Fear and fury in shadow of Japan's damaged nuclear giant

[jpak]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2788602.ece

One wonders what the pitch was: building the planet's largest nuclear power plant on one of its most seismically unstable plots of real estate.

Yet, somehow here the plant squats on the outskirts of this town of 93,000 people, a seven-reactor, 8,200 megawatt monster, ringed by roads that are cracked and buckled from this week's deadly earthquake.

Inside, in the seconds after the quake - which measured 6.8 on the Richter scale - struck under the sea just 12 miles away, pipes burst, drums of radioactive waste toppled and monitors stopped working. A fire broke out and burnt for two hours, and 1,200 litres of contaminated water sloshed into the sea.

When Tsunehisa Katsumata, the president of Tokyo Electric (Tepco), the utility giant that runs the plant, surveyed the damage, he reportedly called it "a mess".

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[peacebird]

1. oh yeah -it's "a mess" when 1,200 litres of radioactive water gets dumped into the sea...

:eyes:

Talk about your classic understatement.

And think - Cheney wants lots of new nukes built here as well so his buds can keep making money. Because nukes are "CLEAN ENERGY" and are "GREEN" and better for the environment.

:puke:

[Systematic Chaos]

2. Yeah, I generally prefer coal- and gas-fired power plants.

They never kill anyone.

[bahrbearian]

5. As compared to Solar and Wind which kill all living things.

[Systematic Chaos]

7. No... they're just totally impractical pipe dreams.

People have been clinging to the hope of a "solar-powered world" for 50 years and damned if it's amounted to anything much more than a bunch of solar calculators and a few rooftop systems that average Americans (to say nothing of the billions in developing countries) will never be able to afford.

[bahrbearian]

8. Or is it because they couldn't be controled by the energy company's

Gee how did we ever get this far withour nuclear power.

[NickB79]

9. Solar and wind can't be controlled by energy corporations???

Who builds solar panels and wind turbines? Energy corporations like BP (solar panels) and GE (wind turbines).

Who controls the boom in biofuels? Mega-corporations like ADM, Monsanto and Cargill.

Who maintains solar and wind farms? Energy corporations (here in Minnesota it's mainly Xcel Energy).

What are you doing to get energy-company-free renewables, planting a solar panel tree and some turbine turnips?

[bahrbearian]

10. Oh I can see my errors now,, Nuclear energy is the way for me.

Actually I do have solar panels and Passive solar heat, I'm soon going to invest in a wind generator.
and I do grow my own Turnips using the Sun. What are you doing about it, buying into Nuclear?

[NickB79]

14. You totally missed the point

You stated "they couldn't be controled by the energy company's" (they being solar and wind power).

Did you build your solar panels yourself? Are you going to build your own wind turbine? The energy companies still control where the energy comes from, because they control the manufacture of the panels and turbines themselves (other than the few home-made wind turbines I've seen posted here, which are pretty cool). If in the future BP and GE decide that decentralized solar and wind is bad for business, they could dedicate all solar and wind manufacturing capacity to centralized solar and wind farms, and there would be nothing the average American could do about it. As it happens, the majority of wind power in this country already is generated from centralized locations, just like nuclear power.

[jpak]

15. BP and GE cannot monopolize wind or sunlight and they cannot monopolize the PV or turbine markets

Other companies can easily step in and market PV/turbines to whomever they please....

[NickB79]

17. Yeah, a start-up company is going to compete against a multi-national

Until the multi-national buys them out and closes them down, as happens ALL the time in the business world.

Seriously, you think that multi-national, multi-billion dollar companies can't monopolize the energy industry? Monopolization of the energy industry is why we're in the mess we're in NOW!!!

[jpak]

18. Yes they will - it happens all the time in the business world.

If GE won't sell you a turbine, Vestas, Suzlon, Toko, Repower Systems, Furlander, Enercon, Ventis Energy, Nordex, Siemens, Zhejiang Windey Engineering, Mitsubish, Eurowind Developments Ltd et al. will...

[Systematic Chaos]

12. "Turbine turnips"??? ROFLMAO

Can I get some recycled rice and some geothermal green beans with that?

:rofl:

[NNadir]

6. Once again, the "liter" is not a unit of radioactivity.

The anti-nuclear conceit depends wholly on scientific illiteracy of the type that cannot comprehend what scientific units are about.

As it happens there are 1.3 trillion liters of water in the ocean and as it happens, this water is radioactive and has been for more than 4 billion years.

The unit of radioactivity is the Becquerel, or alternatively the curie.

If you are here to announce that the area around the reactor is seriously radioactive, please try to make even a primitive stab at learning to use to correct units.

Here is something that is scientifically literate that describes releases of radioactivity from power plants:

For 1982 the total release of radioactivity from 154 typical...plants in the United States was, therefore, 2,630,230 millicuries.

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

If one gets a modicum of scientific literacy - and it may be too much to expect - one learns also what the prefix "milli" means. Thus it appears that the plants in question released 2,630 curies or roughly, 97 trillion Becquerel.

If one seeks to avoid scientific literacy, one could always read posts like the opening one here.

Now, I don't expect much scientific literacy from the anti-nuclear crowd because it is extremely rare to encounter any such literacy. (The fact that the word literacy starts with the word liter does not make the liter a relevant unit, unless one happens to know the units of concentration.

A discussion of this issue, which does in fact, require a modicum of a knowledge of physics to comprehend, can be here: http://www.ead.anl.gov/pub/doc/potassium.pdf

According to this account, over 3,000 curies of radioactivity are deliberately dumped on US fields in full knowledge of the public.

If you are here to announce that you know the concentration or the activity of the release in this Japanese plant, you are invited to do so, but you won't do so, because clearly the significance escapes you.

If you would like to inform us of the need to evacuate any part of Japan because of the radioactivity releases, or any deaths associated with said release, you are invited to do so.

If you would like to demonstrate give a shit about the millions of people who die each year from dangerous fossil fuel waste, well, never mind, you won't...

Hundreds of millions of people could die from dangerous fossil fuel use and and dangerous fossil fuel waste and dangerous fossil fuel wars and dangerous fossil fuel terrorism and neither you nor any other scientifically illiterate anti-nuke would indicate a shred of concern.

How do I know?

Because that is precisely what happened in the last century there's not one of you who could care less.

[Kolesar]

11. Nobody was claiming that the "liter" was a unit of radioactivity

Hey, Mr. Strawman
Won't you please just go away
I can't take anymore of you today

[jpak]

13. Scientific literacy reality check

There are 1.37 billion cubic kilometers (not liters) of water in the world ocean.

A cubic kilometer of water is one trillion liters.

The natural radioactivity of seawater is ~12 Bq/L - the external dose to humans swimming in the ocean from these radionuclides is *NEGLIGIBLE* and *INSIGNIFICANT*

Just to clear up the scientifically illiterate hobbyist nonsense here...

[Dead_Parrot]

16. Well Done Jpak! You did a sum!

Let's build on that, shall we?

OK, according to wikipedia the Sea of Japan covers 978,000 km² and has an average depth of 1.753 km, so that gives us 1,714,434 km³ of seawater: That's 1,714,434,000,000,000,000 liters, give or take.

Your figure of 12 Bq/l sounds about right, so the total radioactivity of the sea was 20,573,208,000,000,000,000 Bq. Add in the 90,000 from the plant and it's gone up to 20,573,208,000,000,090,000.

An increase of 0.0000000000004%, although you'll notice it's dwarfed by the rounding errors in the math.

Do you begin to see how useful numbers are for judging how bad (or good) something is?

Which reminds me, about 25,141 people have died from fossil fuel pollution use since the 'quake.

25,141 = big number
0.0000000000004 = small number

You'll get the hang of it eventually. :)

[acmavm]

3. This guy is sadly misguided...

<snip>

"I wish the plant wasn't here," lamented a local resident, Koji Yamada. "But now that it is we have to live with it and hope the government keeps us safe."

<snip>

Good luck with that one buddy.

[Ghost Dog]

4. Heh.

...Japanese nuclear plants are designed to withstand a 6.5 quake, but the construction regulations are 25 years old and new rules issued this year recommended an upgrade to 6.7.

Insiders suggest that a quake resistance of 7.0. The new regulations may demand that geologists identify quake faults active up to 130,000 years ago, a reaction to the stunning revelation that the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant sat atop an active fault.

"The logic of nuclear power is that the companies want to reduce the costs of earthquake-resistant design as much as possible," says the anti-nuclear academic Professor Tetsuji Imanaka. "That leaves a lot of room for underestimating the risks."

As the quake hit on Monday, a gravestone in a village a few miles away toppled and smashed. The grave belonged to the former prime minister Kakuei Tanaka, Japan's postwar master of pork-barrel politics and an early proponent of energy self-sufficiency.

To add to the richly symbolic turn of events, Tanaka helped broker the Kashiwazaki plant. "Perhaps Tanaka-san now regrets his decision," said one local.