By Mike Smith
There is no question that the events in Japan are ongoing and serious. That said, I believe a lot of people are being misled by much of the news coverage. Take a look at these headlines from the Christian Science Monitor and from Channel News Asia, respectively,
and,
“Three Mile Island” and “Chernobyl” sounds scary, right?
Let me ask a couple of questions? How many were killed by the Three Mile Island incident?
100?
10,000?
100,000?
Answer here
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TMI was a disaster averted. Chernobyl was a total disaster. I used to live near TMI and had family that lived within a few miles, and despite a few lawsuits, there was really no negative effects from TMI.
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.
rbateman said on March 14, 2011 at 3:05 am
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.
RE: ‘Not only that but a large section of land closed off for a thousand years’
Let’s review – Hiroshima is a thriving city of 1.6 million.
People are afraid of nuclear power for the same reason they are afraid of flying.
I ride a motorcycle and feel no sense of anxiety when I get on it, but there is just a pang of ‘what if something goes wrong’ when I get on an airplane.
Riding a motorcycle is way more dangerous then flying a commercial aircraft.
Motorcycle accidents might get reported in a local newspaper, but they are so common that most newspapers don’t consider them ‘news’. The same goes for automobile accidents.
Airplane accidents are uncommon, so they always make front page news.
Fear is an emotion. We all experience it for one reason or another. When the fear doesn’t match the facts we tend to exaggerate the facts. That’s just human nature.
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.
There are still a few good journalists out there. At my site I have link up to a WSJ article that should be mandatory reading for the public. The media has been truly disgraceful throughout this ordeal in Japan.
Polistra said,
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.
Many industrial buildings in the US have a water tower on site. These do not supply the fountains, kitchens and flush toilets — they supply water to the overhead sprinkler system used to fight fires. A passive system that works as long as the tank is full.
This is commonly required in order to get fire insurance and the insurance provider periodically inspects the system to make sure it is full and in working order.
What was once old is now new.
@Volt Aire (1:28 am)
From my old knowledge in epidemiology.
1) Don’t confuse correlation and causation. Never analyze only one factor
2) Never express epidemiological risk in percentages (of what, from which baseline?). They are utter nonsense unless this is a poblational study (hardly credible)
3) In my times, a rule of thumb was: don’t worry about anything with risk factor below 2 (or better 3) -Risk factor is the ratio of prevalence between the study and the base sample-. A naive measure would be 100-150 % more -proportional- cases in the target sample as a threshold …
Without even opening your supporting doc. It’s utter BS
yes I meant “equivalent dose” not “absorbed dose” but I think you get what I’m driving at.
From rbateman on March 14, 2011 at 3:05 am:
And thus I know you never read my post to you at the earlier article where I told you they could have been trashed by hydrolock. Or you have info that says hydrolock did not occur, which seems unlikely given the drenching that must have occurred to warrant the servicing you’ve recommended. If you have such info, please share.
Deekaman says:
March 14, 2011 at 12:41 am
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.
People are not impressed by the numbers but by the intensity of the explosion, the bang. If one considers the number of casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (hundreds of thousands) due to the detonation of two nuclear warheads, and compare that to how many died of the maschete and hand gun ( one million Tutsis and Hutus) in Rwanda alone, not to mention the continuous and endless African tragedy, one will realise the hypocricy of it all. We all know about Hiroshima even after 60 years, but who remembers Rwanda after only 16 years?
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!
Risk isn’t something we humans always deal with intelligently.
Other commenters have ponted to the enormous (and continuing) death toll in mining.An informed estimate suggests over 20,000 peryear in China when small private mines are included.
I don’t think this is a sensible argument against coal but it is a sensible argument against closing comparatively safe mines in the West and exporting jobs (and environmental problems) to China.
In the UK the only believable energy strategy that is now available is more gas in the short term followed by a big nuclear programme. By all means let’s make nuclear as safe as we can but don’t pretend that anything will be risk free. How many people will die because of ridiculously expensive and unreliable wind power?
How many of today’s alarmists will die through nervously puffing at their cigarettes whilst worrying about nuclear?
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.
Thanks for the few serious replys. Just like there is a giant whitewash going for cAGW, there are similar interests in keeping problems of nuclear disasters out of peoples minds. I’m pro nuclear and a firm believer in natural climate change but the fallout from Chernobyl was and still is a giant disaster. Sure there are more ppl killed every day in trafic but that is no reason to disgrace all the people who suffered, and still suffer, from that catastrope. As there is no way to distinguish “natural” cancers from fallout cancers due to the randomness of victims there will never be a true number on the casualty.
Looking at the death toll the figure is most likely somewhere in 10.000-100.000 range instead of 56(!) or millions. Costwise the Chernobyl cartastrophe is in excess of 150billion dollars. In human suffering the amount is naturally impossible to calculate but most of the people affected are not dead, for each dead there are tens who survived with varying degrees of disablilities. As a father I have a really hard time listening to someone justify this http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-13316-4.html.
So better than downplay a known disaster, why not take the opportunity and make sure lessons are learned to avoid such incidents in the future?
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.
Peter Taylor says: March 14, 2011 at 3:20 am
“I spent ten years at UN conventions making sure it became law – and am glad of it.”
Interesting stuff, Peter. I have never thought much about the precautionary principle because I never investigated it. It turns out that Wikipedia (although not a great source) has a definition.
First of all, to invoke the precautionary principle, there need be no quantifiable risk. Anecdotal evidence is sufficient to trigger its use. All you need is a good idea, or expert opinion, or the ability to speculate.
The precautionary principle does not seem to be very principled. It seems more to be a license to roll the dice without the necessity of betting your own money.
It looks like the precautionary principle is that is not a principle at all.
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.
It is now 20 years since Chernobyl. Has anyone seen a credable study showing increased cancer deaths as a result? I have seen a couple showing decreased deaths though increases in thyroid cancer.
The link given earlier is a good one.
http://mail/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=https://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors/
Killing nuclear power is where the pseudo science nuts cut their teeth.
If the generators were anything but nukes there would already be casualties, by the thousands if it was a dam.
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.
Volt Aire says:
March 14, 2011 at 2:31 am
http://www.chernobylreport.org/summary-en.pdf
Official reports leave out 2/3 of the fallout zone.
Depends on what you mean by fallout zone. There was fallout in North Wales UK. Is that part of your fallout zone? You need to read more. Chernobyl was a massive surprise in terms of low dosage radiation damage. As one commenter has already mentioned, low dosage effects were based on extrapolation (ring a bell elsewhere) following the 2 atomic bombs. Chernobyl changed all that. Real scientists examined the people quite widely at the beginning and have monitored them ever since. The results were amazing. Radiation is much less dangerous than the goops at FoE and Greenpeace.
martin brumby says:
March 14, 2011 at 4:47 am
There is no energy strategy in the UK is there?
I’m with Volt Aire. Take this post down. It is bad for WUWT.
In my country, we give respite visits to groups of children from the affected region. We don’t need a crude and oversimplistic assessment of immediate deaths, or academic report to see the harm.
This post lacks taste and perspective.
Please take it down. Thanks.
Chernobyl facts.From `What the green movement got wrong`.
The answer is thorium….what was the question?
I stand corrected their was a huge increase in abortions due to Chernobyl, totally unnecessary but the scare tactics of the anti science crowd were very effective. If you leave out unnecessary abortions numbers like hundreds of thousands? tens of thousands? even thousands are unsupported Claims based on the availabel mortality data in the Ukraine don’t show an uptic in cancer deaths. Lousy economic conditions in the 90s had such a hugely greater effect I doubt we could detect any net signal from Chernobyl, the cancer numbers suggest there is none.