Nuclear power perspective

Compare those figures with the deaths from renewables. in one incident alone over 170,000 died in China when the Banqiao hydroelectric dam failed. Greenpeace et al never ever mention this of course.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Worth asking the same of Chernobyl.
Wiki currently says:
“Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus have been burdened with the continuing and substantial decontamination and health care costs of the Chernobyl accident. Fifty deaths, all among the reactor staff and emergency workers, are directly attributed to the accident. It is estimated that there may ultimately be a total of 4,000 deaths attributable to the accident, due to increased cancer risk”

Unless I am much mistaken, that is one question, not a couple.

None died as a result of 3mile island, but Chernobyl is a different story.

“Perhaps saddest of all is that as many as 200,000 abortions were conducted of wanted pregnancies in order to avoid non-existent radiation damage to the fetus.”

Chernobyls Real Victims by Dr Roger Bate
http://www.radscihealth.org/rsh/Docs/UN-Chernobyl/BateReUNDPChernobylStory.pdf

Along with reliable sources such as the IAEA and WNN updates, there is an incredible amount of misinformation and hyperbole flying around the internet and media right now about the Fukushima situation. In the BNC post, a lot of technical detail is provided, as well as regular updates. But what about a layman’s summary? How do most people get a grasp on what is happening, why, and what the consequences will be? Read on mes braves!
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/

Big Jim’s point is understood as “We should do nothing because there is a potential for someone to get hurt”.
The “Precautionary Principle” will send us back to the Stone Age. We don’t build nuclear power plants because of it, we don’t drill for new petroleum because of it, we divert water from the most productive farmland on Earth because of it, we don’t build new hydroelectric facilities because of it. You get the picture. We should do nothing because someone or something might get hurt. There is so much wrong with the Precautionary Principle that I can’t even begin.

Congratulations all 24 Hour Breaking News stations.
Hype to the hilt anything that requires the words Nuclear and Explosion. Even when experts say the radiation levels are measurable but not excessive. Why scare people by offering doom laden scenarios that are not actually existing anywhere in Japan at present?
Let’s have an end to all continuous News services as the presenters think they are “Stars” – Not! and continuos repetition needs to end and maybe historical docu items
used to ease the mundane presentation of news that we have to endure at present!
OK I can use the Off switch like anyone else!
Sarc off.

Claiming 56 deaths for Chernobyl is total and utter BS. The total death toll from the incident is likely in the hundreds of thousands but it is lost in the “static” of the millions of deaths occurring yearly in the fallout area.
Linking an article claming 56 as the casualty number is the worst mistake I have seen in my years of reading this magnificient blog – Pretty much not even aggressive pro nuclear lobbyists will even try to push that kind of rubbish.
I really hope AW will see the problem and take this insult away.

Zero lessons for the UK – we do not live in an earthquake zone!! However, California might be sleeping a bit worse.
I suppose, on reflection, there is a bit of a lesson for the UK – or will be once we see how difficult life is for Japanese individuals and industries now they are deprived of 20% of their electricity generating capacity – of course this is roughly where we will shortly be in the UK due to the Huhnatic’s anti-AGW policies.

(UNICEF) analysed health statistics in Belarus and showed increases between 1990 and 1994 of:
disorders of the nervous system 43 %
cardiovascular diseases 43 %
gastrointestinal diseases 28 %
disorders of bone, muscle and connective tissue 62 %
diabetes 28 %
None of the fatalities from the above list ever made it to a list of Chernobyl deaths. For every death threre has been an unimaginable amount of suffering caused by the deformations, miscarriages, stillborns and the rest of the long list.
Go ahead and make a google picture search of chernobyl. Notice how the children look in the pictures. Wonder how many of you still talk down the effects of that incident?
And BTWm I’m pro nuclear, just anti BS. Claiming Chernobyl was just 56 deaths and nothing more is mindbogglingly stupid.

“Shades of Chernobyl and TMI” is classic conflation. Those are actually opposite poles of nuclear technology, but the media have spent 30 years insuring that we think of them together in one horrible blur.

Here in Europe, the whole bunch of green extremists always ask for more trains, electric cars, etc. At the same time, they want to step out of nuclear power generation. They religiously believe, this will all work out with solar cells or “alternative” power generation. These morons do not hesitate here in Germany to politically capitalize on Japan’s quake and Tsunami (elections are coming), asking for Nuke stop, focalizing on themselves and ignoring the Japanese people pain. Well, may be we should stop atom plants here in Germany, then we’ll buy electricity in France, where more than 70% is nuke generated. Great…

Michael R reminded me of the girl who never tried Guinness because she didn’t like it.
The BBC (surprise) did a good prog on Chernobyl a few years ago. If you exclude the deaths of those heroes who delivered boron by helicopter just above the reactor (they are all dead I think) then the deaths in the surrounding area are even lower. Wildlife is flourishing in the exclusion zone. Apparently the only available graphs of death against dosage are based on the two WW2 bombs, and exclude low dosage. Deaths attributable to low dosage are merely extrapolated down to the 0/0 origin. But the actual facts at Chernobuyl indicate that low dosages may actually reduce deaths: pepping up immunity systems was mentioned as a possibility.
Why has this post attracted comment from so many people surnamed ‘Johnson’?

I saw this
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/14plume.html?_r=4
and had to ask:
What the hell is the military spending its money on nuclear, biological and chemical systems for if they can be exposed to this. Were they all out on deck sniffing it up or something?

Same as with the “Love Canal Great Disaster”. The part of the underlying landfill that was toxic was not penetrated and couldn’t pollute the environment. Yellow journalism at its nastiest. Tell people that they should be sick from something or other, and they quickly sicken from something or another.

Volt Aire says:

Claiming 56 deaths for Chernobyl is total and utter BS. The total death toll from the incident is likely in the hundreds of thousands but it is lost in the “static” of the millions of deaths occurring yearly in the fallout area.

This must be true because, well, Volt Aire says so.

“Without being able to quantify the risk it seens sensible and logical to assume extreme danger.”
This only seems sensible or logical to someone who either believes that there will be no cost and that peoples lives will not be disrupted or who more likely believes that he will not have to pay the cost and that his life will not be disrupted.
It is also the theory behind warmism. “We can’t prove anything, so we need to take extreme measures”.

News item from China this morning.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-03/12/c_13774519.htm
They’re going to continue building reactors, while trying to learn lessons from this emergency. One interesting bit of fail-safe technology already in place:
“But the AP1000 nuclear power reactors, currently under construction in China’s coastal areas and set to be promoted in its vast hinterland, are Generation III reactors and would be exempted from such a problem, as they have a non-powered cooling system. The cooling system consists of a huge tank containing thousands of tonnes of water above the reactors, and will be activated by the force of gravity in times of emergency.”
Simplify, simplify, simplify.

http://www.chernobylreport.org/summary-en.pdf
Official reports leave out 2/3 of the fallout zone.

Les Johnson [March 14, 2011 at 12:21 am] says:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/
“Some radiation was released when the pressure vessel was vented. All radioactive isotopes from the activated steam have gone (decayed). A very small amount of Cesium was released, as well as Iodine … The Cesium and Iodine isotopes were carried out to the sea and will never be seen again.“

Clearly this last sentence will return again to haunt us, in the next reboot of the Godzilla series.

Yes, it is being played to the hilt.
Every single news items covering the Nuclear sites in Japan has the keywords:
Possible meltdown and fear.
Deadlines are imminent, having only hours until doom strikes.
But each successive story seems to reset the counter, and injects new fear of possible meltdown.

Hugo M says:
March 14, 2011 at 2:13 am
Unless the diesel generators were smashed, they should have been able to be brought back by servicing (oil, filters, injectors & pumps) and supplied with fuel via skycrane.
Failing that, the nearest port has tugboats which can pump lots of seawater.
Hey, how’d they get that seawater pumping thing going?

Deekaman – you take an uneducated swipe at the Precautionary Principle – I spent ten years at UN conventions making sure it became law – and am glad of it. It wa sbrought in primarily with respect to preventing the discharge of toxic wastes to the ocean. Prior to this change in the law, the burden of proof fell to environmental groups and even national (foreign) governments to prove a discharge caused harm – virtually impossible to do. The shift in the law (and the burden of proof) heralded the birth and expansion of Clean Production Strategies (don’t use toxic materials if you can avoid them- and then you don’t need to discharge toxic waste). The PP always had a clause which stated – ‘within reason’ related to economic criteria. For example, many would not consider it reasonable to curtail CO2 (not a ‘toxin’) at enormous cost in order to precautionarily prevent possible future damge – and many would! I am on the side of the former only because I have studied the science and do not think the future damage is properly assessed (i.e. the science does not support alarm).
The Precuationary Principle is not well applied to large aras of technology dealing with essentially non-toxic material (like hydro-dams) where normal common sense should prevail. Lead in petrol was another issue – better to take it out, than risk damage to the brains of young children playing in the street. X-raying pregnant women – better to take note of the studies showing excess leaukaemia in children born to mothers who had been X-rayed, than rely on models of threshold effects for low doses – though it took 15 years to make the decision!
As for the Japanese reactor – the death toll is not the main criteria, as with Chernobyl or TMI, it is how close you come to sterilising millions of acres of productive agricultural land, evacuating cities for a hundred years and losing livelihoods for several hundred thousand of even millions of people. The US came close. Chernobyl vented largely toward Belarus’s empty quarter of swampland. The UK and France have both suffered narrow escapes due to loss of coolant incidents.
And consider this – an 1859 scale EMP from a cornonal mass ejection (super flare) that has a frequency of 200-500 years, would potentially wipe out the electric grid in the northen USA and Europe and leave all nuclear stations (and high level waste storage systems) dependent upon diesel generators for their cooling systems. Diesel back-up does not have a good record. How long would diesel supplies last? Did anyone consider this perfectly natural and common event? No, because the design targets for loss of coolant are not 1/500, but 1/10,000 for each of a dual system. This is a good example of the limited intelligence of the engineering and science community – and by that I mean, not lack of skill, but talking to each other across disciplines. The US National Academy of Sciences cottoned-on somewhat later (in a 2008 report on the Carrington Event) and in the UK a report hit the Prime Minster’s desk two weeks ago.

I am a great believer in the Precautionary Principle. Accordingly I think that it would be very sensible for all of those people presently living on the Pacific Rim to move somewhere much geologically safer. I am not absolutely sure where they could all go, and certainly not to my backyard, but somewhere safer than where they are now. To get the ball rolling I could take one, always assuming that I could talk my good lady into the idea. Someone English speaking from California would be nice, preferably not from L.A. or San Francisco, but one of those nicer coastal communities. Let precaution be our watchword and decadence our aim.

I think the main problem with nuclear is the widespread possible detriment a rare event could cause. If a dam split in France it doesn’t really have any chance of affecting me in the UK, could I say the same about their nuclear powerstations?
I remember UK radioactivity went up afer Chernobyl, who knows have many people died in general, it is very hard to measure.
Andy

Volt Aire
Would it help if the original poster had stated, “… 56 countable deaths.”? This is factual. There are a lot of excellent studies on the effects from Chernobyl and except for the possibility of a thyroid cancer increase, which is very treatable, it does appear that overall there has been no increase in cancers. Your point about stress related deaths may have validity. At the time of the accident, the Chernobyl area had a very poor socio-economic status. Health care was poor and statistics on the normal incident of cancer were pretty non-existent. This has had a huge impact on trying to determine the effects of the accident. However, the ruthless way people were removed from the area and dumped elsewhere with little education about the accident and no financial/societal support would more than likely put huge stress on the people. It is well known that the intervenors (those who were forced to go clean the area) went back home and were shunned by their fellow citizens because the USSR did nothing to make them heroes or to educate the public. Reminds me of how I was treated when I came home from Viet Nam. The problem of determining whether or not these stresses have led to a rise in stress related illnesses is hugely complicated by the rampant alcoholism amongst the Russian people and the fact that their socio-economic conditions are not the best.
Ergo, your original statement that “56 deaths is pure BS” is a little over the top, because that is the number of deaths from direct radiation exposure. You may ( or may not, as we really do not know) be correct with regards to stress related illnesses,
but want to bet these would be a lot less if the people were given a decent treatment?

The Japanese earthquake and tsunami disaster combined into sort of a perfect storm. In multiple reactors, primary and backup cooling systems were either destroyed or failed, and their last ditch cooling systems ran out of power.
There are lessons to be learned, but those lessons should show us how to build safer nukes.

“As for the Japanese reactor – the death toll is not the main criteria, as with Chernobyl or TMI, it is how close you come to sterilising millions of acres of productive agricultural land, evacuating cities for a hundred years and losing livelihoods for several hundred thousand of even millions of people. The US came close. Chernobyl vented largely toward Belarus’s empty quarter of swampland. The UK and France have both suffered narrow escapes due to loss of coolant incidents.”
This is comic book stuff, do you really believe it?

Re Peter Taylor

As for the Japanese reactor – the death toll is not the main criteria, as with Chernobyl or TMI, it is how close you come to sterilising millions of acres of productive agricultural land, evacuating cities for a hundred years and losing livelihoods for several hundred thousand of even millions of people.

And so far, despite what the media are saying, it hasn’t even come close.

Diesel back-up does not have a good record.

Really? Do you have any idea on how many computer centres have seamlessly switched to diesel backup without any issues? I have been in 3 different centres that have had to switch to backup power and have done so without an interruption of power to a single server. If I have experienced that three times then how many other centres at how many times have had to do it without any issues? Unlike computer centres nuclear power stations do not need a seamless transition from grid to standby power.

How long would diesel supplies last?

Irrelevant. The question should be be how long do they need to last. The answer is just a few days. Power is only needed to circulate the coolant until the secondary fission materials have decayed and the core has cooled and that should have happened after a few days.

Did anyone consider this perfectly natural and common event?

They would not have asked the question “What happens if a CME knocks out all the power grids?” because they would not care what caused the grids to fail. Instead they would have asked the question (or something similar) “What happens if we are running at 100% capacity and we lose all power to and from the grid for more than 7 days?” and have prepared procedures for dealing with it.

I like the idea of the mini nuclear power plants that Hyperion are building. The company claims they are meltdown proof, easily transportable by truck, quick to build, could meet the needs of up to 20, 000 domestic homes each (well, maybe not Al Gore’s homes, I’m surmising), can be constructed underground away from terrorists etc, etc, and after five years would result in re-usable waste about the volume of a softball.
http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/

Chernobyl was running full steam ahead when the accident occurred. The Japanese reactors are off-line and cooling. And essentially that’s a big difference.
However, it takes a little bit of time to cool a reactor down, apparently it has something to do with it being very hot. But maybe they’d ought to focus on engineering an rapid cool down process just so the hippie hysterics can have piece of mind. O_o

I continue to be amused by the people pitching low cost, safe geothermal energy. One look at the results of the attempt by Basel, Switzerland to tap into their “cheap energy,” despite warnings of geologic action. The project leader was sued by Basel following a minor earthquake, subsequently exonerated of any wrongdoing, as the report prior to starting the project covered the seismic risks involved.
It just goes to show there is no free lunch – TANSTAFL.
Suppose that Japan had had offshore wind turbine farms and they had suffered through the 8.9. What would be left of them?
Certainly anything wave based would have had a problem as well.
Thorium anyone? That’s a better bet than boiling water.
Low Energy Nuclear is starting to really look like it’s worth investigating, a lot less likely to go wrong, if the worst case does happen.

http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/accidents.pdf / Summary of Wind Turbine Accident data to 31 December 2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents
http://www.energyliteracy.com/?p=310 (see pie chart, 8% nuclear, .3% wind)
44 fatal accidents in wind energy, verses 5 in nuclear in the last ten years . In those ten years nuclear provided at least thirty times the energy of wind. 44 x 30 equals 1,320 deaths verses five. In the last decade nuclear has been 265 times safer then wind energy on a energy produced verses fatal accidents basis.
Dave Springer does not like this and points out that this is accidents in the Wind Industry. However, almost 70% of the fatal accidents are on site. The report also says this…”Data in the detailed table is by no means fully comprehensive – CWIF believe that it may only be the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of numbers of accidents and their frequency. However, the data gives an excellent cross-section of the types of accidents which can and do occur, and their consequences.” Additionally environmental costs are not considered… http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html
Multiply that by at least 30 times to equal Nuclear energy production. Deaths in China are not part of the study either.
Large scale energy is dangerous. Nuclear has a very good track record, and current technology can make it much safer then what we are seeing in Japan today, as a result of 1960s technology.

Unless we’re talking about a reactor with no containment, bringing up Chernobyl is pure hysteria. Regardless of how many people died because of it. Worst case, this is a Three Mile Island scenario, and that wasn’t all that bad.
Obvious lessons need to be taken from the issues in Japan. I would think the key one would be to make sure your cooling backup power can’t be affected by a tsunami. More broadly, make sure the backup power can’t be affected by the same natural disaster that can take out main power.
As long as no reactors are built or managed like Chernobyl, the risk for events like this (which will become less risks as more lessons are learned) are well worth having power that you control the supply of.

rbateman said on March 14, 2011 at 3:05 am

Unless the diesel generators were smashed, they should have been able to be brought back by servicing (oil, filters, injectors & pumps) and supplied with fuel via skycrane. Failing that, the nearest port has tugboats which can pump lots of seawater. Hey, how’d they get that seawater pumping thing going?

Only some U-Boat engines (equipped with pressure overload valves) are said to survive a bucket full of water in a cylinder when in operation. So these generators certainly have been smashed beyound repair. And tugboat pumps aren’t much an alternative solution, as one needs high pressure injection pumps to feed water into a still pressurized reactor vessel. Hence, my question still is what actually happened to these pumps (or the system they are part of) that the Japanese engeneers are seemingly unable to fill up the reactor vessel with enough water, be it seawater or whatever.

Good grief , this whole thing isnt over and the cries of alarmists are already sounding on wattsupwiththat…..what’s up with that???? The french government is telling there citizens to get out and they are the global nuclear experts.

yes I meant “equivalent dose” not “absorbed dose” but I think you get what I’m driving at.

Deekaman says:
March 14, 2011 at 12:41 am

Big Jim’s point is understood as “We should do nothing because there is a potential for someone to get hurt”.
The “Precautionary Principle” will send us back to the Stone Age. We don’t build nuclear power plants because of it, we don’t drill for new petroleum because of it, we divert water from the most productive farmland on Earth because of it, we don’t build new hydroelectric facilities because of it. You get the picture. We should do nothing because someone or something might get hurt. There is so much wrong with the Precautionary Principle that I can’t even begin.

Nobody lives by the Precautionary Principle. If you did, you would die.
For example, you wouldn’t eat because there is a slight chance you could choke to death on your food. If you really lived by the Precautionary Principle, no chances could be taken, no matter how small.
No getting out of bed (you might fall, break a limb, contract an infection at the hospital).
No driving. After all, over a million die every year on the roads.
No walking. Dog attack, falls, out of control vehicles.
Every move you make entails risk. But everyone tolerates risk in their day to day lives, otherwise they would have to quit living.

AndyW35, that was my point back at the start of the comments. It is the ‘potential’ that nuclear power holds for disaster. Unfortunately, at least two commentators took exception to my comment and somehow confused the Precautionary Principle with it – which I never even mentioned! Still, as someone used to arguing points on forums, I well used to someone reading something in my arguments that I never wrote!

If the choice is between a cloud of CO2 or a cloud of radioactive cesium, I think I’d choose the CO2. At least it would be warm (if you believe that man-made CO2 causes a warming problem) and my plants would thrive! No one in Japan talked about the potential problems of generating nuclear power adjacent to an active subduction zone. They were too busy raving about their “green” plan and promoting the Kyoto Accord.
Even if we accept that greenhouses gases actually do cause global warming or climate disruption or whatever the name is today, the people of the earth still need to make sane choices about how and where to generate power. The world is still awash in natural gas and oil. Those still seem like better alternatives to me.
The Japanese archipelago is called a “volcanic island arc.” The events that happened over the last few days are predictable and certain. A large mega-thrust earthquake is certain to happen again since only a small portion of the Pacific tectonic plate ruptured. If you live in the Pacific Northwest: take note: a mega-thrust earthquake and a tsunami will happen there too.

According to the reports, they have fed seawater to at least two of the reactors pumped in from the fire water system, which are powered by stand alone diesels. If this is true, and seawater is actually going into the reactor, the cores and possibly even the reactor vessels many never be able to be restarted. The chlorides in the seawater are very corrosive to the fuel rod cladding and the stainless steels in the reactor coolant system. That is very serious.
And one more thing, many reports say the control rods “dropped into the core”. In boiling water reactors like the ones in trouble here, the rods drive up from the bottom of the vessel.

The Japanese nuclear agency is handling the situation well, at least from a publicity standpoint. They are using a scientist-engineering spokesman on television here who is coming off as knowledgeable and careful. He has been spending a great deal of time the last day or so in front of the cameras carefully explaining what is going on in these reactors. Scientists around the world have been able to take this information and explain how things here are reasonably under control, all things considered.
Our worry here in Tokyo is that we are losing a significant part of our electrical generation capacity. We may be facing brownouts and disruptions to rail transport for months to come. For those who hallucinate about having electrical based rail transit in the US, note here that electrical production disruptions will cripple the very public transit they profess to love. The green wet dream that US cities will be powered by electrical based rail transit while at the same time the electricity powering that transport will be produced by “alternative” energy sources is sheer nonsense.

Here is dose of reality from MIT’s Dr. Joesf Oehmen.
Here oar some highlights from Oehmen,s article…
The plant is safe now and will stay safe.
Japan is looking at an INES Level 4 Accident: Nuclear accident with local consequences. That is bad for the company that owns the plant, but not for anyone else.
Some radiation was released when the pressure vessel was vented. All radioactive isotopes from the activated steam have gone (decayed). A very small amount of Cesium was released, as well as Iodine. If you were sitting on top of the plants’ chimney when they were venting, you should probably give up smoking to return to your former life expectancy. The Cesium and Iodine isotopes were carried out to the sea and will never be seen again.
There was some limited damage to the first containment. That means that some amounts of radioactive Cesium and Iodine will also be released into the cooling water, but no Uranium or other nasty stuff (the Uranium oxide does not “dissolve” in the water). There are facilities for treating the cooling water inside the third containment. The radioactive Cesium and Iodine will be removed there and eventually stored as radioactive waste in terminal storage.
The seawater used as cooling water will be activated to some degree. Because the control rods are fully inserted, the Uranium chain reaction is not happening. That means the “main” nuclear reaction is not happening, thus not contributing to the activation. The intermediate radioactive materials (Cesium and Iodine) are also almost gone at this stage, because the Uranium decay was stopped a long time ago. This further reduces the activation. The bottom line is that there will be some low level of activation of the seawater, which will also be removed by the treatment facilities.
The seawater will then be replaced over time with the “normal” cooling water
The reactor core will then be dismantled and transported to a processing facility, just like during a regular fuel change.
Fuel rods and the entire plant will be checked for potential damage. This will take about 4-5 years.
The safety systems on all Japanese plants will be upgraded to withstand a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami (or worse)
I believe the most significant problem will be a prolonged power shortage. About half of Japan’s nuclear reactors will probably have to be inspected, reducing the nation’s power generating capacity by 15%. This will probably be covered by running gas power plants that are usually only used for peak loads to cover some of the base load as well. That will increase your electricity bill, as well as lead to potential power shortages during peak demand, in Japan.

martin brumby says:
March 14, 2011 at 4:47 am
There is no energy strategy in the UK is there?

Chernobyl facts.From `What the green movement got wrong`.

The answer is thorium….what was the question?

The KneeJerk boogie has begun. Lieberman and others are calling for a moratorium on US nuke plant construction “until such time” as we yadda, yadda, yadda.

David said
March 14, 2011 at 4:19 am
http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/accidents.pdf / Summary of Wind Turbine Accident data to 31 December 2010
That’s taken from a source that is against wind turbines so I am not sure how much credence you should give it. If the figure is accurate then fine. However the people behind that site are not against wind farms because of the danger but because of the visual impact of them in the lovely countryside up there.
In regards to danger they seem more concerned about the radioactive particles turning up on the beaches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reay
Andy

It’s not a question of downplaying a disater it is more one of being fed up with end of the world scenarios being fed to us everyday, yet here we still are. Get a grip…

The diesel generators failed becuase they were swamped by the tsunami, the were built, stupidly, on low land. The operators fully expected the sea walls to hold. Also, I’ve read the secondary containment on these reactors is much weaker than at TMI, but better than Chernobyl (which isn’t saying much). So there were some serious design flaws.
Also, please remember that Chernobyl was 100% human failure. It was a half-assed unit built by the Soviet Union (nuff said right there) AND the workers were actively trying to cause an emergency test situation… at that they they did a nice job.

goodbye, safe nuclear power development.
Hello, even MORE oil and gas dependence.
no other choice.

Translated Government messages/press releases here: http://www.kantei.go.jp/foreign/topics/2011/earthquake2011tohoku.html

Ironically , the treatment for thyroid cancer is a thyroidectomy and a drink of radioactive iodine.
If the diesels were running when they were flooded they would have hydraulic lock which usually bends the con rods , snaps cranks , cracks cylinders.

Ecological Tour to Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
http://www.tourkiev.com/chernobyltour/

Twenty-three years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Solo East Travel offers an ecological tour of the power plant. Visitors get to see a reactor, the “dead town” of Pripyat, and the “red forest” where pine trees turned reddish orange because of radiation.

Specifically that’s about 100 meters from reactor #4. On the way to the site you get to stop and feed the fish in a cooling channel. Two and three day tours are available. Stay at Chernobyl’s hotel, visit the Chernobyl Museum, see all the local attractions.
Although it’s likely an error to say “radiation” turned the pine trees reddish orange. Historically uranium was used for red/orange coloration in glazed surfaces, which is why common pottery and ceramic objects can be radioactive, like old-fashioned Fiesta dinnerware (Fiestaware). Thus the pine tree coloration is likely just uranium oxide, from dust in the air post-explosion.
BTW, if you’re curious about glazed surfaces, this is informative:
http://nvl.nist.gov/pub/nistpubs/jres/105/2/j52hob.pdf
Radioactivity Measurements on Glazed Ceramic Surfaces
Thomas G. Hobbs, NIST, 2000

A few folks have mentioned this, but it bears repeating; there is no way the problems at the Japaese plants can turn into the sort of disaster that happened at Chernobyl. The Japanese plants have multiple containment structures, at least one of which is designed to deal with even a full core meltdown. There is no eviedence that thes containment structures have been compromised. (the explosions have damaged the buildings housing the reactor’s containment structures. Those buildings were never intended as radiation “containment” structures). Moreover, the reactions in all the Japanese plants have been shut down. The temperatures within the reactors are, therefore, going down, making it less likely that there will be a meltdown of nuclear fuel.
Chernobyl, by comparison involved a meltdown of nuclear fuel outside any containment structure. That’s the worst of all worlds, and it is not going to happen in the Japanese plants.
Everyone screaming disaster needs to calm down and focus on the real problem; helping the victims of the quake and tsunami. Calmly analyzed, this crisis, like TMI, shows that properly designed nuclear plants can withstand even the most extreme events, and survive with de minimis radiation leaks. Moreover, these plants were built in the early 70s. New designs are even safer. Unfortunately, an uninformed media with a thirst for hyprbole has already whipped up a frenzy of fear of all things nuclear. Our green friends with their precautionary principle preaching won’t fail to take advantage of this fear. Most of us will, I am afraid, not see the construction of a nuclear plant in the US during our lifetimes. Our society will the poorer for it.

That 56 number from Chernobyl sounds a little low guys, does he have a reference for that? I agree we’re not even even approaching the 300+ range here and the numbers are not scary. But I believe there were more than 56 people who had direct exposure while trying to permanently encase the core and died soon thereafter from acute exposure. I would guess the number of surrounding-area-cancer-deaths to be on top of that number. That total number from Chernobyl that he’s quoting is a little suspect, just a little. I think it should be more in the 100-200 range, but I wasn’t there. I’ve just talked with people who were in Russia and in that industry at the time. I could be wrong, it just seems slightly low.
It is interesting talking to these Russian guys. They say the reason there were any large numbers of civilian deaths/exposure is because a percentage of nuclear workers at Chernobyl fled the scene as soon as they realized that they were being exposed and some big event was going down. Many of those guys died later as they’d already had an unhealthy dose, but if they had stayed and sacrificed they might have saved other lives. Their comrades stayed and died sooner from the higher dose they received, but they also helped contain the problem.

FACT : More people die from KFC than from all nuclear incidents combined

*****
Pull My Finger says:
March 14, 2011 at 4:29 am
I think the fact that Nuclear has proven so safe, TMI and Chernobyl were both human caused disasters. TMI workers ignored warning signs, Chernobyl workers actively worked towards blowing plant up. The fact that the Japanese plants are still relatively safe despite a biblical magnitude earthquake speaks pretty highly of the quality of construction. Let’s hope they avoid the meltdown, it’s been a bad enough week over there. But of course, hyperbole is the rule of the day when it comes to nukes.
*****
Good post.
Early in the days of steam-plants, boiler explosions wreaked havoc on personnel & even bystanders. This is why the ASME boiler-codes were implemented & continue today — all without the help of government! Later the state govs got into the safety standards.
If the precautionary principle had been used, we wouldn’t have steam-plants today & our electricity-for-anyone society wouldn’t have developed.
It’s a symptom of mass-hysteria when people are scared-stiff of somewhat-damaged but still intact nuke plants (from which not a single person has died), and ignoring the thousands dead around them from the crushing effects of an earthquake-tsunami. The MSM invents & reinforces this hysteria.
Knowledge & developed procedures can defeat this hysteria. Military “rad-monitoring” crews in the 1950s had it down so well that they could enter the very “hot” ground-zero area of a tower or air-burst from a nuke test within 30 mins to take samples in a stripped-down jeep (for ease of decontaminating) in their protective coveralls & filter masks. They just had to carefully monitor their Geiger-counters & limit their time-exposure, then employ the usual decontamination procedures immediately afterwards. Later, their personal rad-exposure “badges” were analyzed to indicate how much they had exposed to, and how much more they could safely tolerate. Similar procedures for pilots flying directly thru the radioactive mushroom clouds to take fission-product samples for bomb-analysis.

Workers
From http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Battle_to_stabilise_earthquake_reactors_1203111.html
“A seriously injured worker was trapped within Fukushima Daiichi unit 1 in the crane operating console of the exhaust stack and is now confirmed to have died. Four workers were injured by the explosion at the same reactor and have been taken to hospital. A contractor was found unconscious and taken to hospital.
Two workers of a ‘cooperative firm’ were injured, said Tepco; one with a broken bone. A Tepco employee who was unable to stand and grasping his left chest was taken to hospital.
At Fukushima Daiini unit 3 one worker received a radiation dose of 106 mSv. This is a notable dose, but comparable to levels deemed acceptable in emergency situations by some national nuclear safety regulators.
The whereabout ( sic ) of two Tepco workers remains unknown. ”
I have a lot of respect for the Japanese with Nuclear. The companies running the plants obey the rules in building the reactors and report what is going on to the government when things are going tits up. Their Government follow long practised rules and move the populace when required. As someone from the UK that knows people living near UK plants I am sorry to say the public have no such information or practices in order. Does the U.S practice even after TMI? Just asking!

I should have added that Thyroid cancer has nothing to do with this post!

Jeremy says:
March 14, 2011 at 6:24 am
Imagine! This is the UK’s Guardian! Monbiot must have had a sh/te fit!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/oct/18/nuclear.russia

Hey… No Fair! I blogged this first!!!!!
On Three Mile Island, I noted this:
Here is a question few are asking:
How many people died or got ill due to the radiation leaked from TMI?
Answer:
NOT ONE!!!
Yep.
Nadda. None. Zilch.
In fact, the only thing that can be proven to have died as a result of the Three Mile Island accident…. was the U. S. nuclear power industry!!!

I read through the article(s) and found the bottom line:
“There is no source of energy that is without some risk. The challenge is to properly balance the risks.”
I worked in line clearance, trimming trees around high power lines, then later as a lineman for the power company. Electricity is terribly, terribly dangerous. We use it every day. I have a first cousin who was horribly burned from a gasoline fire, her skin grafts are ongoing even after nearly 40 years. We are awash in dangers related to power and energy. It is one of the prices to be paid for harnessing the dynamo. The tragedy is that some pay the price while others live out their entire lives, oblivious to the awful costs.

The top one is #3/11 and the bottom clip is #2/11.
Fortunately, the true magnitude of the threat by Chernobyl is immortalized by Gorbachev in person, on camera.

I think some of us have lost sight of what is real and what is not. The following scenario is “real”. There are five monster buildings lined up in a neat row. We all agree that there is some very dangerous stuff caged in the bowels of each of those buildings. Some of us are sure that dangerous stuff cannot get out and harm us. Others of us are not so positive. As we watch those buildings through heavy lenses, the following occurs:
1) Men in radiation suits begin pouring out of those buildings, rigging up pumps, hoses and other paraphernalia and begin pumping sea water into the buildings.
Some of us say, “Not to worry. These folks know what they’re doing.” Others of us say, “Sea water will ruin the ‘stuff’! These guys must be desperate!”
2) Suddenly, the roof and walls blow off one of the buildings. Some of us say, “Not to worry! That building was just cosmetic anyway.” Others of us say, “WTF?”
3) More men in radiation suits run outside the buildings. Everyone without a suit is told to leave the area, PRONTO! U.S. Navy fighting ships off shore of the buildings relocate away from downwind.
4) Suddenly, the roof and walls blow off a second of the buildings. The men in radiation suits tell us to keep an eye on building number three if we enjoyed watching the first two explode.
5) Some of us say, “Everyone is over reacting.” Others of us say, “You have to be kidding me!”

At Fukushima Daichi, four workers were injured by the explosion at the Unit 1 reactor, and there are three other reported injuries in other incidents. In addition, one worker was exposed to higher-than-normal radiation levels that fall below the IAEA guidance for emergency situations. At Fukushima Daini, one worker has died in a crane operation accident and four others have been injured. See Japan Earthquake Update (13 March 2011 02:35 CET) — Corrected .
Six people have been in second injured Unit 3 reactor. See Japanese Earthquake Update (14 March 07:00 CET).
http://www.iaea.org/press/

In India 200000 people die in traffic accidents; many more get wounded. Should they all switch back to walking?
No: learn by trial and error and from other countries how to reduce these numbers and risks.

Is there any substance to the reports that Russia, and Japan to a lesser extent, have histories of being less than forthcoming with nuclear incident information?
On Chernobyl, I can’t quite wrap my head around so many of my fellow skeptics speaking in support of the 56 deaths number. I’m inclined to believe that fifty-six sounds about as likely as 125,000. Both of those numbers come from notorious spin doctoring machinary. Why would we be so quick to embrace the Russian estimates and dismiss the Ukraine’s estimates so overwhelmingly?

Bravenewclimate article rebuttal passed on to me (don’t shoot the messenger!)
*
a quick search reveals a Dr. Josef Oehmen at MIT — but he’s a specialist in supply chain risk management, not nuclear reactors.
He’s citing all sorts of facts about what’s going on inside the reactors that just haven’t been revealed by the govt. For someone who’s neither a journalist nor a member of Japan’s nuclear industry, he either has an amazing inside source providing info absolutely no one else has, or he’s making it up. Josef Oehmen studied Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University Munich, ETH Zurich and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While working in industry, he obtained an MBA degree. He is currently a PhD student at the ETH Zurich Centre for Enterprise Sciences (BWI). His major research interests lie in the internationalisation of the value chains of mid-sized Swiss companies, especially the related supply chain risk management. Josef is a reviewer for several international journals and member of the supervisory board of a start-up in the field of climate protection. I dunno how any of the above qualifies him to comment in great detail on nuclear power plants.
*
These are the sources “Dr. Oehmen” recommends to get better informed:
– http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/: This site belongs to the “World Nuclear Association (WNA)”. So, what does Wikipedia tells us about it? “The World Nuclear Association…… (WNA), formerly the Uranium Institute, is an international organization that promotes nuclear power and supports the many companies that comprise the global nuclear industry.”
So, basically, a lobbying enterprise. And we are to expect *serious*, *unbiased* information about power plants and their safety from such an organisation?
– http://ansnuclearcafe.org/: This website belongs to American Nuclear Society (ANS), another lobbying organisation. Let’s cite Wikipedia again: “Its main objective is to promote the advancement of science and engineering relating to the atomic nucleus.” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Nuclear_Society]

If this hasn’t been stated yet:
The plants in Japan survived the earthquake which was orders of magnitude stronger than their design spec. The tsunami which was NOT foreseen in the design spec, swamped the cooling systems, making it very difficult to implement a graceful (3-day or so) cooling off period for plant shutdown. Think about that – the plants survived one of the largest quakes in recorded history. The postponement of nuclear plant construction and deployment will kill and harm far more people than all of the nuclear power plant accidents to date. By many orders of magnitude. The sky is not falling.

The number of deaths and injuries from three mile island is in fact known. It is exactly zero. someone might have died in an accident fleeing the area or I suppose many years from now someone could tunnel into the reactor vessel and smack his head on something. The statements like no one knows how many will eventually die from it are really silly.
I don’t care who said that Chernobyl could have rendered Europe uninhabitable, whoever said it didn’t have a clue. There is simply not enough radiation there, and there never was, to do such a thing. Far more people were killed by the fear of the accident than the actual accident even at Chernobyl. Tiny radiation doses are generally harmless which is a darn good thing because virtually everyone recieves several hundred mrem per year.
Alexander my question on your argument is why? When and how the dose is delivered is what is important. The source of the dose is not. You are not safer or less safe because the dose comes from fallout or background nor because it is from fission or fusion or activated nuclei.
I guess I am saying your statement for any practical health reasons is totally incorrect.

johnnythelowery says:
March 14, 2011 at 6:42 am
” If it wasn’t Gorbachev who said it, i’d never believed it. That is what Gorbachev knew. That’s why he decided to dismantle the S0viet Union(among things).”
Gorbachev decided to dimantle the Soviet Union? Is that why he described the declarations of independence by the Baltic states as ‘criminal acts,’ and sent in the Red Army to put down the uprisings.
Gorbachev had no intention of dismantling the Soviet Union – he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (or right place at the right time, depending on your point of view). He could no more close the floodgates of liberty than could Hosni Mubarrak in Egypt. Anyone who lived through that period witnessed the uprisings of the people against the state. It was a revolution in the purest sense.
The people of Romania are proud of their revolution – they have photographs adorning walls of bars showing ordinary soldiers fighting the forces loyal to the dictator Caucescu. Tell them how it was Gorbachev who set them free.

I have been involved in the industrial/commercial thermal insulation (temperature control insulation) industry since1977. Some of the many projects I have been involved with in that time, were nuclear power generating plants (while under construction). The plants I worked on were designed as Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR’s). As I was a very young Field Engineer at the time, I was hired in late 1981 to assist in retrofitting seismic support systems (simply, pipe hangers and vessel/pump “hold-down” systems) that required upgrading by the NRC – due to lessons learned from the TMI event. In my life, TMI strangely gave me a way to enter into what would become my personal life-long work career. Strange how these things happen…
Back to it. My main point is this: the more modern (post-TMI) PWR designs, incorporate safety systems that are not installed at the older PWR’s, and were not designed into the even more primitive Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) systems. For the “modern” PWR’s in addition to more robust seismic support for the systems, the other safety features are the Containment Spray (CS) and Safety Injection (SI) systems. Even though (at least to me!) the systems seem self-explanatory, let’s review what these systems are designed to do in the event of a reactor scram (for whatever reason).
Safety Injection pumps (electrically powered) pull water from intially the SI tanks, and inject it directly into the reactor vessel to keep it cool. Secondarily, the water can come from the main source of the cooling water for the plant (river, lake, ocean, etc.). Conatinment Spray takes water from the CS systems sources (primary + backups as previous) and basically sprays the water from the reactor containment roof, to assist in cooling the inside of the containment building. Neither of these emergency safety systems are installed in the BWR plants that are now experiencing problems in Japan. That being said, the issues of available electricity to run the pumps needs to be assured (or the PWR’s would start to heat up as in Japan, regardless of design, unless SI/CS water was gravity-fed as others have stated). In conclusion, what I am saying that in regards to “newer” (post-TMI) constructed PWR plants built throughout the world, redundant safety systems and upgraded seismic (earth-movement) support systems are already there. This makes them leaps and bounds more capable to withstand once-in-a-lifetime disaster events such as the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Newer, more modern designs in to-be-constructed plants, would only included even safer technological advances. I am sure other engineers out there from the “old” nuclear construction industry can weigh in on this???
Regards,
Michael C. Roberts

the tree huggers are all happy now

Malaga View says:
March 14, 2011 at 6:28 am
Re: How many were killed by the Three Mile Island incident?
Nobody knows the long term answer to that question….
what do you call longterm?
How many in the 32 years since it happened?
many? some ? none?

@Peter Taylor:

As for the Japanese reactor – the death toll is not the main criteria, as with Chernobyl or TMI, it is how close you come to sterilising millions of acres of productive agricultural land, evacuating cities for a hundred years and losing livelihoods for several hundred thousand of even millions of people.

… as of course happened at Hiroshima and Chernobyl. This is hysterical rubbish.

The US came close. Chernobyl vented largely toward Belarus’s empty quarter of swampland. The UK and France have both suffered narrow escapes due to loss of coolant incidents.

No, the US did not come close. There was never any danger whatever of the reactor vessel being breached, much less the containment building. A crucial fact about TMI that is not understood is that the accident occurred because poorly-trained operators persisted in overriding automatic systems that were trying to shut the reactor down long before there was any danger of permanent damage. And this was with a reactor design nearly 40 years old. And still there was no dangerous radiation release.
Having said that, though, one thing that bothers me about the Fukushima One situation is the way the top of the containment building was apparently just blown off by the hydrogen explosion. In the US, containments are domed (to maximally spread pressure), poured of the hardest concrete available over a very tight web of high-strength pedigreed rebar. (In the early ’80s I worked at several nuke construction sites.) It’s inconceivable that the outer containment of such a plant could be damaged by an internal hydrogen explosion.
From the photos, it appeared that the Fukushima containment was much flimsier. Anybody have any specific information on this?

DanB, one source noted that the containment on the Japanese reactors is much weaker than at TMI. Of course Chernobyl didn’t even have a containment unit.
Look next to “Disaster Waiting to Happen” and Chernobyl will be there. The plant was an absoloute disgrace to design.

Deaths per TWh for all energy sources: Rooftop solar power is actually more dangerous than Chernobyl
Coal – world average 161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal – China 278
Coal – USA 15
Oil 36 (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas 4 (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass 12
Peat 12
Solar (rooftop) 0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
Wind 0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
Hydro 0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro – world including Banqiao) 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear 0.04 (5.9% of world energy)
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html

Chernobyl did not have a containment vessel. It was built with a graphite pile to maximize weapons grade Pu production. Anybody who compares it to the Japanese reactors needs to read up.

DanB said on March 14, 2011 at 8:48 am

The back up generators arrived and apparently the plugs did not match up with plant receptacles. That’s what’s incomprehensible

… if true and relevant, since such problems shouldn’t be insurmountable by (Japanese) electricians, even if pressed for time. But anyway, this is quite old news. In the meantime, Tepco says, they had restored power to all reactors, one way or another. But they still don’t get the water in! And if should be true that they are trying to use fire pumps as a replacement for feed water pumps, you also know why any noted success was only temporary.

To those who still believe nuclear power is safe. What we know is this much. Two nuclear plants in Japan have exploded and we are now finding out that over 10,000 Japanese are dead and billions of dollars in property has been irretrievably ruined. So put that in your flue pipe and smoke it!

Just curious Ryan, but do you actually believe that the deaths and damages you cite, while accurate as far as we know, are in any way related to the H2 explosions at the Fukushima power plant?

Ryan, I truely hope that you’ve forgotten the sarc tag.

@Ryan Spear
The sad number of deaths are caused by an earthquake and a tsunami, and follow-up incidents, NONE to-date due to radiation exposure.
There have been explosions in the nuclear facility, but as far as it is known the core radiactive and protective elements seem safe so far.
Demagogy is out of place here

“Volt Aire says:
March 14, 2011 at 1:14 am
Claiming 56 deaths for Chernobyl is total and utter BS. The total death toll from the incident is likely in the hundreds of thousands but it is lost in the “static” of the millions of deaths occurring yearly in the fallout area.”
Your ‘likely’ numbers are not based on reality. Incidentally, Chernobyl area is now home to the most diverse wildlife in all of Ukraine and plant life has consumed the old town.

mkelly says:
March 14, 2011 at 8:18 am
Let’s see it was hydrogen explosions that blew the roof off both buildings so we should now eschew this as a possible fuel for vehicles. No fuel cell tech, possible explosions.
_______________________
Huh? Ever seen a fuel-air explosion? Then you should be very afraid of gasoline.
Hydrogen also needs an oxidizer to explode. LH2 should work nicely in vehicles, except the volume required is a little bit of a problem. One kg of H2 is the energy equivalent of 1 gal of gasoline. It’s just that 1 kg of LH2 takes 4 gal of volume. On the positive side, the mass is quite low for that volume. 1 gal of gasoline is about 2.7 kg. The Chevy Volt battery pack weighs 400 lbs (182 kg), and a Prius has a 68 kg battery pack. A key to development in LH2 usage is reducing the weight of the LH2 container. These goals are being achieved.

Well according to the San Jose Mercury News (front Page yet) “The second hydrogen explosion (in three days) “rocked….. sending a massive column of smoke into the air…..
Wow ! alchemy right in front of our very eyes. You take steam containing some small amount of Hydrogen, and you vent it to the atmosphere, where it doesn’t react with the nitorgen or the Argon in the atmosphere, but does react with the Oxygen in the air, so you get a massive hydrogen explosion; AND SMOKE !! how cool is that; organic materials conjured up out of a slightly radioactive steam cloud now containing even more steam.
Hey let that sucker blow every hour on the hour. We used to have hydrogen explosions in our building all the time, when a little hydrogen carrier gas leak got loose in the rafters, and eventually hit somebody’s light switch spark. The little hydrogen boomettes, weren’t the problem; the slight trace amounts of Phosphine or Arsine were the problem; but both of those were also pyrophoric, and went poof, and that time we did get smoke.
But smoke from a hydrogen explosion; that has to be a first.
The head line says “Japan in chaos as death’s soar.” Well yes I am sure that deaths are soaring, and I really feel for the Japanese people in this disaster; which certainly is chaotic; but I am sure there is more chaos in Washington DC and the Casa Blanca, than there is in Japan.
Let them keep venting the hydrogen laced steam and let that blow steam smoke rings till the cows come home. Hey I remember the very first hydrogen explosion, I ever saw, in a chemistry class, shortly after the teacher had finished electrolysing enough water to make a few ccs of a perfect stoichiometric mixture of Hydrogen and Oxygen, that he could light a match to.
With news like the san jose mercury news, we don’t need any fiction writers.

“”””” Charles S. Opalek, PE says:
March 14, 2011 at 1:21 pm
Nuclear power plants are designed with incredible attention to detail by thousands of highly trained and educated professionals, following the strictest guidelines, using the finest materials and components available, with primary containments capable of withstanding the impact of a utility pole travelling axially at 300 mph, with redundancy upon redundancy upon redundancy. And yet the unthinkable happened at Fukashima, a site supposedly designed to resist earthquakes prevalent in the area. (Makes you wonder what seismic criteria was used in the design. Apparently, it wasn’t large enough). “””””
Well strange thing; all the stuff that fell down during the quake, and all the stuff that got washed away in the follow up tsunami; and in the midst of all that devastation; I didn’t see ANY nuclear power stations either falling down or getting washed away. It seems like they survived ok. Now in order to cool down a reactor core, you need to keep supplying power to the cooling system pumps. Not to worry; this is a nuclear POWER plant. Oops !! the worry warts put in a “precautionary principle” power shut down provision to ensure you wouldn’t have any power to keep cooling the core. How cool is that, the plant shut itself down just as it was designed to do, and it is still there and didn’t was a way. Maybe the worry warts, can form a bucket brigade, and keep supplying that thing with soem cooling water, till the temperature comes down a bit. Meanwhile let her blow a few smoke rings every now and then.

Ryan says:
March 14, 2011 at 10:57 am
To those who still believe nuclear power is safe. What we know is this much. Two nuclear plants in Japan have exploded and we are now finding out that over 10,000 Japanese are dead and billions of dollars in property has been irretrievably ruined. So put that in your flue pipe and smoke it!
————————————————————-
That’s a bald-faced lie Ryan.
There have been NO deaths to the populous from these reactors to date. The deaths were from the earthquake and seawater. And the entire plants did not explode as you imply. The roofs were blown off of the building with no damage to the reactors.
Retract your statement if you have any honesty in you. Immediately!

Mr Goodrich – the term ‘hysterical nonsense’ is uncalled for. Perhaps you have not studied the subject at any length.
The British public knew first of the potential land contamination consequences of a major aerial release about three years before Chernobyl – I know that because my research group published the first assessments at the Sizewell Inquiry in 1983 – using the EU’s own computer models. Few took much notice until Chernobyl made it all real – the self sacrifice of emergency services trying to control the release, the evacuation, and the long term contamination. If you suggest this cannot happen in ‘well designed’ reactors, you have obviously never read ‘licensee event reports’ (they are not readily available) – accounts of all the times something really serious has gone wrong at ‘western’ nuclear installations and how close things
came (TMI did come very close to having the secondary containment breached – I suggest you read up on the technical details).
Many European reactors do not have secondary containment – as evidently these Japanese designs do not. Britain is still running gas-cooled reactors without secondary containment.
The explosions in the Japanese plants have arisen because when water is irradiated and not adequately circulated, it generates hydrogen. The explosions will have damaged a great deal of the control structure – and although reports suggest the steel pressure vessel is intact, which is good news, the crucial issue is whether the water can be circulated – because that steel is surrounded by concrete as a radiation shield, and that means little heat escapes – the fuel even after shut-down, generates several megawatts of heat and this will boil the water – once uncovered, the fuel in the centre of the core will melt and reach 2000 C, go through the steel and vapourise the concrete – the most dangerous consequence is not the molten uranium but the volatile caesium and iodine (among about 60 nuclides) which will volatilise at lower temperatures – and the pressure and any further explosions will cause venting and a massive aerial release – caesium-137 is extremely hard to remove from urban areas and cropland and emits a hard gamma radiation that will endanger all emergency personnel. Many emergency plans assume that no major release will happen and thus emergency services will not know the risks they are taking if there has been a breach of containment – until their monitors tell them, which is then too late.
Even a secondary containment, as at TMI, can be breached if the explosions are powerful enough – so very few reactors are ‘safe’ in that respect – all that keeps them so is the quality of engineering, manufacture, maintenance and dedication to procedure that fortunately, the industry has a good record of…..except when it has not, and that information is not so readily available to the public. Many older reactors in Europe would not be licensed today because standards have become tighter.
I spent over twenty years analysing nuclear risks (my colleagues persuaded the regional government of Lower Saxony not to license a high-level waste storage plant – and in the words of their safety minister ‘if we had had such a plant operating during the Second World War, central Europe would not now be habitable.’
The technology is unforgiving: it relies on a functional society. If we took a Carrington type hit tomorrow (solar magnetic pulse), nuclear reactors and waste storage would be of grave concern – just as they are now in Japan. The same would be true of a terrorist or rogue state EMP weapon (talk to the military about how highly they rate that risk).
It seems that many on this blogsite are in denial of the risks of their favoured technology to fill the ‘energy gap’. That is a shame. And rather than derision, a little time doing some research would be time better spent.

Peter Taylor,
I have worked in nuclear power for 25+ years. Your diatribe has many mistakes, I will correct only a couple:
Every licensee event report (for the USA) is available at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/event/en.html
TMI’s reactor vessel did not come close to failure let alone its containment.

Peter Taylor says:
March 14, 2011 at 3:14 pm
“It seems that many on this blogsite are in denial of the risks of their favoured technology to fill the ‘energy gap’. That is a shame. And rather than derision, a little time doing some research would be time better spent.”
The only comment about these reactors that is necessary is that they were built at an unacceptable site. Siting is the whole issue in this particular case. All the comments about other matters are absolutely unnecessary. The media cannot focus on the issue to save their lives. Neither can many others.

@Peter Taylor again:

Mr Goodrich – the term ‘hysterical nonsense’ is uncalled for.

Actually, I called it “hysterical rubbish”, but I’ll settle for “hysterical nonsense” if you prefer.
Due to my employment at the time, I was privileged to read the entire Met-Ed technical “lessons learned” report on the TMI incident. To say that the melting core will reach 2000 deg C is simply silly.
Peddle this stuff to Jane Fonda and fear-mongering EU bureaucrats. I stand by my characterization, in either version. I do not find it particularly convincing that you have been promulgating hysterical rubbish for thirty years, though it does give me some appreciation for your persistence.

David says:
March 14, 2011 at 5:52 am
How many accidents have there been worldwide with wind turbines, since they started being used in earnest..?
One..?
Ten..?
A hundred..??
Answer: 933.
How many fatalities..?
None..?
One..?
Ten..?
Answer: 73.
(There’ll be many more when maintaining offshore farms becomes an ongoing situation, I reckon..)
Makes nuclear power’s record look pretty good, really…
And over the last ten years nuclear has produced at least 30 times, and more likely 50 times as much energy.

@Peter Taylor
1. The Chernobyl accident happened when the reactor was running at full capacity unlike in Japan where the nuclear process had been stopped due to earth quake.
2. The Chernobyl design was, and will always be considered to be (due to obvious disadvantages in security) of inferior design.
3. Chernobyl was run by drunken personal managing a power plant which security features wasn’t up to par by a long shot.
4. People went back to farm the land in and around Chernobyl a long time ago.
5. So far there hasn’t been any more people dying from “Chernobyl” ‘an have been from US nuclear weapons testing during 30 years in California.
6. There was civilians who survived both of the atomic bombs in Japan during WWII who lived to a ripe old age of over 75.
7. Observation has it, that Japanese people rebuilt Nagasaki and Hiroshima and assumed to live in the newly built cities pretty much as soon as the cloud cleared, “weaponized radioactive” and what not didn’t hinder ’em at all. They survived two a-bombs and the ensuing “weaponized” radioactive down fall, and rebuilt. Of course that might be a chock to the hordes of crazed climate hysterical hippies who probably would just have run around screaming until they all bloody croaked.
8. The average citizen of Japan is probably more of a practical expert on every thing on every potential looming Japanese disaster ‘an any hysterical theoretical expert from the west. So if they don’t flee en mass to North Korea but stay to rebuild, why should even the hysterical and overly anxious people of the western world worry?

Poster “beng”, somewhere above, spoke of the radiological safety measures taken at Nevada Test Site during above-ground nuclear weapons testing.
As a US Army officer, I and several other officers went out toward GZ after shots and provided escort for several battalions of Marine and Army troops as they maneuvered post-detonation. We had to look (with Geiger counters) for “hot” items flung out from the detonation, such as guy-wire turnbuckles and other attractive souvenirs and mark them so the guys wouldn’t pocket them and ensure future sterility.
We all took the detonations in trenches at about 5000 yd. from GZ and took off on maneuver after the flash, ground wave and neutron flux had abated. This particular series was called “Upshot-Knothole” and was conducted in Spring, 1953. There were 11 shots, yielding from 16 to 61 kilotons. There were as I remember, three air drops and one firing of the 280 mm artillery rifle. The rest were tower shots, one of which was “Grable” whose yield was about a third higher than predicted. It was a stunner, to be sure.
Much dust was generated and contained radioactive particles. When maneuvers were over, the troops were decontaminated, checked for souvenirs, and returned to base. The film badges were collected and read, and the records stored.
There began almost immediately and continuing through the years, claims from the soldiers about cancers and other ailments which they blamed on radiation received during their time at the test sites. Sometime in the nineties, the Department of Defense did a large statistical study of the complaints from the soldiers vs. similar ailments arising in the general population of the US. The first results showed that there were fewer incidents among the soldiers than in the general population. When the “healthy soldier” factor was applied, there was no statistical difference in the two populations. The “healthy soldier” concept holds that the mere fact that soldiers, having received health screenings before becoming soldiers were, in fact, healthier than the general population to begin with.
In spite of all the really big bangs and slogging about the desert, most of the participants received less than one REM of whole-body gamma radiation. I and my compatriots in the radsafe community for “Upshot-Knothole” received about 5 REM and were given clean bills. I’m now 81 and my wife swears that I don’t glow in the dark.
My point is all this blather is to attempt to put some reality back into the unnatural hysteria which has grown up over the years regarding the effects of exposure to any ionizing radiation. True, there are situations where it can be truly dangerous. But to go into a national panic over a couple of helicopters flying through a radioactive “cloud” is the province of the uninformed.