw in red herrings with a very occasional feeble defence. There is scant acknowledgement of the grim facts, scant debate and exposing Japanese citizens to radiation is trivialised by the deniers.
Would you buy a used car from these industry shills who sow the seeds of deception and who see truth as irrelevant? Let’s cut them loose. The avaricious nuclear industry is sucking off the teat of a nineteenth century, mired in ignorance and pestilence.
You could have the decency to appeal for calm, or better yet, remain silent and let those on the ground deal with this complex catastrophe until it’s over. When the postmortem results are in, you can crow to your heart’s content about how the tragedy supports your political agenda, and I won’t get in your way.
MR James
There are no wind turbine infestations near us. I mention this quite often, because the urge to say “nimby” is an itch the Crikey knitting circle can’t resist….
Flower:
Why is it that whenever an “X causes Y-nasty” is mentioned, Crikey knitters knit lists of “A-Z also cause Y-nasties”, then giggle in unison?
Every single dispute.
Today it’s nuclear pission: Death by power-plant? (clickclickclick) woddaboud death by ladders, killer bees, hydro dams, pedestrian crossings, coal mines, smoking, asbestos, trapped in a lift with Andrew Bolt, a loo with Alan Jones, the Titanic, listening to Gillard, climbing the North Face of Ross Garnault’s ego (no sorry, that’s suicide), war, plague, cancer and attemped intercourse with a giant stingray…
We end up with the Great Crikey Intellectual Quilt, which is then raffled to pay for Rundle’s research into casual sex in Sweden…
It is the comparable to Cherrnobyl ; in both the fuel rods became hot and caught on fire because of a lack of cooling water.
If you look at the report on Chernobyl, you’ll find it was basically impossible to stop once the fuel rods caught fire ; more water simply increased the steam pressure in the reactor which _caused_ the initial explosion.
Then once the water was vapourised, there was a larger explosion - which would NOT have been contained by a container vessel. In fact, the explosion would have probably been WORSE.
The container vessel is a pressure vessel designed to contain radioactive steam and gases released from the reactor if it gets too hot. It is NOT designed to contain an explosion.
@Gavin at 1.16pm - yeah, thats an interesting take too, and I think I agree. Or at least I’m pretty sure I don’t disagree. Even if it does sound a bit deep for our pro-nuclear elected officials.
But if it’s technology for technology’s sake, rather than need, at what point do the costs - fiscal, human, environmental, ideological - begin to outweigh the benefits?
Einsten and all those guys rued the day they invented this stuff. In 70 years we seemed to have learnt nothing.
@ MLF
I agree that even the most ardent technophiles reach a limit. I think the US has reached that limit in sending humans to the moon and beyond: the US seems most unlikely to try that again for several decades.
But I think many are well short of that limit in nuclear power because it has become normalised in many OECD countries and because there seems the prospect of further scientific and technological advances which may make nuclear power more attractive.
The West is ambivalent about new technologies, but in the end there is a preference for introducing new technologies which is deep within the West’s economic, political and social systems. Witness the introduction of in vitro fertilisation, genetically modified food and gene therapy. These new technologies may be good or bad, but they are being introduced despite deep ethical, economic or practical reservations held by many people.
Yar, yar. I see your point more clearly now. Thanks.
@ Frank Campbell: What a biting criticism. We are all humbled. You are right, of course. I, personally, am in much greater danger of dying falling off a ladder than from nuclear radiation. Are you planning to hop on an airplane and deliver this message in person of how misguided their fears are to the people of Japan?
@Free Country: I think the risk of a Chernobyl-scale disaster is greater than a mass panic in Tokyo caused by the musings of the comments section of Crikey. Please allow us this indulgence, what else can we do?
@Gavin and MLF: Interesting discussion, I think you’re on to something big. The Enlightenment, which no question made our world a much better place, also has caused us to lose our humility. I think we are gradually relearning an ancient lesson.
Syzzzgym…
you’ve got the wrong end of the schtick, Syzzzg: I was talking about bird deaths from wind turbines…
as for the stupidity of putting nuclear reactors at sea level facing a tectonic plate boundary, I’ve been saying that for years…
…notice how the nukies ALL misunderestimated the disaster, experts and Believers alike…..they now have egg on what’s left of their faces…
Hey, and by the way, how beautiful is it that we do have a nuclear furnace, only it’s 150 million km away, and separated by a near-perfect vacuum?
A lot of us are putting our necks on the line.
There are those who say “all is well… it is not too bad”; etc ….
and there are those who are saying “this is terrible; nuclear is bad …”
Someone will end up with egg on their faces when and if we get an honest and complete report and after everything is over (whatever that ends up looking like: cement tomb for the power plant? thousands of Japanese sick from radiation poisoning?..)
it is interesting how we are nailing our colours to one or the other masts. I guess I would rather anticipate the worst and find out it is not as bad, than anticipate it is all okay, and then find out that it is horrible. At least then we are in the flow of having tried to do all we could to minimise the effects.
But that is just me… others seem happy to take the “its not so bad” side. I guess if it turns out really bad, they can say “opps, sorry… guess I was wrong”. Or more likely many will do what Andrew Bolt does: deny it forever! “No one died from radiation poisoning from Chernobyl… its all spin and propaganda by the anti-nuclear side!!”
@Frank: Ah, I think I understand what you were saying, sorry if I misinterpreted.
For me, personally, this disaster has perfectly illustrated the problem with nuclear power. It’s just too difficult to keep perfectly safe, and too terrifying when things go even slightly wrong. And here things didn’t go just slightly wrong. Before this I was increasingly convinced that nuclear power had to be part of the de-carbonising “mix”. Now I’m not. We’re just too fallible - and when we stuff up an aeroplane, it’s a tragedy and hundreds may die. When we stuff up a nuclear power plant, some people die, others are poisoned for decades, and we render part of the Earth uninhabitable. Most people just don’t want to mess with that kind of stuff, no matter what the experts or the statistics might say.
@Jim Reiher, @Syzygium perfectly illustrates the problem with ‘anticipate the worst and find out it is not as bad’, namely that people are jumping to conclusions based on their fears and not on facts. So far, all that we know is that some people (less than 5) have died at Fukushima, probably not for radiological reasons. There is no evidence of dangerously sustained levels of radiation outside the confines of the plant. Now sure, we may not be out of the woods yet, and new information may come to light. I will have to reevaluate my position at that point. But on the facts currently known, it completely escapes me why you would want to ditch the entire nuclear energy industry, and not aviation (to use syzygium’s comparison) or internal combustion (on the basis of the oil refinery fire where 18 have died).
I’d ask that Syzygium and others like them at least withhold judgment until after the dust has settled, and not surrender to ‘no matter what the experts or the statistics might say’ irrationality.
@Mark Duffet:
In the real world, when you are making decisions about the fate of your children and your unborn grandchildren, you do not sit around waiting “until after the dust has settled” - especially when that dust may contain radioactive iodine, caesium, strontium and plutonium.
The bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka yesterday was like a creche - it was packed with babies, small children mostly accompanied by their mothers (many of them pregant) and grandparents.
When we face profound decisions with consequences that will last for generations, whether it be nuclear power or global warming or anything else for that matter, then these are the people that should be making the decsions.
Yeah, I agree. And with respect to all those who have posted contributions, if we are not walking in John Reeves shoes right now, we should probably consider piping down for a bit. Real people, real lives - including those as yet unborn, are being affected here.
Frank – May I remind you that it was you who raised the topic of wind farms vs. bird kills?
When a poster raises a topic, it is an invitation for others to respond. When I submitted a comparison of bird kills caused by other man-man structures, the statistics revealed that your criticisms of wind farms were irrational. Further, Michael R James suggested too that the issue of bird kills by wind farms has been significantly addressed in current technology. Your response to my post was thus:
“Why is it that whenever an “X causes Y-nasty” is mentioned, Crikey knitters knit lists of “A-Z also cause Y-nasties”, then giggle in unison? Every single dispute.”
Frank old chap - would you like the Crikey knitters to make you a beanie for when you go tuttas on your scooter? Wearing a beanie keeps the comb over in place and protects one from the dreaded sun stroke (deliriums.)
@John Reeves, I think we’re talking at cross purposes. I was not addressing personal evacuation decisions (though AFAIK what I said about current radiation distribution remains true; I hope and trust you have access to good information on this). What I am saying is that to have the strategic level debate about nuclear power ‘in light of Fukushima’ is premature.
Mark - thanks for your comments. I suspect that gven two possible scenarios: the actual danger of radiation poisoning compared to the containable damage done when tragedy hits a coal mine… when people are offered the two options most would opt for the coal mine tragedy - even if it killed 16 not 5 in the blast…. Both are undesirable of course. Both should be avoided if at all possible. But there is something “manageable” and “controlable” about a coal mine disaster (as horrible as it is) compared to a nuclear power station disaster.
Perhaps this incident will not be really bad. Perhaps it will all come under control in the next 48 hours. But the possibility of a really bad outcome from nuclear power is always there… and it is not a pretty thought. The reality of much lesser disasters from other sources of power, is “within the bounds of coping” for most people in the remainder of the community. Again, I am not trying to downplay the tragedy of losing even one life in any accident. But there is something quite “out of our control” about nuclear worst case scenarios. And that should stop a country like Australia from going down that path.
at least, I hope it stops us. We of all nations do NOT NEED to go there. We have so many other options!
@ Mark Duffett: “But on the facts currently known, it completely escapes me why you would want to ditch the entire nuclear energy industry….”
Yes Mark Duffett – the nuclear industry are incapable of grasping those reasons. That could be because the nuclear industry has no regard for the environment and an industry which trivializes its impacts on a fragile planet.
One current example includes the intentions of a mere three uranium miners in the arid lands of Western Australia. Toro, Mega and BHP (Yeelirrie project) not only mine for uranium, they also mine for water. Collectively, these three miners will guzzle 3,000 olympic sized swimming pools of groundwater every year from aquifers in a region with intermittent rainfall. This is an industry that seemingly knows zilch about aquifer recharge and cares even less.
Senator Ludlam has warned that: “The region will have exchanged one of its most precious assets – water – for millions of tonnes of radioactive tailings,” an irrefutable fact. Further, Toro’s Lake Way project is just 7 kilometres from the borefield that supplies Wiluna’s scheme water to its citizens, in an aquifer that the Water Corporation says is at risk of contamination because it is “unconfined.”
I remind you again that the Uranium Conference of 2009 boasted of “450 projects” in the state of Western Australia. Which ever way one looks at it, extracting uranium in the driest state in the nation is a reckless abuse and exploitation of diminishing resources that belong to the people of Australia and its already threatened biodiversity which is being obliterated by the mining industry.
Jim Reiher - So do you think that in the big picture, worst-case scenarios of peaceful nuclear power including Chernobyl do more harm than oil explosions, oil spills, oil wars, and the developmental backwardness and corruption that characterizes oil-rich regions?
@ Free Country: “Jim Reiher - So do you think that in the big picture, worst-case scenarios of peaceful nuclear power including Chernobyl do more harm than oil explosions, oil spills, oil wars, and the developmental backwardness and corruption that characterizes oil-rich regions?”
Hey FC – We’re over oil, we’re over coal and we’re over nuclear. They’re all catastrophic and/or insidious killers. Why the comparisons? They’re all obsolete technologies in the age of renewables. And forget about corrupt oil countries for the moment because “charity begins at home” - lest we forget.
And I’ve read too that as in the US, the Japanese government has for decades allowed re-racking of spent fuel pools to reduce the originally designed minimum safe distance between the assemblies so that more can be stored in each pool. Therefore, Japan’s nuclear catastrophe may have been avoidable if this industry had ceased its downward moral slide into economic recklessness, thus placing its citizens at an unbearably high risk of contamination.
The nuclear industry always has and always will scoff at the Precautionary Principle. Ignoring the PP comes with the package by default. Why would an enlightened 21st century society place their faith in these grim reapers?
Free country - thanks for the question. I personally believe that we should avoid Nuclear at all costs, and then work to replace polluting fossil fuels with renewables. You rightly point out the problems of oil, and it would be wonderful to replace that all some day…
mind you, nuclear wont rid the world of oil. Uranium supplies will only last about 50 years with intensive use (I am told), and no one that I am aware of has ever said that nuclear can be the way to rid the world of oil use. They would be used side by side. Worst of both ….
So if I am allowed to dream… I would love to see a world that weans itself of old fossil fuels and which avoids nuclear as well. The money we spend on so many harmful things would be put into renewables instead. …. I know I know… “tell him he’s dreaming”…. but what a dream!
50 years? 30 years? 80 years? I keep hearing a different lifetime of U supplies. River-bed gold panning completely ran out a century ago, and yet we are still somehow mining gold.
As Flower points out, the extremely limited options for disposing of spent nuclear fuel have put pressure on Japanese arrangements for storing them, and it is this spent fuel that is not causing the major problems, not the live fuel rods.
In fact, disposing of spent fuel is turning into a bigger constraint on the industry than getting the fuel in the first place. If we were running a commercial disposal service as has been suggested, the Japanese people would probably be a lot safer today.
Exactly Flower - It is the mind set of the people who are attracted to the nuclear industry. When the prominent blow hards are blathering about only 50 - 65 or what ever were killed by Chernobyl well they are only regurgitating stuff that has been commissioned by the nuclear industry and then distributed by the hire by the lie think tanks. These people love to be in charge and they love the loot but they never take responsibility for any of the consequences of their decisions. It is hard enough keeping the ba**st*ds on a leash when they have control over less lethal stuff such as airlines and trains. I love technology, like a lot of green types, but I am not confident about something that goes wrong in such a nasty way in the hands of these people. If we want nuclear then build the first reactor on lake Burley Griffin. That’s what I call a control rod. (sorry Canberrans)
I don’t think there can be a nuclear disposal service that is ‘commercial’ in the sense that it covers its costs and takes a reasonable premium for the risk involved since it is necessary to store nuclear waste securely for a minimum of 1,000 years, but prolly longer.
Or until GE-Hitachi’s first PRISM reactors come into service and can recycle the stuff.
I understood that technology still had to be proved. In any case, surely Australia wouldn’t contemplate buying a reactor to run a commercial nuclear disposal service.
Mark Duffett, Free Country : I think Guy Rundle’s piece today perfectly explains my point of view. Nuclear Power is categorically different to the common, everyday risks we face and understand. To many, including myself, it is the worst sort of Enlightenment-inspired hubris. I fervently hope and pray (irrational, but what can you do?) that this situation will come under control and there will be no loss of life. Regardless of the outcome, I take this lesson - there are limits to what we can do, and what we can control.
@FC exactly, this is also the reason why uranium supplies will last much, much longer than 50 years, even if we powered the entire world with nuclear.
Mark or others: why do the pro nuclear people assume that science can make nuclear better, (or coal cleaner, or carbon stored underground….) but the same people don’t believe science can make solar technology better, or geo-thermal technology more efficient?
why the selective trust in future science for just some better ways of doing things?
re @Syzygium “regardless of the outcome” etc. - I mean this in the nicest possible way, but this literally means you cannot be reasoned with. Different worldview. This aspect was one grain of truth in what I generally found (you will be unsurprised to learn) to be a load of ignorant nonsense from Rundle. I for one remain an unreconstructed child of the Enlightenment - that’s one position I won’t be reevaluating.
Jim Reiher - Because the sun delivers only so much power per square metre of earth surface, and every improvement in technology can only edge closer and closer to that mathematical asymptote of 100% efficiency. You can’t get blood out of a stone. But there are no such limits getting power out of the atomic nucleus; indeed, the problem is not getting power out of it but getting no more power than you want.
Mark’s right: for a phrase like “Enlightenment-inspired hubris” to come into common usage is a prospect that frightens me more than any apocalypse the rest of you can dream up. It’s equivalent to saying, “I prefer the dark ages, people dressed better and the superstitions were more fun.”
@Freecountry beat me to it. It’s not about ‘trust’ in future science - indeed, the science for Generation IV reactors is already done. Science isn’t just about technological development; it also tells us about fundamental limits. See BraveNewClimate’s ‘Renewable Limits’ section for a flavour of what I’m talking about.
free country… I think you mistaken with that attempt at a maths answer and what is finite and what is not. there can always be better ways to tap the energy coming from the sun, always a more efficient possibility, things we have not even dreamed up yet, and some things we are working on as we speak.
History is littered with people who said “it cant be done”. Humanity could never fly - a mathematical impossibility; humanity would never get to the moon - a science fiction fantasy; humanity would never split the atom; or run a 4 minute mile; or travel underwater in machines for weeks at a time; or whatever….
Your faith in some science “producing the goods” but then not believing it is actually possible to do something else … is mistaken. And it demonstrates the dilemma I continue to ponder.
I suspect there are all sorts of vested interests in why people choose to believe in the possibility of one thing, but not in the possibility of another.
@ Free Country: “As Flower points out, the extremely limited options for disposing of spent nuclear fuel have put pressure on Japanese arrangements for storing them..”
Not good enough FC. In November 2000, Mutsu City, Aomori Prefecture (near Rokkasho Village), asked the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to carry out a field survey to examine whether an interim storage facility could be constructed in the city.
This request may have been prompted by the Japan Nuclear Fuel Limited’s (JNFL) advice that “spent fuel is currently stored in storage pools at individual nuclear power plants. However, at the present rate, these storage pools will reach capacity in the *near future.* Therefore, Japan’s utilities foresee a need to construct an off-site facility in which spent fuel can be properly stored and managed until it can be reprocessed.”
Three years on, in 2003, TEPCO was considering plans to bring an interim storage facility into operation by around 2010, covering an area of 100,000 square metres.
However, TEPCO and JAPCO (JV partners) did not apply to the Japanese government for a licence to construct the facility until March 2007. On 27 August 2010, the joint venture announced that it had received approval from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (Meti) for the design and construction of the Recyclable Fuel Storage Centre.
At a minimum of eleven years on of wilful delay, one could be assured that David Dowell, all fair-minded Australians and I would agree that the pawns in this blatant disregard for safety are the Japanese people (‘Citizens’ Nuclear Insurance - Total Liability’) who have paid dearly for nuclear plants that are controlled by morally bankrupt swindlers, and worse, controlled with impunity.
Jim Reiher, there never was any mathematical theorem saying that we couldn’t fly. Aristotle would have of any such claim, merely by pointing to insects and birds. The same with getting to the moon; it was essentially a matter of harnessing and controlling enough energy to escape earth’s gravity intact and survive the landing.
Aristotle would have made short work of any such claim, I meant to say.
“The Enlightenment and hubris” - I thought I might get some flak for that - old religions die hard. The enlightenment has brought many good things to the world, there is no question about that. I do not propose throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I do propose that not all technology is benign, and there are limits to what we can or should do. Life is about life, it’s not about progress (that’s an enlightenment idea by the way).
I can be reasoned with, Mark, in fact as I posted earlier, I was a convert to “nuclear power must be part of the mix to avoiding climate change”. This event has made it clear to me that we just shouldn’t play with it, because the world is uncertain, we can’t calculate all the risks, and the consequences are too grave. “Regardless of the outcome” - because I learn from near-misses as much as catastrophes. Is that irrational?
“learn from near-misses as much as catastrophes” yes, that’s perfectly reasonable. But this evaluation depends critically on how ‘near’, and just what did we ‘miss’.
I’ll go back to the comparison with aviation. I’ve previously drawn the analogy between the Hindenburg and Chernobyl - both catastrophes with obsolete technology. Rationally, Fukushima should be seen as nuclear’s de Havilland Comet - a failure from which lessons are learned to make improvements in the technology. Not to trash the entire enterprise. With respect to nuclear power, ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ is exactly what you’re proposing.
sorry, meant to include the following updates and perspectives:
bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/18/fukushima-radiation-tsunamis/
and
http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2011/03/17/how-much-are-you-willing-pay-nuke-free/
Those reasons for ‘almost drinking the nuclear kool-aid’ haven’t gone away. For pointers as to what may well happen from here on, look which direction the share prices of fossil fuel suppliers Rio Tinto and Woodside have headed since Fukushima. This is the point also made by Monbiot in the Guardian, and Kohler today.
What we missed was nuclear fallout raining down on one of the largest cities in the world. The argument I’m making is that atomic energy is so qualitatively different from airplanes and trains that the only sensible thing to do is walk away from the exercise, stop trying to make improvements and work on other, different technologies.
JOHN REEVES
Posted Wednesday, 16 March 2011 at 6:50 pm | Permalink
I read all your posts with great interest. I too have been following this disaster closely (plenty of time, on crutches with broken leg).
Your right on the money with everything you have said, an excellent summary.
I do suggest you look up the weather statistics for the prevailing wind directions this time of year.
I agree with leaving ASAP, and suggest a bullet train to an airfield far away from Tokyo, to avoid the crush (radiation?).
I had to laugh at your references to Edano, he came across as a super cool dude under pressure. But now realize that he was selected as the most suitable media robot to reassure everyone. Worked him out! He gives reams and reams of detailed useless data to confuse (reassure?) everyone, but does not really say anything. There is absolutely no proper assessment of the big picture, and/or info regarding all the possible and/or likely outcomes! In short, HE IS USELESS!
Bottom line, to use the American vernacular, basically FUBAR! (look it up).
With four separate units, all without proper cooling, it is one big mess. Similarity to Chernobyl is very valid. Just like WW1 and WW2 are comparable, they both involved death, misery and destruction. Meltdowns (not fully contained) and overheated storage rods all result in escaping radioactive particulates and gases. The mechanism, whether it involves a burning graphite moderator or not just effects the possible severity. So we are just left with a range of possible outcomes of varying degrees of badness. So, bad, very bad, ultra bad………………………. all bad!
Perhaps the best scenario would be slowly smoldering radioactive piles of molten/burning cr?p slowly contaminating everything for miles around for months or years to come. Or, perhaps an uncontrolled build up of heat setting anything and everything that is combustible into a raging infurno something like Chernobyl. We are in unknown territory here, one giant experiment so to speak. So watch this space.
Also suggest looking at the Chernobyl radiation no-live, no agriculture map. If overlaid onto Victoria, it would go from Melb to Albury……….hummmmm…..very sobering.
Begs the question, how big, and how many nuke disasters are required before those pro-nuke-right-wing-nuts start to see the light. They probably still think that asbestos is still not dangerous, and the earth is flat. Some people are slow learners.
A few years ago, 1996 I think, a car bomb went off in Sydney, pretty much vaporising the man in the car, laying waste much of a block with shrapnel and shattered glass for a few hundred metres around. Only it wasn’t a car bomb; it was a leaking 9kg LPG bottle — such as you might use for barbecues on weekends — in a plumber’s van whose leaking gas mingled with the air before something sparked it.
Dangerous things with terrifying potential are all around you. You drive them, you sit in them reading the paper while someone else drives them, you flick them on and off as you enter and leave the room.
In the 1880s, Thomas Edison tried to convince America that Nikola Tesla’s alternating current electricity (which competed with his own direct current technology) was just as reckless and irresponsible as people today believe nuclear power to be. In 1887 he declared that AC had its uses after all — and demonstrated the world’s first electric chair on an unfortunate monkey which was strapped into it to fry. He expected it to shock society into rejecting the high voltage oscillating power source for all time. Today, without AC three quarters of the world would still be living in the dark, instead of the current figure which is about one quarter of the world.
FREECOUNTRY
Posted Friday, 18 March 2011 at 6:41 pm | Permalink
And your point is ??????
His point is that he believes nuclear power is a great thing, and all the critics are either ignorant superstitious fools or they have a financial interest in a competing technology.
FREECOUNTRY and Mark Duffet:
Yes, the amount of energy the sun deposits upon the earth each day is limited.
It is 120,000 TeraWatts.
Considering the entire world’s total energy needs right now are between 15 and 20 TeraWatts, I think we can safely say, that energy from the sun totalling nearly 10,000 times the world’s energy needs, should be adequate for some time to come.
If we collected solar energy over only 1 % of the world’s surface, and converted the energy at 1 % thermal efficiency, that still equals the whole world’s power needs.
If you are attempting to suggest that there isnt enough renewable energy available to supply our needs, what an embarassing attempt it was.
Mark Duffett – you and the nuclear proponents suffer from selective sight and hearing. When participants allude to the shoddy practices in the nuclear industry, you lot perform the side-step shuffle. Failure to acknowledge the grim realities is a sure way of the facts being quickly interred while you lot busily bob and weave and distract participants with more palatable information. It’s some pity that you can’t run nuclear plants as well as you can lobby.
Anthropologist, Hugh Gusterson is a professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason University. His expertise is in nuclear culture, international security, and the anthropology of science. He writes in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:
“The US government, including its regulatory agencies, has been largely captured by the corporate sector, which, by means of campaign donations, is able to secure compliant politicians and regulators. (In this context it is not entirely irrelevant that employees of the nuclear operator Exelon Corporation have been among Barack Obama’s biggest campaign donors, and that Obama appointed Exelon’s CEO to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Energy Future.)”
Illinois’ Braidwood reactor leaked so many millions of gallons of tritium-laced water that Exelon was forced to buy a new municipal water system for a whole town. In 2008, at New Jersey’s Oyster Creek reactor, tritium was reported leaking a second time shortly after Exelon got it a 20-year licence extension. The leak was spilling about 7,200 gallons a day and contained 500 times the acceptable level of radiation for drinking water.
Undeterred, the cavalier Exelon volunteered to truncate its licence and allow the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant to operate until 2019. This was simply a ruse to avoid investing in cooling towers to prevent the reactor sucking up millions/billions of fish and marine organisms every year. The rusting, belching Oyster Creek unit is the oldest operating reactor in the US.
So what do those guys say before they detonate a nuclear device? “Standby?”
My point is further to Mark Duffett’s point at 5:19 pm. If we abandoned every technology that ever had a setback … either from the Soviets designing a power station that never could have been built in the west and then trampling even their own atrocious safety standards; or from the Japanese running out of disposal options because of NIMBYism everywhere that a waste dump is proposed (such as Australia), and then putting it in the too hard basket until a once-in-a-century tsunami hits it … if the first tamer of fire had been written off as a madman after someone lost control and burned his whole clan to death … we’d all still be living in the dark.
CAPTAIN PLANET
Posted Friday, 18 March 2011 at 7:30 pm | Permalink
His point is that he believes nuclear power is a great thing, and all the critics are either ignorant superstitious fools or they have a financial interest in a competing technology.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -
1. I think that nuke power is currently stupid based on simple cost benefit, risk benefit basis.
2. The risk is exacerbated by the simple fact that they are designed by imperfect men, built by imperfect men operated by imperfect men, and maintained by imperfect men, and manufactured with imperfect materials, with imperfect safety procedures, and subject to cost cutting by imperfect accountants, and located in unsuitable/imperfect locations by imperfect bureaucrats and imperfect politicians. And decisions for life extensions of old unreliable worn out nuclear plants are made by imperfect (and totally ignorant) politicians (the later, whose sum scientific and engineering knowledge could be written on the back of a postage stamp with room to spare).
3. There are some 450 power reactors world wide, with three major events (Three Mile Island, although contained, was a close shave, more good luck than anything else, and with radioactive, noble gases, steam vented that sent the radiation meters right off the scale). It’s a miracle that the Three Mile Island build up of radioactive hydrogen gas didn’t explode. That is one meltdown per 150 reactors so far. A pretty sh!tty safety record. And that does not include all the other close shaves that are covered up and not reported.
4. If we had had 4,500 power plants instead of 450, that would have meant 30 major accidents including 10 Chenobyls with ten radioactive exclusion zones. If you lived near several of these nukes, you would feel like you are in a game of russian roulette, and you would have to ask yourself, like in the Dirty Harry movie, do you feel lucky, Punk?
5. If there is a radioactive plume from Fukushima anything like Chernobyl, and the wind happens to be blowing towards Tokyo (with, what about ten million residents?), just imagine turning it into a permanent ghost town just like Pripyat. Just overlay the Chernobyl radiation no-live zone map over Fukushima and Tokyo! Doesn’t that put a shiver up your spine! See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chernobyl_radiation_map_1996.svg
6. Nukes are not economic, they need massive Government subsidies. Plus government insurance guarantees.
Insurance companies/actuators know their stuff, why won’t they touch them with a ten foot barge pole? Duh!!!
7. Pu 239 has a half life of 24,100 years, and won’t be safe several times that. You cannot just store and forget this stuff. Each kilogram of Pu 239 is probably mixed up with 100 Kg of depleted (ie still radioactive) uranium. So let’s say storage costs of only a hundred dollars per year per kilogram of any of this stuff. Plus factor in the multi billion dollar cost of decommissioning a Nuke Plant. Bingo! No way is any Nuke Power station economic to run over it’s lifetime.
8. I could keep going, but if you have not got the point by now, you would have to be deaf dumb and blind.
9. Yes, I AM a critic of Nuke Power. However, I have an open mind, and I am perfectly open to reconsider, provided the technology and humane factors evolve to such a degree, so as to negate all the above issues. But I am extremely doubtful.
10. By now you should have realized that I am definitelly not “ignorant”!
11. Not superstitious.
12. Not a fool.
13. Nor do I have a financial interest in a competing technology.
14. I think that the judgemental generalization about “all the critics”, simply reflects self evidently on the accuser.
Flower, I ignore your catalogues of shoddy practices in the (yesterday mining, today nuclear, tomorrow, what, forestry?) industry because they’re irrelevant to the issue at hand. There are shoddy practices in the finance industry, does that mean you never use a bank? There are shoddy practices in the building industry, does that mean you don’t live in a house? There is bribery and corruption in the pharmaceuticals industry…you get the idea. Identification of these shortcomings is useful if it helps get them fixed, not as a rationale for trashing the entire enterprise.
Just re-reading some of the previous posts that I must admit, I had read originally in quite some haste.
Some of the arguments presented, appeared quite strange, and struck me as rather delusional.
It inspired me to have a poke around on the web, and I found this quote together with a rather obvious explanation, which I thought rather appropriate:
“None so blind as those who will not see………………. Meaning: Nobody is more blind than the person who decides he does not want to see. Often used in reference to prejudice and intolerance.”
http://www.englishclub.com/ref/esl/Sayings/Quizzes/Will/None_so_blind_as_those_who_will_not_see_959.htm
Hummmmmm!
Mark Duffett - I’ve met a few artful dodgers who throw in the the red herrings when they’re cornered but let’s get back on topic, shall we? So to which catastrophe would you attribute the following article excerpts?:
In the days that followed a dangerous cloud of ‘fallout’ was carried in a south easterly direction towards cities in the North of the country. The scientists were unsure how to deal with the raging fire. They tried to pump in carbon dioxide gas to try and smother the flames, but the heat was such that oxygen was produced from the gas and thus fed the flames higher.
They then had to gamble on flooding the reactor with cooling water. The risk they were aware of was that explosive hydrogen and or acetylene gas could be created and then flash over into an explosion. As this critical decision was being taken the temperatures were climbing by 20 degrees a minute.
The fire in the core continued for 24 hours. During this time the wind blew the fallout south-easterly over England and Europe.
It is thought that the fire led to the release of between 600 and 1000 Tera bequerals of iodine-131, 444-596 TBq of tellurium-132, 45.5 TBq of caesium-137 and 0.2 TBq of strontium-90, plus an estimated 1369 TBq of polonium-210.
The NRPB has since calculated that the catastrophe had caused 32 deaths and 260 extra cancers in the population, but independent experts put the total death toll at more than 1000 lives. (Atomic “incident” - Windscale (Sellafield) 1957 – 54 years ago.) Sound familiar?
In addition, the United States has two dozen reactors of the same GE design as the damaged ones in Fukushima. The US has built reactors on earthquake faults and Japanese earthquakes are no different to American earthquakes. The US NRC has increased the earthquake risk of the top ten most vulnerable reactors to between 33% and 420% (minus any tsunami). But you suggest my posts are irrelevant? Or do you mean they’re “an inconvenient truth?” (for you that is). Very tricky Mark.
Flower, you’re the artful dodger. If I had the time, I could adapt your method of reciting a litany of appalling accidents, crimes, frauds, cover-ups, and time bombs, all relating to medical treatment in hospitals, to show that the invention of the hospital was the most disastrous mistake humanity has ever made.
From infections acquired in hospitals that are estimated to kill up to 100,000 people in America every year, to the Australian surgeon Graeme Reeves who whispered to a patient “I’m going to take your clitoris too” just as she was fading into anaesthesia for a minor lesion removal … hospitals are dungeons of horror that have killed orders of magnitude more people than the nuclear and coal industries ever will. But the vast profits in hospitals just will not let governments face up to what monstrous institutions they are, giant networks of organized mass murder and mutilation, all masquerading behind the imagined benefits of science for humanity.
Free Country - The topic here is nuclear energy. You are under the illusion that you can get away with wilfully suppressing and obscuring vital information on the shenanigans in the nuclear industry, to which the public are entitled. However, you are not entitled to gag citizens who supply relevant information that has the potential to knee cap an opponent’s political agenda. In a democracy the public are entitled to digest information from both sides thereby forming their own opinions, so suck it up pal:
Japan’s documented record of nuclear mismanagement (and only the Gods alone would know what else):
December 1995
Eight tonnes of sodium coolant leak from a pipe at the Monju experimental fast-breeder reactor, run by the now-defunct Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (Donen). Monju’s managers tell the Japan Science and Technology Agency that the leak was discovered 8 hours later than was actually the case, and supply a doctored video excluding the worst of the spill. The attempted cover-up causes public outrage.
March 1997
An explosion rocks the Tokaimura waste reprocessing facility, triggered by a fires in a building where waste is mixed with asphalt for storage in drums. Donen officials initially report radiation levels 20 per cent above normal outside the building, but later admit that the true level of contamination was at least 10 times higher. Seven maintenance staff are later found to have been out playing golf.
May 1998
The Japanese parliament passes a bill to reconstitute the discredited Donen as the Japan Nuclear Fuel Cycle Development Institute, monitored by an independent panel of experts. This in turn became part of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency in 2005.
July 1999
Twenty tonnes of radioactive water leaks from a cracked pipe at the Tsuruga power station, run by the Japan Atomic Power Company. Although the leak was contained within the plant, elevated radiation levels mean that clean-up workers can spend only 3 hours a day in the area.
September 1999
In what is billed as the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, three reprocessing workers at Tokaimura inadvertently create a critical mass of uranium, severely irradiating themselves and triggering chain reactions that continue for several hours.
International safety experts are flabbergasted to learn that the workers were pouring a solution of uranium oxide in nitric acid into a sedimentation tank by hand, using buckets. JCO, the company that now runs the facility, and the Japanese government are criticised both for allowing such a dangerous procedure and for a sluggish response to the incident.
Contd…………
Brought forward………
To: Free Country
From: Flower
Japan’s documented record of nuclear mismanagement (and only the Gods alone would know what else):
December 1999
Hisashi Ouchi, one of the workers irradiated in the Tokaimura criticality accident, dies after three months in intensive care; his colleague Masato Shinohara perishes four months later.
October 2000
Six managers from JCO are arrested and charged with professional negligence for failing to prevent the dangerous procedures that triggered the chain reaction at Tokaimura.
September 2002
Freshly revealed reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), dating from the 1990s, describe safety precautions at Japanese nuclear reactors as dangerously weak. IAEA inspectors visited four reactors in 1992 and 1995, finding 90 deficiencies in safety procedures.
The revelation follows the confession by four companies – Tepco, Chubu Electric Power, Japan Atomic Power and Tohoku Electric Power – that they concealed flaws in their reactors from government regulators.
August 2004
In the deadliest workplace incident for Japan’s nuclear industry, a steam leak from a power turbine at the Mihama plant kills four people and injures seven. There is no radiation leak, but the Kansai Electric Power Company is criticised for failing to inspect the failed pipe.
March 2006
A diplomatic cable from the US embassy in Tokyo, later released by WikiLeaks, discusses a case in which a court orders the Hokuriku Electric Power Company to shut down a reactor at its Shika nuclear plant because of concerns over its ability to withstand powerful earthquakes.
Both the company and the Japanese government oppose the ruling. The cable states: “Though not legally obligated to cease operations in this case since this is a civil suit, [the company] will face an uphill battle to regain the support of local citizens for operating a nuclear facility in their backyards.”
A court did indeed order the plant to be shut down, but a higher court reversed the decision, and the plant resumed operation in 2009.
July 2007
Three reactors at the world’s largest nuclear plant, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, shut down after a 6.8-magnitude earthquake. A fire briefly breaks out in one of the units. Tepco initially says that the quake caused no radiation leaks, but days later admits that 1200 litres of radioactive water had washed into the sea and several drums containing nuclear waste lost their lids after falling over.
In the wake of the incident, experts debate whether Japan’s nuclear plants are engineered to standards high enough to cope with major quakes – the country’s Nuclear Safety Commission stipulates that all new plants must be built to withstand only a magnitude-6.5 event. Worldwide, there are about 150 earthquakes above magnitude 6 per year.
December 2008
According to a diplomatic cable from the US embassy in Tokyo, an IAEA representative has said that guides for seismic safety have been revised only three times in the past 35 years, and that the IAEA is now re-examining them. The cable continues: “Also, the presenter noted recent earthquakes in some cases have exceeded the design basis for some nuclear plants, and that this is a serious problem that is now driving seismic safety work.”
(Source – New Scientist – 18 March 2011)
May I again suggest that the IAEA are an impotent “force” and that the nuclear industry is predominantly controlled by avaricious and ecocidal tyrants?
The only covering up here is Flower pushing everyone else’s posts off the screen with sheer volume. I used to read you, but now I know it’s no more informative than listening to airport announcements stuck endlessly on auto-repeat.
The problem with internet blogs that don’t ban spammers is that, unlike old-style public conversations, there’s not much way for an audience to turn its backs on those who simply shout over others without listening. Flower, you have never made one attempt to answer a single anyone has made against you; you merely fill up screen after screen with spam and denounce anyone for their motive in presenting any counter-argument at all. It’s an admission that you cannot sustain your argument, so instead you protest that you shouldn’t have to. It’s spam.
One could unsubscribe to this thread. By Thursday morning I started contemplating asking Crikey to introduce a function that would allow one to filter out posts by specified handles.
The Anti-Nuclear Power Case
1. Nuclear Power is not justified, based on simple cost benefit, risk benefit basis. It is also plainly not viable at all on straight financial ground, when you are honest, and include all all the associated costs.
2. The risk is exacerbated by the simple fact that they are designed by imperfect men, built by imperfect men operated by imperfect men, and maintained by imperfect men, and manufactured with imperfect materials, with imperfect safety procedures, and subject to cost cutting by imperfect accountants, and located in unsuitable/imperfect locations by imperfect bureaucrats and imperfect politicians, who know very little about about science, engineering and risk factors.
3. There are some 450 power reactors world wide, with three melt-down events (Three Mile Island, although mostly contained, was a very close shave, more good luck than anything else, and a lot of radioactive gases were vented, which sent all the radiation meters off the scale). It’s also a miracle that the Three Mile Island build up of radioactive hydrogen gas didn’t explode. The odds stand at one meltdown per 150 reactors so far. A pretty horrible safety record! And that does not include the numerous other close shaves that are known to be happening and routinely covered up and not reported.
4. Keep in mind that if the Chernoble and Three Mile Island events had not put the brakes on building new plants, we would have had many many more plants by now, and statistically we would have also have had many more accidents/melt-downs, and an even bigger community backlash than we have now. Public opinion was always going to doom Nuclear Power when the inevitable melt downs occurred. No matter how many derisory comments are made about the NIMBY factor, it is just not going to go away. So fighting against this aspect, is a totally futile exercise..
5. It is still possible that we could end up getting get a big inferno from any of the multiple tons of spent fuel rods stored at Fukushima, and a Chernobyl size radioactive plume heads towards Tokyo (ten million residents??), imagine evacuating and abandoning Tokyo. Pripyat is still a ghost town! Just overlay the Chernobyl radiation no-live zone map over Fukushima and Tokyo! Doesn’t that put a shiver up your spine!
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chernobyl_radiation_map_1996.svg
6. Nukes where never economically viable, they all need massive Government liability guarantees and subsidies.
When private enterprise won’t accept the risks, What does it tell you? It suggest Big alarm bells type warning to me!
7. Spent fuel contains plutonium. Pu 239 has a half life of 24,100 years, and won’t be safe several times that. You cannot just store and forget this stuff. Each kilogram of Pu 239 is probably mixed up with 100 Kg of depleted (ie still radioactive) uranium. How do you factor in the costs of storing this toxic stuff for over 100,000 years? There is also the enormous end of life, plant decommissioning costs. Common sense says that without even crunching the numbers, that Nuclear Power plants could not possibly be economic, when compared with any/all the other alternatives.
8. I could keep going, but if you have not got the point by now, I am just wasting my time.
9. Yes, I AM a critic of Nuke Power. However, I do have an open mind, and I am perfectly open to reconsider Nuclear Power, provided the technology and the humane factors improve to such a degree, so as to negate all the above issues. But I think we have as much chance of that, as we do of ridding the world of wars.
“Shout over others” Free Country? Me? So let the facts speak for themselves. A quick perusal reveals:
Free Country: Twenty one posts (21)
Flower: Twelve posts (12)
It is an established fact that you have an aversion to truth but just who is spamming?
“Flower, you have never made one attempt to answer a single (?) anyone has made against you; “
Do you mean the personal attacks or a refutation of the contents of my posts? So what would they be Free Country? Refresh my memory. To date I have received no “counter argument” from opponents unless you are referring to such irrelevant and tiresome swill as hospital infections, car bombs, dodgy surgeons, ignorant Greens, oil spills, nimbyism, fearmongering etc. The bandwagon technique!
Alas, after a record 21 posts, you have not challenged me on the documented information I have provided and you have not stated whether my claims are true or false. But then dancing boys of the nuclear industry bewitched by their own hubris, are very proficient at the “bob step and weave side-trot.”
And can I conclude that you are now officially the moderator on this thread - brass knuckles and all?
Over and out - allelujah!
Oops apologies. Make that twenty two (22) posts for Free Country, a record for gibber jabbers at the bottom of the U heap.
Flower.
I can see why you are being flamed!
You are definitely relentlessly pushing an agenda.
You’re lucky it’s a free country, although you wouldn’t think so sometimes!
I found reading your posts was very confronting, and made me think that the culture within the nuclear industry is probably no different to a lot of other industries, (as other posts have already indicated)!
Are you unfairly criticizing the Nuclear Industry?
The BP Mexico oil leak fiasco also comes mind. Documentaries, and articles I have read indicate that there is a very bad safety culture within BP.
So, I can see where your critics are coming from, in that you are criticizing the nuclear industry for what is happening everywhere else.
I think what is becoming obvious is that the free enterprise system has a relentless focus on profits at the expense of safety.
What has changed over recent decades, is the shear size of a some industrial projects, and thus a growth in the potential size of any disaster that might result.
For instance a catastrophic failure of the huge Three Gouges dam in China, would probably kill millions of people who live down stream. The Bhopal disaster with Union Carbide in India in 1984 killed 15,000 and a government affidavit in 2006 stated the (deadly gas) leak caused 558,125 injuries.
So, the key message to me, is that when the likely potential effects of a disaster is likely to be huge, (as it is when you are dealing with multiple tons of radioactive material and huge amounts of heat), safety is paramount.
So, the more danger, then more safety is needed.
I personally think that nuclear energy “could” be made extremely safe.
But, I doubt whether there is “the will to make it really happen” in the world we currently live in.
The focus will always on profit, which simply won’t and can’t change.
I think that Flower’s posts are very valuable, in that he is highlighting that there is “supposed” to be a proper and stringent safety culture and system of safety in place in Japan, but it is simply not working at all.
I feel that Flower has proven this beyond all doubt, and perhaps an inconvenient the truth?
So what is the answer? Do nothing? Business as usual? Try and improve the safety system/culture?
Move away from nuclear energy? Go back to coal? Move to clean/green energy? All of the above?
This is the big debate.
The Nimby Factor.
First good to see my posts finally got accepted, although the delay led me to modify and resubmit one post, leading to a lot of duplicated stuff, sorry about that.
In response to the put-downs of the Nimby people.
Let me state that I am a Nimby, and proud of it!
I would not want a dirty filthy disgusting coal fired power plant in my back yard, end of story. Burning coal puts heaps of poisonous mercury into the environment, as well as a lot of other nasties. Not good for your health.
Similarly, I would not want a nuclear power plant in my back yard either. Because, I do not believe that safety is treated as seriously as the industry says it is. Also, radioactive noble gases (which are constantly building up in the plant) are vented periodically on regular bases as part of the normal (safe?) operating procedures. And, I don’t want to inhale any more radioactive gases into my body than I have to. Also, make no mistake, small accidents are occurring all the time (as in most other industries), some of which will involve accidental releases of radioactive substances into the environment. The further away from me the better I say!
Is nuclear a greener substitute for coal?
Who knows, maybe? But why go from one ugly fuel source to another ugly fuel source. Why ugly? because it produces highly concentrated toxic waste that have to be stored forever, (well almost forever).
I suggest that this is a golden opportunity in time, to actually START seriously moving away from all of the ugly fuels.
Moving to renewable/green energy mainly requires the decision, and the will to make it happen. Some innovative thinking and effort will also obviously be required to solve the base load issue. It can happen if we want it to, and I fear it won’t happen if we get sidetracked into putting our (main) focus on nuclear.
Am I wrong here, are there any flaws in my logic ? JMVHO
@ FalcoPilot
I agree with you that the main objection to nuclear power is handling its waste, but I suggest that stating that it has to be stored ‘almost forever’ weakens the argument by leaving it vulnerable to criticism that the waste problem is exaggerated and therefore can be discounted.
I suggest that nuclear waste has to be stored safely until it reaches natural or at least safe levels of radiation, which I understand ranges from 1,000 - 2,000 years at the lower end of estimates to 10,000 years at the upper end. Even the lower estimates are a bloody long time - longer than any state has existed, for example.
While I agree that Australia should try harder with renewable energy, I expect many will be unsatisfied with the argument that where there’s a will a way will be found. One might propose a few projects to incorporate different forms of green energy into the national power system.
Hi Gavin
(1) My comment was ………..”toxic waste that have to be stored forever, (well almost forever).”
I hope I don’t have to dot ALL my i’s and cross ALL my t’s just so that I don’t risk weakening my argument. a smidgeon. It was just attempt at some humour, whilst still getting the guts of the message across.
Anyone who wanted to check, can quite easily just consult with Mr Google and Mr Wikipedia, themselves.
Mr Wiki says: “The most important isotope of plutonium is plutonium-239, with a half-life of 24,100 years. Plutonium-239 is the isotope most useful for nuclear weapons. Plutonium-239 and 241 are fissile,…..”
I quoted Pu 239 because it is in all the “spent” (still radioactive) uranium fuel removed from the reactor.
It is not safe until several times it’s half life of 24,100, which means something like 100,000 to 200,00 years.
If I had to pay in advance for the storage of some of this “stuff”, somewhere safe that is , including armed guards to protected it 24/7 from pilferage by those pesky terrorists, that’s assuming that I could find someone I could rely on for more than 100,00 years to take it. I think the amount that I would have to pay, including some allowance for future inflation, would be rather exorbitant, and probably make me think that I paying to store it forever!
I assume that you get my drift, that whether it is 10,000 years, 100,000 years or 200,000 years, it is a ridiculous amount of time to have to store really nasty stuff, and at the same time monitor and protect it.
(2) You said ” I expect many will be unsatisfied with the argument that where there’s a will a way will be found”
I assume you mean the Base load problem. Yes people are very reluctant to embrace change, it is a flaw in human nature I guess. Anyway one solution is………. to use Solar Thermal power, concentrated to produce instant super heated steam for steam turbine electricity. The heat can be stored in molten salt, for use over night to generate steam etc. If you don’t know about this, or if you have a problem with this, I am happy to consult Mr Google for you, and get back to you, but I assume you have a access to a keyboard too!
Also sun power can be used to store gravity (a bit humour here! we are really storing a bit of potential energy). Just pump water up hill, is already being done in the snowy mountain scheme. But they use coal power to pump the water. Could just as easily use solar to pump it. It works at about 75% percent efficiency I think (you can check it), which ain’t bad. JMHO (and facts)
PS. In regard to switch to Solar, I think that the main problem is all the existing vested interests, who have lots of power money, and thus influence. They rely on spreading a lot of misleading missinformation and red herrings. It makes it a very hard battle to win, and we really need at least one influential person with a vision, charisma, foresight and drive to champion the cause. But they are in short supply, perhaps a “wanted add”. We can’t even get someone half competent to run our country, or lead the opposition. Well we sort of did, but they both got knived! Anyway, look on the bright side, if we couldn’t maintain our sense of humour, we would well and troolly stuffed!
I personally think the whole world, although giving the outward appearance of running with some semblance of order and control, is in reality, basically out of control, and just bumbles along from one self induced crises to the next. ie incessant wars, inflation, bubble economies, global financial crises et al.
With my very sincere apologies for going off-topic. I promise to be good in future. I really promise! JMHO (and with absolutely no facts included here at all).
FYI An excellent article in the online Age Newspaper to day, I highly recommend to all forum contributors, and lurkers. See: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/no-nukes-now-or-ever-20110319-1c1ed.html
It includes authoritative references to comments made by that pro nuclear expert Ziggy Switkowski . Very compelling arguments indeed. I would be interested to hear from anyone who disagrees with this article. Or, does everyone agree 100% ??? I am throwing down the gauntlet here, so to speak. Please forgive me if a little of my smugness shows through, but I can’t help it! Remember, a little bit of humour helps to keep your sanity in during life’s relentless journey!
A farce!
I hear the Japanese have decided that they are now going to scrap the Fukushima plant!
Duh!
And here’s me thinking that they were keen to get the power reconnected so that they could crank up the power station, and have business as usual!
Heh, what’s happened to all you pro-nuke proponents? Cat got you tongue!
Probably “finally”, realized that to continue to try and push the smelly, runny stuff uphill is a lost cause!?
Some people are just slooow learners!
On another matter:
Aren’t we all impressed with Edano, remember him? he is the totally unfazed government spokesperson. He is so calm cool and collected, nothing fazes him, very reassuring for the Japanese listeners I suppose. It makes you wonder if he would have the same calm demeanor if the whole of the country had been razed to the ground with H-Bombs. Is he just stunned, or just plain clueless.
He reminds me of Alfred E. Neuman from “Mad” magazines of yesteryear, whose mantra was alway “What, me worry”.
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_E._Neuman
I think this forum has now reached the point of being “dead, buried and cremated”, (with my appologies to Mr Abbott)!