Shaken but not stirred! (JP Earthquake)

[djes]

On 26 April 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant blew up. Forty-eight hours later the entire area was evacuated. Over the following months there were stories of mass graves and dire warnings of thousands of deaths from radiation exposure.

Yet in a BBC Horizon report screened on Thursday, a number of scientists argue that 20 years after the accident there is no credible scientific evidence that any of these predictions are coming true.

The anniversary of the world's worst nuclear accident in April saw the publication of a number of reports that examined the potential death toll resulting from exposure to radiation from Chernobyl.

Environmental group Greenpeace said the figure would be near 100,000. Another, Torch (The Other Report on Chernobyl), predicted an extra 30,000-60,000 cancer deaths across Europe.

But according to figures from the Chernobyl Forum, an international organisation of scientific bodies including a number of UN agencies, deaths directly attributable to radiation from Chernobyl currently stand at 56 - less than the weekly death toll on Britain's roads.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5173310.stm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1HF_TnCkhg

Based on these great scientific studies, shouldn't we construct maternities near reactors? The people involved in this kind of documentary must have green blood, really.

[pdwyer]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5173310.stm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1HF_TnCkhg

Nice article, thanks!

[codewalker]

Just do a google on "Japan IAEA" on "Japan Taro Kono" and on "Japan wikileaks"

What you are going to find is not popular to talk about and the japanese government
is going to get away with it anyway as usual, nevertheless it is there :

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) warned Japan in December 2008 that safety rules were outdated,
and strong earthquakes would pose a "serious problem" for the nuclear power stations. Guidance on how to
protect nuclear power stations from earthquakes had only been updated three times in the past 35 years.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was designed to withstand magnitude-7.0 temblors.
Friday's earthquake however, was around magnitude-9.0.

Maybe the Japanese Government has forgotten that Japan is sitting on top of 4 moving tectonic plates
and that 1 out of 5 nuclear plants are build near tectonic fault lines.

Other nuclear experts allege IAEA officials had willingly ignored lessons from the Chernobyl disaster to protect
the nuclear industry's expansion, reports Bloomberg. "After Chernobyl, all the force of the nuclear industry was
directed to hide this event, for not creating damage to their reputation," Russian nuclear accident specialist
Iouli Andreyev tells Reuters, before noting that released radiation from spent fuel rods stored close to reactors
at Fukushima looked like an example of putting profit before safety. "The Japanese were very greedy, and they
used every square inch of the space. But when you have a dense placing of spent fuel in the basin, you have
a high possibility of fire if the water is removed from the basin."

Just one of the many links on google :
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/1 ... 36529.html

.

[skywalk]

Given this is St Patrick's Day, we would do well to respect Murphy's Laws.
"Any thing that can go wrong, will."

So in the future, please build heinous power plants in the middle of the ocean.
I'm certain they would not float.
And if they run out of coolant water half a mile down, then we have bigger problems.

Based on these great scientific studies, shouldn't we construct maternities near reactors?

[the.weavster]

Based on these great scientific studies, shouldn't we construct maternities near reactors?

:eye-roll:

The people involved in this kind of documentary must have green blood, really.

Because their findings don't concur with your preconceptions of what the outcome should have been?

[djes]

Based on these great scientific studies, shouldn't we construct maternities near reactors?

:eye-roll:

The people involved in this kind of documentary must have green blood, really.

Because their findings don't concur with your preconceptions of what the outcome should have been?

"My" preconceptions ? I'm open to every form of scientific study, even to say that nuclear could be a benefit to life, in a long term view. But now, I can't think only this way. I'm not a computer. I'm not a rock. And... We're not gods! Check for references about Chernobyl disaster for yourself and you'll see why it's not only a "point of view".

[the.weavster]

"My" preconceptions ? I'm open to every form of scientific study

Your 'green blood' comment suggests otherwise.

Here's an on-site interview with the Co-ordinator of the UN Chernobyl Report: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uepnYHMlvO4

[jack]

Paul, how is your situation?
I feel sorry for the people of Japan but at the same time I admire them, the way that they are conducting themselves is admirable, no luting but civil and courteous behavior, the rest of the world could learn from that.

[djes]

"My" preconceptions ? I'm open to every form of scientific study

Your 'green blood' comment suggests otherwise.

Here's an on-site interview with the Co-ordinator of the UN Chernobyl Report: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uepnYHMlvO4

I have evolved since my first opinions about nuclear energy, not only since I'm a father. In France, we've learned at school that it is economic, safe, and that it gives us energetic independence. You don't imagine how far this ideology goes. In all my life, never was evoked where comes from the uranium, where waste are going, when and where they travel, what sort of danger the surrounding population must be aware, how weak the security measures are, and so on.
Studying that carefully, you discover that it is not economic, mainly because we rely on future generation for the dismantle process (for example we have a nuclear point that have already costed €500.000.000,00 to be, and it's far to be finished), is is not safe, because even if the incident are very rare, their impact is far bigger than anything else with a long term impact, and it doesn't give us energetic independence, because we rely for a very long time on Niger and Gabon for uranium, extracting it in severe conditions for these countries.
Talking about green blood was a mistake, because I'm sure vulcans would be able to evaluate the real cost of this energy. We could do better, and we must do.

[Zach]

This is why continued research into Nuclear is a must.

There have been extensive efforts to research a fusion process which pretty much leaves no waste behind, and there is also research into Fast Fission, which I believe results in little or no waste at all. If someone would develop an affordable, working Fast Neutron reactor, we would have virtually no fuel concerns as that could lead to Breeder Reactors, which produce more fuel than they consume. So then it doesn't matter where the fuel comes from beyond the initial amount required to start a nuclear reaction. Then there is also the idea of using Thorium which is more abundant than Uranium

The world simply cannot afford to convert to the other "green" alternatives because they are vastly expensive for what they produce, and scaling them up I'm sure would also come with efficiency concerns..

As to where the Uranium comes from, that problem has plagued people since the dawn of energy.. Where does the coal come from? Where does the oil come from? What conditions do the people producing these resources have to live in / put up with?


But those are not reasons against an energy type, they are simply symptoms of a completely different problem.

The stupid thing about all this, is the people who don't even live in Earthquake Zones using it as an excuse to criticize their own reactors.

The Japanese Reactors arguably survived the Earthquake (the buildings were still standing), it was more the fact that the Tsunami breached the Tsunami barriers and flooded the diesel generators (taking the water circulation pumps offline) which lead to the current crisis.

[skywalk]

tsunami is a Japanese word.
The reactors surviving a 7 or 8 or 9 quake is half-baked, given their proximity to flooding.
Let the cement flow...

[djes]

In a long term range, I'm not against nuclear, but actually, it looks like playing sorcery. The expenses needed for fission are not big, they're HUGE, and they're far from giving something concrete. The actual nuclear industry impact is poisoning our life, for centuries. And by now, we don't even know what we're really doing, as everything is highly experimental.
Ask a nuclear engineer what is the effect of radiation on concrete, or plastic, in a 50 years period. Nobody can say what it gives! And we only sees emerging some studies on these impacts in the last years :/
The main answer to all of this would be to reduce our needs, the second answer would be to use clean energies. Why use and abuse limited resources? We see that it doesn't help, no need to be Einstein to realize that :/

[Zach]

You can't argue with economics. People need money to survive, "clean" renewable energy is expensive for what it provides in terms of units per dollar.

The world is in a tough spot. People cannot afford to pay for these energies, just like when the price of gas goes up people stop buying so much gas. The financial state of the world is poor right now, which complicates matters even more.

Inevitably we have to get off oil/gas, but we can't find an affordable alternative right now and even when affordable alternatives start to hit the market en masse, they WILL be expensive, and ironically once the OPEC idiots see that their profits are doomed, they will continue to jack up the price for those of us who still have no choice but to use oil based products.

So in the end...what do we do? We're all paralyzed by indecision, because while it is easy to say "just switch to renewable green energies", the economics of the situation for 90%+ of potential consumers does not mesh with the cost of switching.

If we had dumped even half of the wasted so called "Stimulus Package" into energy research we'd probably be seeing better alternatives starting to hit the market in small pockets, with wide scale releases in the impending future... but when has any government ever done anything that makes sense

The USA has no money, but we just chucked over 100 cruise missles at Libya, at $1million a missle (if not more).

[djes]

People need money to survive

... since the invention of money
Just kidding, but real costs are not so well evaluated. Don't forget that this is a business, and there's profit around it. When there'll be better margins around green energies, you'll see a lot of people changing automagically their point of view!