The nuclear industry managed to get an “expert”, whose livelihood depended one way or another on nuclear power, onto every mainstream media broadcast about the Fukushima disaster, to persuade us that an incident ranked by the IAEA as on the same level as Chernobyl, was actually nothing to worry about.
Subsequently they have managed to persuade the media that the whole thing has simply gone away. How many of you, for example, knew that the highest levels of radioactivity so far at Fukushima were measured two days ago?
The highest radiation readings since March 11 [date of the tsunami] were recorded at the Fukushima plant by robots this week. Two robots sent into the reactor No. 1 building on April 26 took readings as high as 1,120 millisierverts an hour, according to Tepco, or more than four times the annual dose permitted to nuclear workers at the stricken plant.
Quite so – the silence is staggering. An end to the ‘nuclear renaissance’ is of course very bad news – for the bomb makers. Civil nuclear power is the source of materials used in nuclear weapons, hence the esteem in which it is held by the conservative parties (Tories, New Labour and – sorry, Craig – Lib Dems).
The IAEA is also not to be trusted in this matter. There’s a little here, you can google plenty more.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=International_Atomic_Energy_Agency
For a more ruthless look at events in Japan, there are occasional threads here:
http://www.theoildrum.com/
…and regular video presentations here (although I think this guy may have an axe to grind)
http://www.fairewinds.com/
Proponents of nuclear power never seem to mention thorium reactors. Since thorium reactors can “burn” radioactive waste, you’d expect them to be enthusiastic. But thorium reactors can also dispose of plutonium, and that would never do, would it?
Can I be the first to quote Upton Sinclair again?
Thought I would put this on again, its animated, you may have to click the refresh button.
http://transport.nilu.no/browser/fpv_fuku?fpp=conccol_Xe-133_;region=NH
I am not sure how important the links to weapons systems are. I doubt if it is urgent for Japan, or even the US. I dare say it is possible that ongoing programs that may have been disrupted, but I think the issue is really much more direct and straightforward.
The problem is that Japan has been very badly ‘hurt’-both in terms of both the human suffering, a not inconsiderable social issue, and also the economic underpinnings of the country. A clear, analytical view of the situation risks laying bare the precarious nature of modern economies, especially one such as Japan’s which has little natural resource base, and in effect has used Australia as one of its main sources of raw material.
It is quite dangerous to suddenly lose 25% of electricity capacity. OK there are emergency actions which can offset some of the problems, but Japan is suddenly hammered by additional costs on many levels, (and its economy is already in a precarious position due to almost two decades of stagnation), by the fretting and agitation of neighbours that are rightly concerned about pollution, by the downstream economic effects, such as loss of production, never mind the loss of productive activity in the Fukushima exclusion area.
I think there is a real risk that the whole Japanese economic system may buckle under the strain, and the seriousness of that is being kept from us, because the thought is too challenging.
The issue is about the extent that we create globally interdependent, in effect globalised, economic activity systems. I suspect it is this ongoing process that is under threat by too much knowledge. The risk of some serious social transformation effect in Japan-regression, or unrest, or some other unpredictable consequence of inherent stress and instability, is high at the moment.
I think it is this process that is being ‘managed’.
There is also the relatively narrow issue of nuclear power, and I think a globalised economic system must depend to some considerable extent on the concentration of control that large power generation systems put in the hands of a few players, thus creating great economic leverage for them. A backlash such as a move to renewables could be very damaging to vested interests, as it reduces dependency on centralised power (in both senses of the word.
It is the understanding of huge scale of the problem that I think is being controlled.
Vronsky – you are correct. Everything seemed just fine according to the IAEA.
http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/
At the height of the Fukushima catastrophe, their PR man was on all the media with the anodyne stuff. I looked him up and he appeared to have no scientific qualifications yet El Baradei’s successor Amano was shielded by him.
This is their latest offering from Flory.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAyCEWcgTTo
Vienna, Austria, 19 April 2011, IAEA Deputy Director General and Head of Department of Nuclear Safety and Security, Denis Flory, today reported on the latest developments at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and on the on-going radiation monitoring work in Japan
Do we believe a word of it? A big cover up for the vested interests of General Electric imho.
Just had the misfortune of visiting a main Boots to get a prescription dispensed, an experience I will not be repeating. A shambles – people waiting to hand in prescriptions, nobody on the counter, people complaining about the estimated time to collect their prescriptions being exceeded etc etc. The staff were nice mostly Asian young women but they looked harassed and overstretched.
See KKR/Alliance here, the £22 billion turnover, the tax haven in Switzerland and so on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_Boots
Signor Pessina and his colleagues should do a turn or two in one of their shops to see what it’s like on the floor.
Just send the folowing to PM, the Today programme, Look east here in Norwich, so that they can’t say tommorrow that they did not know.
“Dear all
Would it fall into the BBC’s public broadcasting brief to warn people who are having street parties and/or standing outside Westminster cathedral, especially parents with young children, in the case of it raining tomorrow, as the rain is most likely to contain radioactive nuclei’s? Despite the world wide cover up over the Fukushima disaster such warning should not fall by the wayside due to commercial considerations.
The first measurements taken in Scotland two weeks into the disaster, showed traces of radio active nuclei’s when only two of the rectors were damaged, now 4 out of six are damaged and during the last two days the highest ever readings have been taken by robots, some 1240 millisiverts, roughly 4 times the annual exposure for nuclear workers.
If there are no intentions of warning the public via the weather service or news this will reflect badly on the BBC. The Royals will have to be warned as well, although somehow I think they already know.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-28/tepco-to-start-decontaminating-water-at-fukushima-nuclear-plant-in-june.html
Craig,
it is presumably quite difficult to find experts in the nuclear field who are not employed in the field? I mean, it is a highly specialised area and you don’t tend to train as a nuclear physicist and then go and work in a bank. It would be like looking for a electronics professional that is not connected in some way with the electronics industry, etc.
The report that you quote does not imply necessarily that the radiation level has gone up at Fukushima. An alternative interpretation is that the robots have been able to reach another part of the plant that was inaccessible previously.
Also, 4 times the annual dose permitted to workers (presumably under normal operating conditions) does not sound apocalyptic. For comparison, people died at Chernobyl merely after standing for a few minutes next to pieces of radioactive graphite that had been ejected from the core and scattered around the plant.
Completely agree Craig. This is a cover-up.
I’m sure nuclear power could be safe if plants were constructed properly and safety procedures maintained rigorously. In fact they never are and are unlikely ever to be, because the nuclear industry lobby are constantly trying to show they’re cheaper than the alternatives and cut corners on safety to cut costs.
I’m all for killing two birds with one stone.
1) Supporting the Japanese economy by purchasing the Casio F91w watch. UK Price about £10
2) Supporting the ‘giving of the bird’ to the Americans who consider it the hall mark of a terroist.
“I’m sure nuclear power could be safe”
“Nuclear Power Can Never Be Made Safe”
http://karlgrossman.blogspot.com/2011/04/nuclear-power-can-never-be-made-safe.html
Duncan, I don’t see how uranium reactors could be made safe. You have to put enough fissile material in one place to make the chain reaction happen, and that makes the temperature rise. To prevent meltdown, cooling must be supplied continuously. A uranium reactor’s failure mode is disaster. They shouldn’t build these things, if the cooling fails they get too hot and blow up.
@ClarkA uranium reactor’s failure mode is disaster. They shouldn’t build these things, if the cooling fails they get too hot and blow up. Are you sure? I believe that criticality can never be reached in a commercial/civil reactor as the fuel is not pure enough. The ‘explosion’ we saw at that plant was due to a chemical reaction involving hydrogen. Not a good outcome but it was not – directly – the uranium fuel blowing up. It is simply a case of a conventional bomb being let off in a highly engineered environment and the ensuring mess is what is causing this problem.
“I’m sure nuclear power could be safe”
Maybe, if our society retains the technical and material resources into the very distant future to ensure that the abandoned husks of reactors remain safely shielded. ‘Ifs’ don’t come much bigger that that one. When quotations were invited for signage to warn people away from stored waste dumps the specification required that they would persist and remain legible for 25,000 years. Some wag suggested building pyramids. And what language would you use? Most English speakers today can’t understand Chaucer’s English, written a good deal less than 25 millennia ago.
IanG, correct, the fuel is too impure to cause a _nuclear_ explosion. But without cooling, the temperature rises beyond the point where parts of the reactor melt, including the fuel rods. This is “meltdown”. Once melted, the moderation elements cannot be removed, so the reaction proceeds in an uncontrolled manner. _Something_ will get hot enough to explode, and that sprays radioactive stuff all over the place. Don’t build them!
Anyone know anything about a guy called Bob Nichols?
He has an article at OpEdNews which says we’re all contaminated already
“FUKUSHIMA = 2,000 Atomic Bombs”
http://www.opednews.com/articles/FUKUSHIMA–2-000-Atomic-B-by-Bob-Nichols-110425-214.html
and that Fukushima needs to be bombed.
Dreoilin, I can’t think of many ways of stopping the reaction of a melted reactor core, but blowing it apart is one of them. Shame about the fallout…
Dreoilin, I see from the article that Nichols is suggesting encasing the reactor from the air, not blowing the core apart. Hmmm, too big a job. They’ll be needing suicide workers to encase it from the ground.
.
On the need for continuous cooling, from the Wikipedia article about Chernobyl:
.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#The_attempted_experiment
.
“Even when not actively generating power, nuclear power reactors require cooling, typically provided by coolant flow, to remove decay heat. Pressurized water reactors use water flow at high pressure to remove waste heat. After an emergency shutdown (scram), the core still generates a significant amount of residual heat, which is initially about seven percent of the total thermal output of the plant. If not removed by coolant systems, the heat could lead to core damage. The reactor that exploded in Chernobyl consisted of about 1,600 individual fuel channels, and each operational channel required a flow of 28 metric tons (28,000 liters (7,400 USgal)) of water per hour. There had been concerns that in the event of a power grid failure, external power would not have been immediately available to run the plant’s cooling water pumps. Chernobyl’s reactors had three backup diesel generators. Each generator required 15 seconds to start up but took 60–75 seconds to attain full speed and reach the capacity of 5.5 MW required to run one main cooling water pump.
.
This one-minute power gap was considered unacceptable.”
.
So if we state things plainly, water was needed faster than 12 tonnes per second, and if a minute passed without it, there could be a meltdown.
If the implication is that there is a cover up going on, what exactly is being covered up? How many deaths is Fukushima going to cause?
Karl, Clark – you may well be right. I have no scientific background and don’t know enough about nuclear power to know one way or the other. I do know that in practice the safety procedures fail to be carried out all the time – and that we only get to find out about it years or decades later.
Duncan, I’m sure it could be safER, or rather, less dangerous. Obviously, they weren’t forced into storing spent fuel above the reactors, for instance. But uranium reactors are dependent upon their cooling and their structure such that if either is lost the reaction increases rather than decreasing or stopping, and that is inherently dangerous. It’s like that trick where you balance a broom handle on the palm of your hand, and keep it from falling over by moving your hand around. You can get very good at it, but if anything restricts the movement of your hand, the broom handle is bound to fall over.
Thanks Clark.
I know very little about the internal workings of nuclear plants. Yes, he’s talking about “bombing” Fukushima with “sand, boron, water, concrete”. But he seems to be basing his disaster scenario (“every single day that goes by the radioactive Fukushima Volcano slaughters more of us”) on 10,000 terabecquerels/h — as if that was ongoing. I thought that was only for a couple of hours, weeks ago:
http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/04/84721.html
“Haruki Madarame, chairman of the commission, which is a government panel, said it has estimated that the release of 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactive materials per hour continued for several hours.”
One thing seems clear — we’re not (now) being kept informed.
I saw one story today online:
“Japan plant worker exposed to radiation”
http://www.news24.com/World/News/Japan-plant-worker-exposed-to-radiation-20110428
“On Tuesday, 2 600 to 3 200 becquerels per kilogram of radioactive caesium was found in two samples of sand lance caught off Iwaki city, south of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. That is five to six times above the legal limit, public broadcaster NHK reported.
“Local government officials on Sunday also detected 960 becquerels of caesium per kilogram in spinach harvested in Otama village in Fukushima prefecture.”
The vast majority of readers (like myself) won’t know B from a bull’s foot about what that means.
[Mod’s note – sorry, can’t watch it all the time!]
Drat, I’m still in moderation. (sigh)
“[Mod’s note – sorry, can’t watch it all the time!]”
I know! don’t mind me … getting old and cranky. I was talking more about the software.
When things go wrong in a uranium reactor, they can go wrong very fast. Twelve tonnes of water a second removes a LOT of heat, you can imagine how fast the temperature rises without it. The section below is my edit from Wikipedia. It covers less than the last minute of the life of Chernobyl reactor number four. Note how each successive failure caused the power being produced to increase.
.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Experiment_and_explosion
.
At 1:23:40, an emergency shutdown (or SCRAM) of the reactor was initiated when the EPS-5 button of the reactor emergency protection system was pressed, starting the insertion of control rods into the reactor core. The control rod insertion mechanism moved the rods at 0.4 m/s, so that the rods took 18 to 20 seconds to travel the full height of the core, about 7 meters. A bigger problem was a flawed graphite-tip control rod design, which initially displaced coolant before inserting neutron-absorbing material to slow the reaction. As a result, the SCRAM actually increased the reaction rate in the lower half of the core.
.
A few seconds after the start of the SCRAM, a massive power spike occurred, the core overheated, and seconds later this overheating resulted in the initial explosion. Some of the fuel rods fractured, blocking the control rod columns and causing the control rods to become stuck at one-third insertion. Within three seconds the reactor output rose above 530 MW. Subsequent events were not registered by instruments and are known only as a result of mathematical simulation. Apparently, a great rise in power first caused an increase in fuel temperature and massive steam buildup, leading to a rapid increase in steam pressure. This destroyed fuel elements and ruptured the channels in which these elements were located. Then the reactor power jumped to around 30 GW thermal, ten times the normal operational output. The last reading on the control panel was 33 GW. A steam explosion, like the explosion of a steam boiler, appears to have been the next event. Steam from the wrecked channels entered the reactor’s inner structure that caused the destruction of the reactor casing, tearing off and lifting the 2,000-ton upper plate, to which the entire reactor assembly was fastened. This explosion ruptured further fuel channels, and as a result the remaining coolant flashed to steam and escaped the reactor core. The total water loss in combination with a high positive void coefficient further increased the reactor power.
.
A second, more powerful explosion occurred about two or three seconds after the first; evidence indicates that the second explosion resulted from a nuclear excursion [ie an uncontrolled chain reaction]. The nuclear excursion dispersed the core and effectively terminated the nuclear chain reaction.
Is there any difference between a coal miner being killed in an accident and someone being killed in a nuclear accident, apart from the fact that there are an awful lot more of the former?
Can I just say this is a good discussion with contributions from Clark being the most enlightening.
Thanks to all.
Thanks for all the links, it seems we are thye only one’s not enaged in the right royal rain off today.
Bob Nichols has a background in the arms industry and there are probably more ‘in the know’ who are talking to each other privately now.
Bob is right to say that they should shut the facillity down with boron sand and finally concrete. Problem is, until there is concerted pressure put on Japan to do the decent thing and encase this plant in concrete, eventually.
The water on site, highly contaminated and continuously sprayed on to the core must be removed before the boron sand concoction can make sense. As it stands, the Russian reaction and solution was caried out more rapidly and vigorously than what we see in Japan, explained by the overall damage to society by continuous earthquakes and that massive tsunami.
We should ensure that people get to know simple rules, like keeping out of the rain, wash you fresh foods, organis or not and peel everything. Greenhouse stuff will be highly priced in month/years to come. Take care.
Tim, deaths from fallout from nuclear accidents are hard to quantify, because radioactive pollution causes cancers over many years, and they are masked by cancers from other causes. One estimate of excess deaths from Chernobyl is nearly one million.
.
Bulk energy production methods generally cause big problems. Global heating, acid rain, smog and disease, mining accidents and environmental damage, oil spill pollution, nuclear material proliferation and fallout, war. But the modern way of life is extremely wasteful of energy. Look at the traffic jams caused every day by commuting to work. Go to your local “recycling” site and look at the huge piles of discarded domestic stuff, much of it still usable. Look at the ever increasing “need” for Internet bandwidth due to the adverts plastered over most web pages. Go to the service road at the back of the High Street shops and look at the masses of commercial waste.
.
Faster, faster, work harder, consume, buy stuff and throw it away.
.
No. Let the Power Fall…