From my town newspaper, in the story covering a young English teacher who was just now able to return home after being in Japan during the earthquake. She gets it, why can’t the media?
While saying the threat associated with the damaged nuclear power plants, about 140 miles from Koga, have been overstated by the media, she quipped, “I’m not glowing. I was supposed to be glowing.”
Full story here:
http://www.chicoer.com/fromthenewspaper/ci_17651319
The Register also mentioned something similar about the media yesterday in their online briefing:
Good news from Japan: Situation ‘fairly stable’, says IAEA
And, an online “wall of shame” has been established for logging media blunders in this affair:
http://jpquake.wikispaces.com/Journalist+Wall+of+Shame
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HenryP says:
March 19, 2011 at 10:34 am
“I still say nuclear energy is not save!” (sic)
You can keep saying it but the numbers will still keep proving you wrong!
Relevant:
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
R.S.Brown,
I was led astray and questioning by your initial use of “Duke Power,” which may be a local way of referring to Duquesne Power but that is a different company. Then you make reference to “the tipping point for the China syndrome” that I took to mean a terribly serious threat to life and landscape. In looking up the term, someone claimed it meant an area the size of Pennsylvania would be permanently uninhabitable. As I have relatives living in the area I know that did not happen.
Your point seems to be – if I understand it – is that you want independent observers to provide all the facts as an “event” is on-going. As the facts are not actually known and the situation can be considered dangerous, it would be morally and legally problematic to allow camera teams from the BBC and CNN on to the site. Consider that when an airliner crashes you do not have someone looking over the pilot’s shoulder examining the activity. The time frame for a report is months, not hours or days.
With this event, there is no chance that there will be a nuclear mushroom cloud wafting across the Pacific Ocean to North America. TMI had a partial meltdown and Pennsylvania still exists. Why should the power company and the government in Japan allow media types looking for a story to spread panic? These “events” are industrial accidents, this time caused by a devastating earthquake and tsunami. Thousands are dead and local infrastructure gone or buried in rubble.
Let’s focus on the real problem – thousands of living beings with no homes, no food, dead and missing relatives and friends, jobs gone, all possessions gone, and massive needs. Focus on the people!
http://www.bt.com.bn/opinion/2011/03/20/japans-embattled-tepco-faces-its-bp-moment
Designed to infuriate
And when they did provide more information, it was couched in terms apparently designed to infuriate. Asked about the chance of meltdown, the company answered with the memorable “the possibility of recriticality is not zero”.
Tepco’s reputation was already tarnished by past mistakes. It was severely criticised after the 2007 earthquake in the Niigata Chuetsu-Oki area when it was forced to shut down a plant, admitting that it had not been designed to cope with such tremors. That plant has never reopened.
Five years earlier, Tepco was found to have falsified nuclear safety data at least 200 times between 1977 and 2002. All 17 of the company’s boiling water reactors were shut down for inspections after the government provided evidence that Tepco had been concealing incidents.
This forced the president, Nobuya Minami, and a number of board members to step down. It was 2005 before the firm was allowed to restart all its reactors. Observer
Interestingly back in the ’20s and ’30s various spa towns in Europe used to proudly advertise the radioactive properties of their spa water. (Not so easy to give citations when using a Blackberry in the middle of India – but I think Badgastein in Austria was one).
After Hiroshima, that wasn’t seen as helpful PR. But I well remember after graduating, my first job (as a Civil Engineer) was working in the potable water industry.
The events of the Cuban Missile Crisis, at an early and impressionable age had made me very mindful of nuclear issues and, having chatted to the Chief Chemist at work, he pulled out all his extensive records of radiation readings taken from the big impounding reservoirs above the city (Sheffield, UK) where I was living.
Wow!You should have seen the spikes on the graph he had prepared! He had in many cases been able to point out with reasonable confidence which nuclear test, by which country had caused any particular spike.
Breathlessly, I asked about the health risks to the good people of Sheffield who were drinking this stuff. He then pointed out that by the time water had been treated and gone through the pipes to someone’s tap, little or no anomoly was left and stated the view that adding together all the radiation impacts from all sources (food, water, breathing), it was impossible to say that cumulatively there would be no health impacts (from atmospheric nuclear testing), but it would certainly be a tiny fraction of the problems from a failed reservoir dam. (Sheffield was, in fact, the city devastated in the C.19th by the Dale Dyke Dam disaster).
So, yes, there are lessons to be learned. But as I commented the other day, many more Chinese coal miners die every year than the people who have died or (probably) will die ever from Civil nuclear plants around the world.
And that’s no argument to turn our back on coal, let alone nuclear.
What we should reject are almost all “renewable” energy – especially BigWind – which is ludicrously expensive and unreliable.
And the hypothermists and MSM and politicians who peddle their puerile scare stories.
Like a couple of others, I am tired of hearing from Michio Kaku. His first couple of books were interesting. Then, apparently having become addicted to the fame and running out of things to say, he started writing silly stuff. Now, he’s screaming “Fire Bad” to anyone who will listen. Meh.
I do not want to minimize the event, though. The outcome of this crisis could have been very bad, and the primary fault management system in place was inadequate. The ability of the tsunami to knock out all power systems and backups means there was a single point failure mechanism, which the designers should never have allowed to exist in such a critical system.
Fortunately, however, autonomous adaptive backup systems, though initially slow in converging to the proper response, ultimately saved the day. I am, of course, speaking of the heroic plant staff and workers who have been battling against realization of the worst case scenario.
>
That would be because, you silly man, no one knew the exact condition of the fuel until cameras were inserted into the reactor vessel. And that wasn’t done for some time, because it was entirely sensible to wait until the worst of the local contamination had decayed away.
In particuklar, no onw knew there’d been substantial meliting of the fuel because almost none of the supposedly horrific effects associated with melting fuel actually happened. There was little release of anything other than gaseous fission products – the short lived ones – into the reactor coolant. The heavy stuff, the actinides and so on stayed in the fuel. And, contrary to the b*****ks about the fuel melting in a bolus through the floor of the reactor vessel (note that, reactor vessel, not containment), at it’s deepest it penetrated less that 15mm into a vessel something like 200mm thick.
Sorry, that last was addressed to RS Brown – my mistake, I thought I’d c&p’d a quote, re
“My point, which you seem to be avoiding, is it took MONTHS
for the media to be given the facts on the Three Mile Island
partial meltdown “event”.
“My point, which you seem to be avoiding, is it took MONTHS
for the media to be given the facts on the Three Mile Island
partial meltdown “event”.”
Has Kaku shared his wisdom on how you’d do decay heat removal from under a pile of insulating sand?
I must disagree with all of you who keep insisting that the purpose of the media is to make a profit. The purpose of the news media is to provide the information which is vital to our free and democratic society. News organizations must make a profit to remain in business, but profit is not their purpose. When news organizations put profit above truth, they are failing in their purpose. Eventually, the public will get tired of being lied to and that will affect profits.
Claude Harvey says:
March 19, 2011 at 4:53 pm
We’ll be very lucky if this thing doesn’t get much worse before it gets better. Since it now appears that, to some, anything short of a monstrous reactor vessel explosion at
Fukushima Daiichi can be interpreted as “victory” for nuclear power proponents and “vindication” of nuclear plant safety design, I’ll pray for “victory”.
Even if there was a monstrous explosion like that there would still be people saying Fukushima is victory for nuclear power. In fact, it could be that a monstrous explosion would make them defend nuclear power more strenuously. They would find a way to rationalize the explosion. And even if they didn’t, per se, view a monstrous explosion as a victory they would still want nuclear power to continue. It is like the global warming believer that is unmoved by ClimateGate. There could be conclusive work showing the net effect of adding co2 is cooling and they would still be committed to ‘manmade global warming’.
—————
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
~Leo Tolstoy
“At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other even more reasonable says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger, since it is not a man’s power to provide for everything and escape from the general march of events; and that it is therefore better to turn aside from the painful subject till it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second.”
~Leo Tolstoy
More up-to-the-minute information from Japan’s
Health Ministry.
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20110320/D9M31JOO3.html
The Health Ministry is not noted to be a pack of scaemongers.
R.S.Brown says:
> Is the US uninhabitable?
There’s still no one living on our nuclear test ranges.
++++++++++++
Thanks. I am not surprised no one is living on the test ranges, for more than one reason, radioactive elements being one. It is hardly the whole US though. What was the total number of Becquerels of radiation released by all those bombs? Gazillions. I remember the milk scares. Ontario also pulled milk off the shelves in the 80’s when dioxin was discovered in the paper packaging – 50 parts per trillion. Not because it posed any danger, but because the fear of it had been hyped in the MSM by Green fanatics who didn’t realise dioxins form naturally in the environment.
I work with gas sensors which can measure, for example CO to very low concentrations (well below 1 ppm). The fact that something can be measured does not means it is a clear and present danger. What I find missing from MSM reports on Japan is anything approaching an explanation of the relative levels of radiation – just what I perceive to be hype about ‘increases’ relative to some very low number. It is BS with China Syndrome lipstick.
In high, clear, clean Mongolia (the Outer one) standing outside exposes you to 18 micro-Sieverts of radiation. Stepping into a concrete building exposes you to 26. That is a whopping 44% increase! Radioactive concrete! Good Lord, break out the iodine! It is equal to eating a banana every 5 days.
The control room in Japan was widely reported to be experiencing ’10 times the normal radiation level’. From what to what? If it doubled and then redoubled and redoubled again would it have reached the level of living in some UK towns or in Iran or standing next to statues in Washington? No? Crikey. Get a grip.
No one is denying that overdosing on ionising radiation isn’t bad, but this hyping is counterproductive. In spite of some very bad siting and operating choices and some questionable design practices, the nuclear power industry, which could easily be improved further, has demonstrated for decades that it is an extremely safe one, especially compared with all other forms of electric power generation. Not some, all.
Hydro power: you want to talk about risks?? Dams failing? British Columbia has built dams that are thousands of times more dangerous than a nuclear power station, based on what nukes have done and what dams have done, or could do.
Solar cookers are dangerous for anyone who still has sight, plus burns are common. Try one some time. Biomass is fraught with emissions problems: black carbon and other particulates, not to mention land and water degradation. Biogas? Everyone with his own gas generating facility? Wind has all sorts of problems without even getting into the reliability of supply thing. I am a big fan of passive solar but so far that does not promise to solve our energy needs. Solar PV and batteries? Where will we get the power to build systems with a negative return on energy?
The issue I have with most nuclear power stations is their Heath-Robinson approach to generating power and keeping it safe. They have a crazy-quilt of overlapping systems designed to heroically cope with problems that might arise from the breakdown of a fundamentally stupid design. Building a reactor that is fundamentally dangerous unless intact, is just about the worst way to design for safety, yet they have still managed to be remarkably safe. To me that is not a good enough answer.
Mention has been made on WUWT of other, even safer energy producers of a nuclear type. I did not see the pebble bed modular reactor mentioned which South Africa was trying to revive (the Germans gave up on it). The South Africans were struggling with coating problems on the fuel balls and recently pulled the plug on the project after spending billions to keep their old nuclear weapons engineers employed long enough to retire gracefully. But there remain other viable and inherently safer options than pressurised light water reactors. Silly technology, destined to inspire fear and loathing when something inevitably cracks during Homer Simpson (TMI, Chernobyl) moments. Or giant earthquakes.
As they say in climate circles: let’s see some numbers on these radiative threats. Enough with the ’10 times’ and ‘1000 times’ and ‘large’ and massive’. We know full well that modern instrumentation can measure just about anything so relative values are of….well, little value.
The Japanese have an inherently unsafe design sitting on a major quake fault, with a recent tsunami having over-run it, with no power, no pumps, broken piping, venting hydrogen, maybe a cracked containment vessel, melting fuel rods, multiple reactors with similar problems, a management organisation in evident denial and still, after all that, there is so far no danger to the public at all. Suppose instead we built inherently safe designs, on stable ground, operated by conscientious operators with proper backup and training! We can do it anytime, if and when we want.
Andy Dawson says:
March 20, 2011 at 2:43 am
OK, Andy. Which part of my comment at:
March 19, 2011 at 12:52 pm and later at 5:58 pm
didn’t apply to Three Mile Island?
When I said:
I already knew the phrase indicates a burn through the bottom of the
containment.
Using your reasoning to justify the tardiness of AEC reporting on
the event as a given, had the melt burned through the vessel for
another 50 or 60 feet, we wouldn’t expect to be told that because
they couldn’t get cameras in or take direct readings on what was happening.
The damage to the water table would have happened, and until the
mass was 100% removed, would keep on happening.
Good ahead and trust your government and the self interest of
regulated corporations to provide rimely facts contrary to their
own interests.
I may be silly, but I’m not foolish.
Except, of course, it wasn’t near a “tipping point” for the “China Syndrome” Because the “China Syndrome” is a myth cooked up by a few hysterics, who couldn’t do a few basic heat balance sums – about the relative masses and temperatures, and rates of heat transport/generation.
Recall, by your own admission, it took a significant proportion of the fuel oven to melt ts way even in that peripheral manner – I think you claimed 1/3rd? Well, do the numbers yourself. Even if you’d dumped all the fuel, and it’d given up all it’s heat to the RV, it’d have penetrated to perhaps 40mm – out of 200mm thickness. It’d then have had to do it all again, when it impacted the steel and concrete of the containment.
And that’s while being spread into ever larger surface areas, losing more heat to the containment interior.
“Using your reasoning to justify the tardiness of AEC reporting on
the event as a given, had the melt burned through the vessel for
another 50 or 60 feet, we wouldn’t expect to be told that because
they couldn’t get cameras in or take direct readings on what was happening.”
eh?
The AEC wasn’t tardy in working out there’d been fuel melting (or more pointedly, because they were, as you originally implied, sitting on the information). You seem to be rowing backwards from that insinuation….
They didn’t know because there were no gross physical symptoms. No penetration of the RV – not even, so far as I can tell, even any gross increase of RV temperature. And, odd as it may seem, it’s quite hard to see inside a 200mm thick steel vessel.
Incidentally, how exactly do you think that overheated fuel, having only the thermal mass to penetrate 5/8ths of an inch, would have either had sufficient excess heat to melt further, or, once subject to spreading and decay, have had the heat content to melt “50 or 60 feet” ?
Oh, one other thing. I was born and brought up in the North West of England. Less than 40 miles or so as the crow flies from what’s looking like the closest analogue to Fukushima in terms of radiological impact – the Windscale Fire. You know, the one where the core of an air-cooled reactor for breeding bomb plutonium caught fire, and was vented straight to atmosphere (other than some pretty ineffectual filtration). That was almost certainly worse, in that it was venting uranium and other fission products, stuff much longer lived than the iodine and xenon dominated releases from Fukushima.
And the effects were never statistically identifiable, in terms of mortality, cancer rates, etc. They were so small they were (if there were any) “lost in the noise”.
The chap who was later my undergrad supervisor was actually there – sitting on top of the burning pile, taking temperature readings. He took doses an order of magnitude higher than anything faced by the Fukushima crew. I last saw him about 5 years ago. Still barking mad, but utterly healthy. If anything, he was lasting better than his intake of gin would suggest he should have been.
I’m happy to work on the theory that results, i.e. “Bombay Sapphire” intake directly offsets gamma exposure.
Andy,
You’re right. The AEC wasn’t tardy in working out that there was
melting fuel at Three Mile Island. They had that information early
on in the “event”.
You essentially prove my entire point that they (AEC and/or the
operators) were tardy in reporting that situation to the public. They
knew they had to cool the reactor vessel because the fuel was melting.
It was simple… improper coolant flow = melting rods.
They weren’t just “overheated” as you portrayed them.
Pump in lots of water = limit the damage = the melt didn’t get to burn
through the bottom of the vessel = they got to it in time.
They were unable to “share” even that minimal amount of information
or those simple goals at the time.
I’ve never claimed anything about a “significant portion”
of the fuel doing anything except partially melting. I made no calculations
or cited any calculations.
The China Syndrome is not a myth or a name cooked up “by a bunch of
hysterics” to describe one worst case scenario in the nuclear field. The
term has been around since the early 1970s. It wasn’t all that well known
until that Fonda movie came out.
According to Wikipedia:
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Syndrome
I’ll allow that some folks later made less than fastidious uses of
the term to protest anything nuclear.
If all 6 power stations had been coal fired and had exploded due to a lack of cooling water, we’d already be looking at a number of fatalities and serious injuries.
You said, “You can rebuild and actually live on earthquake/tsunami sites. You can’t
on or around the site of a nuclear ‘event’.” Nowhere in your statement is there a qualification excluding any other form of “nuclear events” such as the detonations of nuclear explosives and “air bursts.” You chose to use a statement which equated all “nuclear events” with the end result of not being able to “rebuild and actually live” on any of those “sites.” Now you want to claim the nuclear events at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and elsewhere are “not applicable to this situation” after having misled the readers otherwise previously.
Worse yet, you then proceeded to contradict yourself about the risks arising from explosive “nuclear events” and attempt to mislead readers again in a later comment which makes a false statement which amounts to a bald faced lie.
In particular, you said, “There’s still no one living on our nuclear test ranges.” Anyone with an ounce of commonsense can immediately investigate and discover that whole communities of people do in fact live and have lived “on our nuclear test ranges,” to use your exact words in context. Since you either had to know this fact or you chose to neglect this obvious impeaching fact, readers can be forgiven if and when they conclude you were promoting a lie.
The first detonation of a nuclear explosive occurred at the Trinity Test Site of what is today the White Sands Missile Test Range. The test site is a National Historic Site administered by the National Park Service. It is surrounded by the military reservation of the White Sands Missile Test Range, which is still very much in active use. While there were no communities within the area of the Trinity Test Site other than the former ranch and ranch house, there were and still are thriving communities remaining in their pre-nuclear age locations around the Trinity Test Site. Public tours are also conducted at the Trinity Test Site every year. Post World War Two nuclear explosives testing were subsequently conducted in part at the Pacific Proving Grounds in the Marshall Islands and at the Nevada Proving Grounds (Nevada Test Site)
The former Pacific Proving Grounds in the Marshall Islands, one of our former “nuclear test ranges,” have had communities of people returning and living on it since 1980, almost a third of a century ago.
The Nevada Proving Grounds (Nevada Test Site) outside of Las Vegas, one of our most well known “nuclear test ranges,” has always had a community of people living on it since the first day it was established. The town of Mercury, Nevada is located on and well within the Nevada Test Site. It was formerly known as Jackass Flats, and was named Mercury Base Camp as the test site was established. The place subsequently had a population of as many as 10,000 people in its heydey while the nuclear events were occurring.
Other explosive “nuclear events” occurred at sites across various parts of the United States. The two PROJECT DRIBBLE nuclear explosive detonations took place at the Salmon Site and Tatum Salt Dome in Lamar County, Mississippi. This test site was just recently transferred from the U.S. government to the State of Mississippi for public use. Other projects detonated nuclear explosives in Colorado. People have always lived around these test sites.
You objected when you said, “The difference between reactor ‘events’ and designed nuclear weapons detonations is massive and not applicable to this situation” Yet you then proceeded to attempt to mislead readers by using the Chernobyl “nuclear event” as if it were a representative example of what can happen when a “reactor event” occurs versus what you erroneously describe as “designed nuclear weapons detonations.” As should be blindingly obvious to any rational human being, the Chernobyl “nuclear event” is not and never can be representative of the “reactor event” presently occurring in Japan, the Three Mile Island TMI-2 core melt down, or any other “reactor event” that can occur in today’s active nuclear power plants. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was constructed differently, without anything remotely resembling the same safety features, and without the containment capabilities of all present nuclear plants in service. Nuclear power plants such as Chernobyl no longer exist.
You even continue to insist the China Syndrome is not a myth. You completely disregard the fact the scientist who originally used the phrase was using the terminology and concept as an extreme exaggeration and fantasy to illustrate an idea at a conference. It did not then nor at any subsequent time reflect the real world or real world science. Its use today is only for black propaganda designed to kill public support for nuclear power plants by instilling unreasoning fear in the minds of the public. Your exposition about nuclear weapons is just as hopelessly erroneous with half truths and falsehoods as your comments about people not living on nuclear test ranges.
D. Patterson says:
March 21, 2011 at 3:41 pm
You should take a GoogleEarth tour of White Sands
where the nuclear weapons were actually detonated.
Oops, no occupied dwellings. You might get to tour some glassy
patches, but nobody’s dumb enough to live there.
You lied by implying someone acutally lives on a detonation
site.
Or maybe you’re just confused as to the difference in living near
a nuclear test site and living ona nuclear test site.
I’ve made a perfectly appropriate distinction between the two.
You seem to have totally ignored what kicked off the “myth” where
Andy Dawson says:
March 20, 2011 at 9:57 am
I responded with:
And then gave a link
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Syndrome
…and I followed it up with:
…which you seem unable to understand but are more than
willing to use as a platform for more sarcastic invective, implying
that I commonly practice using the term in a less than
fastidious manner. You can call a scenario a “myth” or a “fantasy”
or what ever you want. It’s still a scenario.
You seem to be totally happy to gloss over the point I’ve repeatedly
made that when dealing with the nuclear industry, the government
regulators and the regulated in all the “event” examples you’ve
mentioned (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Japan) the media and the
public were generally the last to know what was going on…
unless someone caught it on film, and it had to be explained.
You might want to pay attention to the dicotomy of how the news
is being disseminated in Japan. The “Health Ministry” was releasing
reports on radiation in the environment at the same time the IAEA
and Topco were saying there wasn’t and wasn’t going to be a big
problem and no danger to the populace whatsoever.
Since I’ve already said:
…and you actually quoted that statement, you seem unable or
unwilling to understand a simple flow of logic:
reactor events do not equal weapon detonations.
No matter how you torture logic, or twist my statements, the
similarities you seem to support between reactor events and
weapons detonations are fallacious and spurious.
Since I didn’t begin the nuclear detonation issue on this thread,
maybe you should deal with the poster who first brought the
subject into the conversation.
Oh, that’s right it was you at
D. Patterson says:
March 19, 2011 at 1:54 pm
If supporters of the nuclear power industry worldwide had to
rely on a strawman like that for support, they wouldn’t have
made past the 1990s.
TokyoTapWater
And to illustrate my point, note the difference between what the
Japanese Health Ministry has to say about tap water for infants
and other “sources”:
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20110324/D9M59T7O1.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/ferguswalsh/2011/03/japan_nuclear_leak_and_tap_water.html
…so as long as the infants don’t eat fresh Japanese
fruits & vegetables, or later, meats, and as long as they don’t bathe
in water, or play in the dirt, there’s no problem, right ?