Japanese N-Plant Explosion

[iceaura]

I'll stick with fact based assesments over panic based speculation, thankyou very much.

Facts are what you continue to dismiss, wholesale.

For example: Any panic actually visible anywhere here, oh fact-based one? Any speculation?

Suppose you provide evidence of panic and speculation, to compare with the great piles of evidence of false confidence and illegitimate, speculation-based reassurance.

What you trying to argue against is a realistic, sober, fact based assessment of the current state of geological expertise, as it applies to risk assessments when designing and siting nuclear power plants.

On the other hand, a ten year old with a map and a few pins could have told you that any nuclear reactor built on anything like the Fukushima site - let alone a complex of six of them - needs to be able to withstand a 9+ level quake with associated tsunami, plus a safety margin for human error. And plenty of non-geologists, people with a more sensible outlook on the uses of geological expertise at the current state of such expertise, have been saying that for decades now.
”
:Yawn:

Yawn at the Japanese. They need some comic relief about now, and beating the shit out of some "expert" might be good for their mental health.

If that was true then how come countries like France have the cheap electric bills?

Government and foreign subsidy, and shirking some major bills (such as waste handling). French people pay high taxes, have you noticed?

At present solar as a baseline power source (solar plus gird storage) is completely out of economic range,

Thermal solar with any of various forms of storage is about half the price of nuclear, at current scale and development.

That's at much smaller scale, and with much less in the way of development. The upside there is significant.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh studied deaths between 1979 and 1998 among people who reside within five miles of the Pennsylvania plant. - -
- - - -
"Twenty years is the latency period for most cancers."
”
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/...in527826.shtml

As soon as you hear the words "reside within five miles", you should squint at this kind of thing. That's a dubious method of estimating exposure to the consequences of a nuclear accident - it's not a point source of radiation emission, and the worst of the exposure travels with the exposed person.

Then you have the counting of deaths, rather than incidences. Then you have the increased rate of death from heart disease, unexplained. Then you have an increase in radiation caused cancer attributed to background radiation, for some reason. And so forth.

But if it makes you feel better to think of TMI as medically harmless, no problem - I fully agree that may be that case, as the incident turned out very well considering (we were lucky): my original point was about the news and media coverage of the event.

Do you remember TMI as those present described it, in that archive? If not, why not?

Originally Posted by adoucette
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/...in527826.shtml
”
This man seems to be the primary voice of steady reason here

Every assessment he's made of the Japanese incident has turned out wrong, so far in this thread. Go back and see for yourself.

Paranoia in the US seems to be growing.

It's the common response to false reassurances from authority - reality debunks them, and then paranoia has no reliable checks and balances. See my link past, the article by the "risk communication" professional on Three Mile Island.

Since the apologists and promoters here are so wildly and willingly speculation, we might indulge a bit: the fact that this cycle

of irresponsible nuke building, false reassurances in the inevitable crisis, subsequent paranoia from debunked false reassurance, and subsequent reliance on tales of silly paranoia for support of further irresponsible nuke building and deflection of sober analysis,

works so well for the irresponsible nuke builders, deflects anger from them and protects their activities (past and present) from sober analysis,

for fifty years now, this pattern

at least suggests the possibility of deliberation, here. It's always more likely that these corporate powers have simply responded by ass-covering reflex, or maybe hit on something that works and run with it every time, but some of them are pretty sophisticated guys: other possibilities exist for strategies of crisis management and crowd control.

I just find it hard to believe that if an exhaustive geophysical survey had been done off this part of Japan's coast, say in the last 5 years, that it would not have pointed to a potential problem.

Too late, unless there was some policy in place to shut down unsafe reactors and remove the hazardous stuff. There were a dozen reasons to do that, right out front - starting with the waste fuel storage design.

And irrelevant. Great hazard, great risk, was completely evident when the plant was built. It was evident in the lack of relevant knowledge and comprehensive theory, and the location of the plant.

Well, the problem is that the quake was unprescedented. There's never been one like it in modern times. It was thought that a quake of this magnitude was beyond the scope of what quakes could do. This one's re-writing all the books. I don't think this quake could reasonably have been predicted, and let's face it, the Japs have had plenty of experience to base thier models on. But the N-plants survived the quake, it was the Tsinami that knocked out the cooling pumps, and there was no way anyone could have predicted such a massive wave. If it was thought possible, a lot more people would have lived.

In fact,

in the real world, in the realm of evidence and reason

the occurence of an "unprecedented" and "gee, we never saw this before" quake (with associated tsunami or some other quake effect) taking out a nuclear power plant has been predicted frequently, by numerous people, many of them very well informed. It's conventional wisdom. I'ts completely fact based, with attention to the nature of expertise and the modes of its employment. The upshot is that no informed person except a few "experts" is at all surprised by this event. The risk was and is completely obvious, flagrant, right in your face, grade school blatant. The initial reaction to the news was "so it did happen" and "here we go again". The problem is not that this quake was unprecedented. The problem is not that the risk was invisible. The problem is the odd hypnotic effect produced by some of the current official methods of risk assessment in these situations. They keep treating lack of knowledge as evidence of safety, serial good luck as evidence of safety, long odds as safety margins regardless of risk size, and so forth.

Huge risk exists right now, in the upper Mississippi drainage. It's blatant, it's obvious. And if it hits, if the odds break badly again, can we agree that the only appearance of the corporate shills and narrow-focused "experts" who run around saying that their ignorance is evidence of our safety,

their only public show of face,

should be in handcuffs, and not on TV pretending to be reasonable and authoritative?

 

[adoucette]

Yes, there is a genetic legacy passed down in the genes. Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had dreadfully malformed babies. Very sad.

???

Genetic Effects on Children of Survivors
One of the earliest concerns in the aftermath of the atomic bombings was how radiation might affect the children of survivors. Efforts to detect genetic effects began in the late 1940s and continue. Thus far, no evidence of increased genetic effects has been found.

http://dels-old.nas.edu/dels/rpt_briefs/rerf_final.pdf

Arthur

 

[ULTRA]

With California now detecting radioactive particles from Japan, Scammers are cashing in on US paranoia;

[10:57 a.m. ET Friday, 11:57 p.m. Friday in Tokyo] In the wake of the crisis in Japan, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is advising consumers to beware of inadvertently buying fake iodide products that are supposed to help protect against radiation.

Shouldn't even be taking them yet - there is no threat to health as yet.

 

[adoucette]

Every assessment he's made of the Japanese incident has turned out wrong, so far in this thread. Go back and see for yourself.

Actually no.

I have said it would be an economic disaster (three reactors are probably write-offs) and not a radiation disaster and so far that's exactly what it has been.

I predicted no one would be killed by radiation from this event and so far no one has been.

I said there wouldn't be a meltdown of any of the reactors and none have.

I said the containment structures were designed to prevent large scale releases of radioactivty and they have done so, as except for very short periods of time workers have been able to be on site and control the shutdown, lie cables, spray water and get backup generators working etc, something they could not do if the Primary Containment vessels of any of the reactors had been breached.
Most of the radiation is coming from the Spent Fuel Pools, and even in Reactor 4, where they initially thought the lower Torus of the Primary Containment vessel might have been damaged by the H2 explosion, they now realize that it is holding pressure and the radiation was actually from the SFP inside the containment building.

The fact is the real disaster is the deaths of over 6,000 people (and likely to pass 15,000) and the approx $200 billion in damage to their infrastructure.

The NPPs on the other hand have so far caused people in a 20 km radius (whose homes weren't destroyed in the Tsunami) to have to be evacuated and slightly higher than normal radiation doses to the people who are helping to shut the reactors down.

I know the event is not yet over but if you think I left out a prediction I made that has turned out to be wrong, please correct me.

Arthur

 

[iceaura]

I said there wouldn't be a meltdown of any of the reactors and none have.

You said the sea water flooding made it impossible - "no chance", IIRC, is the exact term you used.

In reality, the sea water flooding was a sign of increasing risk - to the point that desperate countermeasures were being employed - of meltdown.

And so forth.

 

[Kittamaru]

ice, at the same time, it was a measure to prevent the meltdown.

Face it, Ice - nuclear power isn't the ungodly satanic evil you seem to think it is... is it perfect? Hell no... but no large-scale, "low-impact", compact source of power currently is.

Tell me, honestly, how many coal/oil/LP/natural gas fired plants would it take to replace a single similarly sized nuclear plant? What kind of emissions are we looking at between that ONE nuclear plant and all those other plants?

The single real danger with a nuclear plant is when something goes wrong... and to be honest, I've seen oil and propane factories go up worse than what's going on in Japan right now. We're talking entire city blocks simply up and vanished in a massive gas explosion... compared to some radiation which, in the grand scheme of things, isn't THAT big a deal. I'm not trying to minimize the dangers of nuclear power... but it isn't evil.

 

[adoucette]

You said the sea water flooding made it impossible - "no chance", IIRC, is the exact term you used.

In reality, the sea water flooding was a sign of increasing risk - to the point that desperate countermeasures were being employed - of meltdown.

And so forth.

You've got it backwards though.

I said BECAUSE they could flood it with seawater that there was no longer a chance of the cores melting down.

My prediction turned out to be CORRECT.

All primary reactor vessels remain intact, pressures are all stable and while some fuel is damaged there was no meltdown.

Arthur

 

[ULTRA]

Finally, some good news: FLASH: Japan's TEPCO says they have connected the transmission line to the Daiichi plant, and says that electricity can be supplied

 

[ULTRA]

Arthur, there have been multiple partial meltdowns according to my information. Right and wrong seem a little subjective under the circumstances..

 

[adoucette]

Arthur, there have been multiple partial meltdowns according to my information. Right and wrong seem a little subjective under the circumstances..

You need to come up with an authoritaive source then because from the official sources there has been some damaged fuel, which would be the Cladding around the Uranium fuel, but no meltdown of the Uranium fuel, which requires internal temps of 2,865 C.

The reason for this is because the amount of enegry (heat) evolved from nuclear fuel drops rather rapidly after shutdown.
Now, unlike TMI, where the reactor was shut down because of loss of cooling and cooling wasn't restored for ~16 hours and in that case about half the fuel did melt, in this case, the cores were cooled for those first critical ~9 hours and that really got them out of the immediate danger zone, and why I said, that after that amount of time, if they could flood the core with seawater they would prevent any chance of a meltdown.

Which is exactly what happened.

Arthur

 

[ElectricFetus]

Government and foreign subsidy, and shirking some major bills (such as waste handling). French people pay high taxes, have you noticed?

They pay high taxes for a variety of entitlements so it difficult to say how much they pay indirectly for nuclear power. More so we pay subsidies here in the states for Coal and Oil as well. Certainly the economics of nuclear power are controversial and difficult to calculate, if you want to add waste storage as a cost then you must ask that the cost pollution and warming global be added to oil, coal and natural gas, if you are trying to compare the economics of these power sources.

Thermal solar with any of various forms of storage is about half the price of nuclear, at current scale and development.

Oh and we can build one of those just anywhere?

 

[iceaura]

The single real danger with a nuclear plant is when something goes wrong... and to be honest, I've seen oil and propane factories go up worse than what's going on in Japan right now.

And that, folks, is how the people who are pushing nuclear power generation think. That is not a joke - that's the fundamental attitude.

Thermal solar with any of various forms of storage is about half the price of nuclear, at current scale and development.
”
Oh and we can build one of those just anywhere?

Pretty much. They are more efficient in sunnier places, but you can put them on city building roofs if you want to - where the shade effect would be welcome, cut back on heat island costs as well as supplying power directly.

They pay high taxes for a variety of entitlements so it difficult to say how much they pay indirectly for nuclear power. More so we pay subsidies here in the states for Coal and Oil as well.

So you're going to cease making bs price comparisons?

I said BECAUSE they could flood it with seawater that there was no longer a chance of the cores melting down.

And you were wrong about that. There was still a chance - a scary good one, at the time. There is still a chance now. The reassurances by the experts are all about how a meltdown at Fukushima would be "unlikely" to spread much radiation farther than about 50 km.

My prediction turned out to be CORRECT.

Your assessment was wrong. Your predictions are still up in the air.

 

[adoucette]

And you were wrong about that. There was still a chance - a scary good one, at the time. There is still a chance now.

SOURCE?


See preceeding graph.

The fuel is past the point of being able to melt and has been for some time.

Arthur

 

[ULTRA]

NPR America reported "Officials already suspected partial meltdowns at Daiichi's Unit No. 1 and Unit No. 3 reactors.

A partial meltdown isn't a technical term — it just means that the nuclear fuel rods that make up the reactor core have gotten so hot that they have started to melt.

If the fuel rods melt completely, it's considered a full meltdown, but that doesn't necessarily mean the radioactive materials have breached the containment structure and escaped."

 

[ElectricFetus]

Pretty much. They are more efficient in sunnier places, but you can put them on city building roofs if you want to - where the shade effect would be welcome, cut back on heat island costs as well as supplying power directly.

No, no you can't use solar thermal electric power with thermal storage "Pretty much" anywhere. They need direct sunlight to focus and can't operate on indirect sunlight like photovoltaics can. This limits them to places with little cloud cover, like deserts. Now if your saying we can put up photovoltaics all over the place, I'm all for that and it could supply 20-30% of our power but after that we will need grid storage systems which will certainly increase the total price for electricity significantly. Ultimately it will take us many decades to get such a system providing the majority of our energy, in the mean time we can build more nuclear power plants.

So you're going to cease making bs price comparisons?

Not at all, just because it difficult does not make it impossible, but it does make it arguable and if your intent on not believing nuclear power can be economically competitive when we consider all the cradle to grave and pollution cost, not much can be done for you. Now if you want to agree to stop making price comparisons and thus stop saying nuclear power is uneconomical that would be fine for me.

 

[iceaura]

No, there was not.

Yes, there was - that's why they were flooding it with seawater.

And they were having problems - a couple of times they ran out of appropriately boron-laced seawater, and had to let one or two of the reactors cook while they refilled their source pools. The risk was then fairly high. That was after your assessment.

The fuel is past the point of being able to melt and has been for some time.

Everyone on the scene is still preparing to deal with accomplished and potential meltdown - of the waste fuel, even, let alone the reactor cores. You should go and reassure them - they are wasting a lot of effort and money, risking people's lives to run electrical power to badly needed pumps, etc.

And tell this guy he is being far too pessimistic: http://www.google.com/hostednews/af...ocId=CNG.d09217177032cbbc9a7b49e80f70edcb.211

 

[ULTRA]

New generation multi-layered photovoltaic cells look promising for the future, when thier price comes down a bit more.

 

[adoucette]

Yes, there was - that's why they were flooding it with seawater

Nope.

There are other important reasons to keep the core cool besides a meltdown.

They had passed that point where melting of the UO2 was going to be a problem but they still have to deal with other elements being released from the Cladding and from overheated fuel pellets broken from thermal expansion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior_of_nuclear_fuel_during_a_reactor_accident

See chart, Table of chemical data, see temps where elements are released.
Notice that they all occur WELL BELOW that of the melting point of UO2 (2,865 C)

That's what they were trying to prevent.

Like I pointed out TMI did have a partial melt down, but it went 16 hours with cooling right from the start to do so, when you look at the rate of energy evolving from the fuel on the 4th day of this event (the day of my post), and the fact that they had just flooded it with seawater you will see why my prediction came true (and also why it can't melt down at this time, it's not generating enough energy to melt UO2)

What people keep referring to, a "meltdown" is a pretty specific thing, the UO2 melts and falls to the bottom of the reactor vessel.
Which would not necessarily cause a large release of radiation, but still would not be a good thing, but the issue of radiation release they have been trying to deal with in this style reactor comes well before the fuel melts, which is why they needed to keep it cool.

And though the fuel suffered some damage (the cladding) the fuel did not and will not melt.

Arthur

 

[iceaura]

Like I pointed out TMI did have a partial melt down,

As did reactors 2 and 3 at Fukushima, apparently, as far as we know.

But we weren't discussing that - we were discussing the possibility of worse, which you had assessed at 0 as soon as sea water pumping had begun.

 

[Captain Kremmen]

On long term Health effects. Progeny of survivors.

http://dels-old.nas.edu/dels/rpt_briefs/rerf_final.pdf
Arthur

Thanks. Very informative. And unexpected.
........no evidence suggesting genetic changes in the children born later to survivors (i.e., those not exposed in the womb.....................