Nuclear power perspective

Doug Allen says:
March 14, 2011 at 5:10 pm
“It’s sad that climate skepticism or dislike of MSM (or is it something else?) seems to have infected the reasonableness of many who here have been comparing the ongoing crisis to bananas and trivializing the possible tragic consequences for two days now.”
We have the power to focus and we use it. Greenies do not have that power. Focusing on the tragedy in Japan, we see vast devastation. However, we also see that many Greenies are doing everything they can to put the focus on the nuclear facilities and screaming that this shows that nuclear is dead. Having the power to focus, we see that the only thing about nuclear that can be inferred from this event is that the station was built in the wrong place. To condemn the entire industry because one nuclear facility was built in the wrong place is preposterous. No one expects a nuclear facility to survive a tsunami that devastated an entire region and prevented all forms of relief from reaching the troubled reactor. By the way, people who have trouble focusing are highly prone to hysteria.

“Take a look at these headlines from the Christian Science Monitor and from Channel News Asia,”
No thanks. There’s more than enough trash unprofessional free of cost journalism to wade through without purposely exposing oneself to even more of it. Sometimes free news is worth less than it costs. Decent filters are available that weed out the trash for you. WUWT is usually one of them. The Drudge Report is another and news.google.com ain’t bad either.
The fallout (pun intended) from this nuclear fiasco is yet to be determined but three reactor buildings blowing up, Japanese government and the owner admitting to at least partial meltdown of fuel rods, evacuating 500,000 people from the vicinity, handing out iodine pills, pumping seawater and boron onto the nuclear piles in a last ditch attempt to avoid a radiation plume that could spread halfway around the world, these are all hard cold facts at the moment. The only question at this point is how much worse it can get and according to the nuclear power cheerleaders it couldn’t get this far so you’ll excuse me if I don’t trust nuclear power cheerleaders much at this point in time. Save your breath and wait for the facts like the rest of us. Going into PR damage control mode dumping criticism on equal but opposite news spinners is as transparent and desperate as pumping seawater into a nuclear reactor. Man up and take your lumps for betting on a lame horse.

David says:
March 14, 2011 at 4:50 pm

Don’t you think you’re comparing apples to oranges here? The TMI and Chernobyl figures refer to a specific type of casualty, i.e., nuclear-related injury/death resulting from two specific events.
I’m sure many more people were injured during the construction of those facilities or in the day to day operations.

Here’s where the skeletons (pun intended) are hidden:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=&q=uranium+mining+hazards&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS290US290&ie=UTF-8

“How many were killed by the Three Mile Island incident?”
Are we counting dreams of cheap clean energy as among the casualties?
In that case I think the death count is probably a billion so.
See, when you say “this can’t happen” or “this type of accident is sooooo unlikely” then it does, not once but twice and now five times… well it’s sort of like the reservior I live on. When it was impounded in the 1930’s the engineers told people the “100 year flood plane” is 691 ASL so people built homes at 692 feet ASL, banks lent them money to build, and insurers sold them insurance. Well sir, there have been ten “100 year” floods in the past 80 years. The flood plane was raised about 20 years ago to 715′ ASL. It hasn’t yet exceeded that but it’s been over 700′ three times in the last 20 years and above 710′ one of those times. Just last year the so-called “100 year flood plane” was raised to 722′ ASL.
Nuclear power plants are looking just like those “100 year flood planes” that are inundated every 10 years. Are you really prepared to blame people for feeling like they were lied to and being distrustful of safety claims for “new and improved” reactor designs? The old ones were supposed to be failsafe and they weren’t.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Re:Dave Springer says:
March 14, 2011 at 8:09 pm
“Man up and take your lumps for betting on a lame horse.”
Amen, Brother Dave. Participating in these exchanges has been a revelation in how “agendas” can cloud human judgment. I’ve designed BWR plants such as those in question. I have built and promoted nuclear, hydro and fossil-fired energy power plants. I’ve designed, owned and operated renewable energy plants. I have on numerous occasions on this site argued against the pitiful economics of most of the renewable technologies. I am a firm skeptic of manmade global warming.
However, how anyone can watch the comedy of errors and design shortcomings that surround the Japanese nuclear experience and not understand that, in the public mind, the promises that were made about nuclear plant safety will forever be held up to ridicule is simply beyond me. The perception of downside risk is simply too steep to be balanced by any claimed benefit, so long as other options are available. Three Mile Island killed new nuclear plant development in the U.S. for four decades. The Japanese experience will kill it for many more decades to come. Among other impediments will be insurance considerations and re-examination of current U.S. limitations of liability for nuclear plant owners.
That horse is dead on arrival. Period!

Just heard on nhk-world-tv that power and pumps are back on to all four reactors located on the Pacific beach, temperatures are now down, all hydrogen fires out, and if this ends up being all that this most increadible 1000 year natural disaster along with 4 story tsunami with nothing more that mild exposure of a few power workers and no deaths…. bring the reactors on to get rid of CAGW proponents enemy CO2… the more the merrier. I wasn’t two weeks ago but I am now totally sold on reactor safety. They passed the ultimate test, four times over.

[good news indeed]

Radiation causes cancer. More radiation causes higher probability of cancer. Chernobyl and Fukushima have caused / will cause elevated radiation levels on vast areas and in many foodchains. Thus there will be more cancer in the effected areas even though those cancers will not effect everyone and the ones caused by the fallout will not ever be distinquishable from those caused by radon, cosmic rays, food or other.
There seem to be 3 main reply types here:
1. MSM is exaggarating this / politics are being played against nuclear unfairly – Well, this is to be expeted and seems like there are areas of improvement in nuclear safety. Building reactors in tectonic plate edges with backup diesels onsite in tsunami reach seems to be a bad idea.
2. Because radiation does not kill everyone above a certain dosage, it does not cause deaths at all / 99% of cancers are curable. – See beginning of my post and please consider that those 99% of thyroid cancer victims will need medication for the rest of their lives. Mutations, down syndrome percentage etc are also reliant on radiation and seem not to be considered very muh in the replies.
3. There is something even more deadly, worse, widespread, overlooked like (insert any energy source from above replies). – There sure are. This problem with Japan does not need to be dealiest in human history to be rightfully headline news the world over. Since about 150.000 people die every day I suppose we shouln’t even report such minor incidents if we went the relativistic route here.
I do agree that it is really bad taste to play politics bout this issue yet, disaster should be solved &analyzed first and then preventive remedies discussed. This is going to be a big blow to cAGW coal battle since forcing 3rd tier countries into renewables (form coal) while industrial countries have relied on a future of nuclar with a whiff of renewables (for maximum energy cost difference and thus upper hand in global manufacturing) is at stake here. If nuclear is to be dumped, europe and US are going to have a very very hard time recovering and this is why there is really no problem for us nuclear proponents – realpolitik dictates our future with nuclear, still the safest and most cost efective source of (usually) clean energy. I still think that this is a catastrophe and rightfully there should be corrections. And the artcle linked here is in REALLY BAD taste.
[try turning on your spell check and read before you hit post . . thanks]

Thanks AndyW35 and some others for voices of sanity.
@ur momisuglyLeg [March 14, 2011 at 3:40 am @ur momisugly Volt Aire]
” it does appear that overall there has been no increase in cancer” […from Chernobyl]
Get real, “Leg”, seriously. Whose are you pulling?
Underestimatig/denialism is not any better than overestimating/alarmism. In closely-monitored areas, directl related to Chernobyl ultimatelt a 3-4% rise in cancers was reported; + >4000 EXTRA cancer deaths, as well (see WHO reports on it), not to mention the awful misery of forced relocation, the trouble of dealing with cancers (even when cured), the insecurities, etc., and various issues that are very real when you’re experiencing them (ranging from teenage girls having most their hair fall out, to inexplicable chronic fatigue, more headaches, etc.).
Nuancing radiation levels has its place. Downplaying awful real experiences (“from your armchair sofa”, so to speak) are inexcusable (unless, perhaps you have the actual experience). COs-alarmism should be exposed for the fear-mongering (most-likely-) nonsense it seems. So with radiation-disinfo, and such. But when you start using skewed statistics to promote your agenda, … :-/ You’ll lose the sharp rational folks who’re ‘not heart-death yet’… .
Let’s just hope this is the final nail for an industry of arrogance, operating in a system that thinks in short-sighted quarter-earnings terms, yet in fact has to face dealing with dangerous wastes for many tens of thousands of years… . Burning oil may be primitive and pulluting, proponents of nuclear energy will become known for their naivité and arrogance… .
… May all beings on this Eath without exeption
enjoy peace, happiness and complete prosperity…

Winds as of 6am GMT in Fukushima, Japan look to be blowing to the Southwest toward Tokyo…
http://www.wunderground.com/global/Region/i_JP/2xWindSpeed.html

In response to Doug Badgero, Billy Liar and Dandy Troll – yes, I spent a long time as an anti-nuclear ‘campaigner’ – with some success. I am an ecologist and social anthropologist by training – and that gives me a rather broader perspective – insights into earth sciences as well as human behaviour and the interactions between the two – something rather lacking in the engineers who designed the first British reactors and high-level waste stores (copied by the French). One member of my team resigned from the Fusion research labs at Culham to work with us deciperhing computer codes for aerial release scenarios – there was a massive cover-up in the UK over the whole issue of meltdown potential and off-site consequences – this was not opened up until 1976 with public inquiries and an independent Royal Commission – but too late because a programme of building began in the 1960s, with a gullible public told that radiatioactivity could not leak out beyond small and insignificant doses. The most work done on this was by Rasmussen and the American Physical Society in the USA, though our designs were gas-cooled and the Brits could claim the revelations of the Rasmussen report did not apply. In fact, our reactors had no secondary containment – which effectively saved Pennsylvania from a massive clean-up problem.
Our involement as ‘campaigners’ involved press and TV, as well as parliament, and by 1983, we were listened to – I was consulted by the regulatory authorities, the government departments (advisor on waste management strategies and research) and gave lectures at Universities (a nine University tour of Japan in 1982), and contributed to courses at Harwell – the main nuclear research centre in the UK.
Our responsible campaigning saw changes in emergency planning, discharge control from waste facilities, and the ending of dumping barrels of low-level nuclear waste in the ocean as well as options-off for high level waste in international waters. We ended nuclear ‘reprocessing’ plans in Germany and Sweden and shut down the European fast-breeder programme – an international effort supported by fellow scientists and engineers across Europe. My top engineer – Gordon Thompson – PhD from Oxford – went on to found the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge, Mass. and has been a lifelong oppononent of nuclear expansion and proponent of alternative energy stategies.
I have also contributed to the peer-reviewed literature on the risks of low level radiation, land contamination, and monitoring strategies.
So – I do take some exception to being bad-mouthed as hysterical or the source of diatribe on a site that I regularly contribute to.
On technical matters – 1979 and TMI is a long time ago – but we were informed the explosions came close to the design capacity of the secondary containment and that the building was full of volatile radioactive fission products such as caesium-137. I no longer have access to those records – but will not accept a simple assurance that this was not so – particularly considering the amount of misinformation characteristic of this industry.
On technical grounds – those refering to weapons testing – there is a massive difference in the yield of ground contaminating nuclides between weapons (especially air-bursts) and releases from reactor cores – the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered minimal ground contamination. The areas of crop production around Chernobyl have not, to my knowledge, been re-instigated and only a few wizzened old people remain and grow vegetables, much to the consternation of the regulatory bodies as the produce would not be alllowed onto the market. Vast areas of marshland remain off limits and it was onyl recently that sheepmeat was allowed back onto the market in contaminated areas of Britain and Scandinavia.
I would add that my concerns are not driven by ideology….if a fail-safe reactor system were demonstrated (as claimed for thorium) I would waste my time when there are more urgent problems to deal with (and in any case I do not get involved these days in nuclear issues). I work from facts and data and when renewable energy plans that I had actively supported (I worked for three years also as a government advisor on how to integrate them into landscape and community) I decided to check out the science of ‘global warming’ – largely because the remedy looked more damaging to the things I cared about (both human community and biodiversity) than the illness itself. I changed my mind on reviewing the data and peer-reviewed literature (for which I am very grateful for Anthony’s work!). And I became active – having written a 400-page book that took 3 years of unpaid time (20 five-star reviews on the UK Amazon site but not much take-up in the USA yet!). That act lost me all my friends in the ‘green’ movement…which has become sadly ideological and closed-minded.
In the course of this research I studied the Sun and its magnetic cycles – and the biggest revelation was that every so often, perfectly naturally and well-recorded in the ice-cores, it puts out massive EMPs that have the capacity to disable not only electrical grids, but whole civilisations dependent upon computers and satellites. Almost every nuclear facility is vulnerable – unless you have confidence in diesel supplies for several months whilst the rest of the country struggles to prevent 90% of its people from dying of thirst (no water in taps) or starving (no food in the shops). And if you think that is alarmist – google the NAS report on solar EMP (Carrington events) of 2008, and it is freely downloadable.
So much for advanced engineering – with no solar physics and no social anthropology.
There is more that is not right with our approach to energy and engineering than the squabbles over wind turbines or nuclear safety.

Zr + N Turns into Zirconium Nitride Zr3N4
A stable molecule.
Try Liquid Nitrogen…

Dump Dry Ice in the spent fuel cooling pool !
The problem is too much energy.
Get rid of the heat.
It’s not rocket science.