And I would try to save that rather expensive machine myself. Actually, the upgrades that the US reactor fleet has been required to undergo make such a release of large amounts of radioactive isotopes practically impossible. And Liquid Fluoride Thorium Recyclers (aka Reactors) do a better job even more cheaply. We really should be working HARD to deploy LFTRs on a massive scale. Thorium: Energy Cheaper Than Coal. http://www.amazon.com/THORIUM-energ...1-1&keywords=thorium energy cheaper than coal
that's exactly my point. if energy producers had to replace containment vessels and maybe even relocate they would make damned sure their fail-safes worked. they would make sure their emergency generators worked, their pressure relief valves worked, their control rods worked. they would do whatever was necessary to prevent the vessel from going critical. the current situation is not a fail safe design, if the vessel fails then, well you know what happens.
Ummm, if the reactor doesn't go critical, it won't generate any energy. So I figure you mean something other than that. The current situation, at least in the US, doesn't NEED to be failure proof because if the vessel fails, several things prevent the contamination from leaving the containment system. By the way, to approach the failsafe situation you desire, we should start deploying Liquid Fluoride Thorium Recyclers. They are walk-away safe. And not just for 72 hrs like GEN III+ conventional reactors. They are walk-away safe for months.
well, maybe. depends on the control rods. yes. i was thinking more along the lines of preventing an escape rather than trying to salvage the situation. i'm not talking about failure proof, i'm talking fail safe. the objective is to prevent radioactive contamination and there are a few ways of doing that. of course extreme measures such as this will probably force a relocation which is why producers would do their best at protecting their investment. anything that stops the reaction and prevents escape will work. failures are going to happen, it's a fact of life but we can design a fail safe vessel, in that if it did fail it's contents would be rendered inert.
Nope. The control rods KEEP it critical and can be used to suppress criticality. But if it isn't critical, it doesn't produce power. I am not sure what you are trying to say here. If contamination release prevention is all you want, we pretty much have that now. It is too bad the Japanese didn't require the same upgrades as the NRC did. They wouldn't have released anywhere near the quantity of material that they did. Being rendered inert does not stop the problem. When the unit is shut down, the fission reaction stops immediately. But fission product decay continues to provide significant amounts of heat for weeks, even months afterwards. Fukushima shut down just fine. But they lost the ability to remove the decay heat. That is what generated the hydrogen that caused the explosion, and that is what melted down the fuel. Rendering the reactor "inert" wouldn't have stopped that. It had already been rendered "inert" by the control rods. And by the way, if the control rods fail, they already have a chemical means to quench the reaction, borated water. But that doesn't stop the decay heat.
At a minimum, you need to be able to predict the outcome and circumstances of a serious reactor mishap several days in advance while it is just beginning to happen - to make any such judgment reliably. Unless you can do that, you can't tell whether bunkering in place or evacuating is the better choice for various areas and communities of people, for example. Since we know that even months later the best experts in the world with all the time and instrumentation they need usually can't tell exactly what happened to the cores in a major meltdown, or where all the radioactivity went after emission, we are justified in presuming they won't be able to predict those events reliably with couple of hours of analysis in the circumstances of an ongoing event. The thing is, when I point out that predicting the weather days in advance, the behaviors of their haywire and out of control reactors days in advance, the occurrence and effects of aftershocks days in advance, and the responses of just now tsunami - afflicted people and governments days or weeks in advance, was humanly impossible for the people making the evacuation decision at Fukushima, and you respond with something about measuring wind speed and radiation levels you are being dishonest. That's not a response, it's an attempt to cover up and avoid. And that kind of dishonesty is completely typical of nuke apologists and promoters, including the people we are supposed to be relying on to make these judgments about risk and response. Of course good planning and preparation would help a lot. The anti-nuke forces have devoted quite a bit of effort toward forcing the nuke industry to make such plans and preparations, but in the face of much powerful opposition - so only limited success. They are quite expensive, for one thing, and they tend to make people wary of nuclear power and less willing to pay extra for it rather than more, and of course the nuke industry in general (TEPCO illustrates perfectly) is operating in a very badly deluded state of assumption about the likelihood of a need for them. Like this: These guys will never learn. We need to recognize that: we can't trust them or any of their judgments, and we should make our decisions accordingly. We need to take their money away, and put it into something that does not require inhuman and unrealistic levels of expertise and alertness and political maturity and technological foresight and simple humility. No, they wouldn't. We know that for sure, based on the experience of seeing them in exactly that situation for fifty years now.
No, it doesn't. A non-critical reactor is just a slightly warm mass of uranium and zirconium. It is not possible to fail completely safe. You can always engineer a disaster that will take down a plant. (You can do a lot to reduce the odds, of course.) You can't render the contents of a reactor inert. They're radioactive. At best you can store them while they cool down.
That is the point. You actually DON'T. The question isn't whether to bunker in place but HOW LONG to bunker in place. And for that you basically need a current situation estimate. They had all they needed to recommend that people stay home and indoors for MANY days, even weeks in most cases. Heck, MOST people never needed to be evacuated at all. That really is all they need, a decent estimate of the plume strength, direction, and speed. This is not quite true. Indeed, it is basically just plain wrong. What the anti-nukes have done is to try to force the nuclear plants out of business, period. This is NOT a good way to improve the situation. Working together does a much better job. Anti-nukes have done more, IMHO, to DELAY the implementation of rational safety policy than to bring it about. For example, the most recent revision of the PAG had ONE change. It improved the guidance for when to give iodine prophylaxis. It recommended more protective usage for kids. It PROTECTED KIDS BETTER. One anti-nuke site I read started a petition to STOP the revision. I mean, how stupid is that???
I THINK he was talking about the reactor itself, but since he doesn't seem to understand "criticality", it is hard to tell. I get the impression he thinks that if fission is stopped there will be no melt-down which is, of course, totally wrong.
Yes, you do. You have to have a reasonable estimate of the likelihood of various exposures and hazards over the entire wide area of potential trouble, stretching out for many days or even weeks. You have to answer the "whether", and one of the factors will be "how long". And a future situation estimate, which depends on having a very accurate current situation estimate and also predicting the weather, the aftershocks, and so forth. At Fukushima they didnt' even know whether the cores were melting, whether the spent fuel pools had water still. But no way to compare the risks of that with the risks of evacuation, area by area - the future of each area being a difficult thing to predict. As it turned out, in hindsight, if nothing goes badly wrong from now on. Lucky. Good luck is an unreliable safety precaution. btw: Bunkering in place is stressful and harmful, and in the aftermath of the tsunami the supplies of food, water, heat, and medicine, to outlying homes, were unreliable - many people ended up evacuating to central locations just for that. Any evacuation decision would include those factors. Predicted out for the duration of whatever actually happens over the duration of the event and handling. Yep. Get back to us when you have some way to do that - right now the best experts can't even predict the weather that well, let alone the collective behaviors of four or five quake-damaged reactors in possible meltdown. I agree that shutting the whole mess down has often been the overall goal, but the safety precautions established to forestall that goal were imposed unwillingly, by coercion and political threat, on nuke proponents who did not see the need for them and did not want to pay for them. They would not exist otherwise. Take a look at the designs and procedures created for power plants in the absence of populist anti-nuke forces - see examples in Russia. Nuke proponents are technology hypnotized, and have proven to be incapable of "working together" with anyone who does not share their view of nuclear power as inherently desirable and worth whatever it costs. Furthermore, they have proven to be incapable of telling outsiders the truth about stuff that is happening or might happen or has happened in their various projects - we have to dig and guess and threaten and subpoena and declassify and badger and bone up on physics and so forth, just to get an idea of what's going on. Maybe it's a hangover from the military background of the entire field, but it's lethal to "working together"; no one can "work together" with that scene.
Ice: Yes, you do. You have to have a reasonable estimate of the likelihood of various exposures and hazards over the entire wide area of potential trouble, stretching out for many days or even weeks. Me: Such data will obviously help, but is not mandatory. It is next to impossible to get a seriously unhealthy dose from a nuclear accident in a short amount of time. This SHOULD give the emergency services time to assess what data they have and pick and choose which areas, if any, need evac. Ice: You have to answer the "whether", and one of the factors will be "how long". Me: That is my point. The answer to "whether" is "yes". It is only then a matter of "how long". It is seldom "a very short period. Ice: And a future situation estimate, which depends on having a very accurate current situation estimate and also predicting the weather, the aftershocks, and so forth. Me: The "future situation" should be assessed based on known conditions, not on hypotheticals. The hypotheticals should be assessed BEFOREHAND in making the plans, not on the fly during the fact. Ice: At Fukushima they didnt' even know whether the cores were melting, whether the spent fuel pools had water still. But no way to compare the risks of that with the risks of evacuation, area by area - the future of each area being a difficult thing to predict. As it turned out, in hindsight, if nothing goes badly wrong from now on. Lucky. Good luck is an unreliable safety precaution. Me: As it turned out, even if they HAD had the problems you hypothesize, the need for evacuation would still have been low. The need for relocation after the emergency situation, may have arisen, but that still entails bunkering in place for quite a while. Ice: btw: Bunkering in place is stressful and harmful, Me: Yup, but less so than being forcibly evacuated into the aftermath of an earthquake and tsunami. Ice: and in the aftermath of the tsunami the supplies of food, water, heat, and medicine, to outlying homes, were unreliable - many people ended up evacuating to central locations just for that. Any evacuation decision would include those factors. Me: True, but that is true of any such natural disaster and has nothing to do with the subject at hand, except that the PAG should take dual situations into account. Ice: Predicted out for the duration of whatever actually happens over the duration of the event and handling. Yep. Get back to us when you have some way to do that - right now the best experts can't even predict the weather that well, let alone the collective behaviors of four or five quake-damaged reactors in possible meltdown. Me: Strawman. Not needed. Ice: I agree that shutting the whole mess down has often been the overall goal, but the safety precautions established to forestall that goal were imposed unwillingly, by coercion and political threat, on nuke proponents who did not see the need for them and did not want to pay for them. They would not exist otherwise. Take a look at the designs and procedures created for power plants in the absence of populist anti-nuke forces - see examples in Russia. Me: Many of them were redundant and of little value. The Price Andersen Act which makes NPPs liable for the accidents of others puts a significant pressure on the various owners to make sure that all the other plants are as safe as they can reasonably be made. In the States, that has done well by us. Ice: Nuke proponents are technology hypnotized, and have proven to be incapable of "working together" with anyone who does not share their view of nuclear power as inherently desirable and worth whatever it costs. Furthermore, they have proven to be incapable of telling outsiders the truth about stuff that is happening or might happen or has happened in their various projects - we have to dig and guess and threaten and subpoena and declassify and badger and bone up on physics and so forth, just to get an idea of what's going on. Maybe it's a hangover from the military background of the entire field, but it's lethal to "working together"; no one can "work together" with that scene. Me: Not true at all. Such accusations indicate an anti-nuclear bias that suggests that you cannot hold a truthful discussion.
actually the term is critical mass. it's the mass needed to sustain a chain reaction. the control rods moderate this reaction by absorbing neutrons. like i said above, the "criticality" depends on the control rods. the above applies to uranium piles and carbon rods, not sure if it applies to other reactors such as breeders.
This is gibberish. Regardless of your advance planning, the actual risks will be in some measure "hypotheticals", because the future is not certain. The risks faced in a given emergency will have to be evaluated on the fly, using whatever info you can get at the time to inform your prepared responses. At Fukushima, for example, there was no way to even guess at the risk of aftershock and another tsunami, no way to predict the behaviors of the reactors, no way to predict the weather out more than a couple of days, etc., "beforehand" or any other time. You can't make the decision you want to have made at Fukushima without it. A lot of "next to impossible" events have turned out to be immediate and emergency problems in the nuke power industry - and we have a pretty good idea of what a nuke proponent means by "seriously" unhealthy dose: these are the people who don't count stillbirths, ignore thyroid cancers unless the victim dies, do not count anything (such as cardiovascular problems) they can palm off to any other cause without research, and so forth. At Fukushima they did not have the necessary data, and I have no idea how you plan to provide it in any other such situation - the weather prediction alone is beyond current capability, the aftershock prediction is not even a theoretical possibility at current expertise, I think you are overlooking the problem here. As it could have turned out, bunkering in place would have killed many hundreds of people. Luck is not a safety plan. Really? It gave us several reactor complexes in earthquake and tsunami zones that had (and have) exactly the same inherent design flaws as the Fukushima plants. The reason it happened in Japan and not California is called "chance". It gave us a reactor down the road from me whose main control box fell off the wall it was bolted to, dropped several feet, and landed on a complex of pipes that included every cooling pipe (emergency and operational) that fed to the core. And by sheer good luck nothing happened - all the pipes held (the control box was about the size and weight of a school bus), the shutdown sequence run from the box worked anyway, no big deal - in hindsight. And so forth. And the oddest thing about such common and obvious observations is that they do not affect nuke proponent thinking at all - they already know thatstuff, and they still post assertions like "as safe as they can reasonably be made" and complaints about needless redundancy in backups and so forth. If Fukushima was as safe as a reactor can reasonably be made, then they cannot be made reasonably safe. Fukushima is just the latest manifestation, and this thread on Fukushima is a seven page string of illustrative examples, of the simple accuracy of that paragraph. Your dismissal of the safety influences of anti-nuke forces because they want to get rid of nukes rather than make them safer, for one. "Next to impossible" indeed.
Me: The "future situation" should be assessed based on known conditions, not on hypotheticals. The hypotheticals should be assessed BEFOREHAND in making the plans, not on the fly during the fact. Ice: This is gibberish. Regardless of your advance planning, the actual risks will be in some measure "hypotheticals", because the future is not certain. The risks faced in a given emergency will have to be evaluated on the fly, using whatever info you can get at the time to inform your prepared responses. At Fukushima, for example, there was no way to even guess at the risk of aftershock and another tsunami, no way to predict the behaviors of the reactors, no way to predict the weather out more than a couple of days, etc., "beforehand" or any other time. Me: Your inability to understand the logic does not make it gibberish. It is called "contingency planning" and many places use it, including the US. Read the PAG. Me: Such data will obviously help, but is not mandatory. Ice: You can't make the decision you want to have made at Fukushima without it. Me: I can, as can most competent people. YOU may not be able to, but that is your problem. Me: It is next to impossible to get a seriously unhealthy dose from a nuclear accident in a short amount of time. Ice: A lot of "next to impossible" events have turned out to be immediate and emergency problems in the nuke power industry - and we have a pretty good idea of what a nuke proponent means by "seriously" unhealthy dose: these are the people who don't count stillbirths, ignore thyroid cancers unless the victim dies, do not count anything (such as cardiovascular problems) they can palm off to any other cause without research, and so forth. Me: Disagree. But let me clarify. I meant for the PUBLIC to get a seriously unhealthy dose. So far, nothing that has happened has been next to impossible. Indeed, Fukushima was foreseen and needed upgrades were proposed and ignored. And even with this massive three reactor melt-down, the effect is still surprisingly minor. The Chernobyl event achieved the "next to impossible" by using men like robots. And even so, very few folks were involved with those levels. The public basically none. Bhopal killed more than Chernobyl ever will but I don't see folks clamoring to shut down all the chemical plants in the world. The point is, anti-nukes have an irrational fear of radiation which makes them unable to think clearly about it. It seems to be a contagious insanity. Still births happen all the time. Still births happen MORE often in times of stress. Stress increases when people are told their lives are ruined forever. Such lies are the domain of the fossil tool anti-nukes predominantly. I won't claim that the nuclear industry is lily white, but the anti-nuke industry was founded on a lie and hasn't deviated from that tactic since. So are the still births due to the accident or due to the FUD campaign so diligently waged by the anti-nukes? As to the thyroid issue... I am of the growing opinion that the thyroid issue was actually blown out of proportion by the same kind of fear mongering that is so prevalent amount anti-nukes. The thyroid is one of those organs where, "if you look, you will find". That was demonstrated quite readily in Japan since F1. Scientists looked for indications of abnormalities among the children of Fukushima Prefecture. They found them in 41% of the children. Anti-nukes SCREAMED bloody murder about F1 killing all the c h i l d r e n... Of course, they let out not one peep when the same scientist announce a bit later that they had continued to check the thyroids of children from 5 other prefectures unaffected by F1 and found HIGHER levels of abnormalities. Indeed, IF the radiation had an effect, it was to IMPROVE the situation. The same scientists then did a check for actual cancers and found a higher than normal occurrence in FP. But the cancers showed up too early to be nuclear related. They are still checking the kids in the other prefectures. But it strikes me as possible that the "cancers" they found would have gone away by themselves like all those abnormalities grow and go. I suspect that the Chernobyl cancers were so high because they looked hard for them rather than just followed standard protocol with thyroid issues. They looked, and they found. Would the cancers have grown to significance? We will never know. But nuclear power is labeled with another unproven boogeyman. Me: This SHOULD give the emergency services time to assess what data they have and pick and choose which areas, if any, need evac. Ice: At Fukushima they did not have the necessary data, and I have no idea how you plan to provide it in any other such situation - the weather prediction alone is beyond current capability, the aftershock prediction is not even a theoretical possibility at current expertise, I think you are overlooking the problem here. Me: Yes, they did have the necessary data. What they lacked was the necessary contingency planning. Their planning amounted to "OMG, run away!!!" Ok, it wasn't QUITE that bad, but it was still pretty bad. Me: As it turned out, even if they HAD had the problems you hypothesize, the need for evacuation would still have been low Ice: As it could have turned out, bunkering in place would have killed many hundreds of people. Luck is not a safety plan. Me: Absolute nonsense. My suspicion is that you don't understand the distinction between evacuation and relocation. Until you do, you won't be able to carry on a rational conversation. Me: The Price Andersen Act which makes NPPs liable for the accidents of others puts a significant pressure on the various owners to make sure that all the other plants are as safe as they can reasonably be made. In the States, that has done well by us. Ice: Really? It gave us several reactor complexes in earthquake and tsunami zones that had (and have) exactly the same inherent design flaws as the Fukushima plants. The reason it happened in Japan and not California is called "chance". It gave us a reactor down the road from me whose main control box fell off the wall it was bolted to, dropped several feet, and landed on a complex of pipes that included every cooling pipe (emergency and operational) that fed to the core. And by sheer good luck nothing happened - all the pipes held (the control box was about the size and weight of a school bus), the shutdown sequence run from the box worked anyway, no big deal - in hindsight. And so forth. Me: See what I mean? Lying is the basic stock in trade of the anti-nuke. The current US reactors don't have the system failings that made Fukushima express that large release. Had the same drivers hit one of our systems, it may have melted down, but it wouldn't have exploded and spewed the radiation like Fukushima. Ice: Nuke proponents are technology hypnotized, and have proven to be incapable of "working together" with anyone who does not share their view of nuclear power as inherently desirable and worth whatever it costs. Furthermore, they have proven to be incapable of telling outsiders the truth about stuff that is happening or might happen or has happened in their various projects - we have to dig and guess and threaten and subpoena and declassify and badger and bone up on physics and so forth, just to get an idea of what's going on. Maybe it's a hangover from the military background of the entire field, but it's lethal to "working together"; no one can "work together" with that scene. Me: Not true at all Ice: Fukushima is just the latest manifestation, and this thread on Fukushima is a seven page string of illustrative examples, of the simple accuracy of that paragraph. Your dismissal of the safety influences of anti-nuke forces because they want to get rid of nukes rather than make them safer, for one. "Next to impossible" indeed. Me: Fukushima has been a demonstration of my contention that it is next to impossible for the public to get a seriously dangerous dose of radiation from an accident. No one has. Even the workers most intimately involved with the work at the plant haven't (unlike Chernobyl).
The logic is not involved - you are claiming one can make good, honest contingency plans without taking "hypotheticals" into account, and make evacuation decisions without the people making the decisions taking "hypotheticals" into account when unable to get info. You can't. That's not a problem in logic, but in recognition of reality. You cannot predict the weather, or obtain accurate info about the state of a reactor in possible meltdown after a tsnunami, or estimate the size and frequency of aftershocks from a large earthquake, any better than the pros in those fields. Therefore, you cannot make any better assessments of the need for evacuation in specific areas than can be made without such information. So you say you "disagree", and then provide confirmation of exactly my claims. That's "none" from Chernobyl, as per your carefully considered and thought through "clarification". You indeed do not regard the tens of thousands of people put at risk for thyroid cancer from Chernobyl (several thousand have actually got it, and we are still counting) as having received "seriously unhealthy" doses. You do not regard the increased levels of cardiovascular disease and other immune system related disorders as indicating "seriously unhealthy" radiation dosage. And so forth. This situation, right here: http://www.cancer.gov/newscenter/newsfromnci/2011/ChernobylRadiation ; is your idea of "basically none" receiving "seriously dangerous" radiation exposure. My characterization of nuke proponents could hardly have been better illustrated. Unless we were not as lucky as at Fukushima, and one of the twenty or so US reactors of Fukushima design were at full power with only a night or weekend crew on hand, and the earthquake or whatever it was that time did more damage, and so forth and so on - in which case explosions and spewings might have been much, much worse. You attempt to deceive, by pretending we are talking about only one sequence of events that actually happened in the Fukushima disaster. The major threats from Fukushima derived from design features and circumstances shared by many US reactors, starting with the fact that they are nuclear reactors in the first place. The current leaks and the cooling problems and the generator troubles and the meltdowns themselves and the huge risk to a large public and all the rest were at least as likely at those US reactors as at Fukushima - by chance, Japan got hit first. The takehome here is that the people who think nobody got a "seriously unhealthy" dose of radiation from Fukushima - and that nobody will, in the future, as the various plumes and leaks wander the oceans and the plants gradually cool off and are dealt with somehow - are the same people who think the public suffered only minimal harm from Chernobyl, and the whole mess at TMI was an overreaction by irrationally panicked people; the same people who think the major stress of a nuke accident is from domination of the airwaves and policy recommendations by anti-nuke propagandists (including the stress experienced by the people under the authority and information regime of the Soviet government and military in 1986. Who knew that the Soviet government and military was so gullible and easily swayed by Greenpeace activists? Nuke proponents, that's who).
Boy, now I know that either you CAN'T read or that you WON'T read what I write. I just got thru saying that contingency planning is the PROPER place for hypotheticals. Sheesh, dude, get a clue.
And I pointed out that contingency plans don't get rid of them - "hypotheticals" don't go away because your plans must recognize them, they go away when the necessary information is acquired. The people making the evacuation decisions did not have the information necessary to make the kinds of decisions you want them to have made at Fukushima, and all the contingency planning in the world is not going to provide it during the next "next to impossible" event either.
No. Fukushima survived the earthquake. What got it was the tsunami that followed the earthquake. Nowhere in the US is there the threat of such a 1-2 punch. 1. You'll never hear a nuclear proponent say that nuclear plants can't reasonably be made safer. We're smart enough to know that you can't always identify all the weaknesses in advance. However: 2. The nuclear power safety record speaks for itself. Nuclear power is two to three orders of magnitude safer than its primary alternative, coal. If a Chernobyl or Fukushima type accident happened every year, then it would be reasonable to call nuclear power unsafe on a magnitude close to coal, but the reality is that nuclear power is very safe.
Russ, given the WORST CASE estimate for what Fukushima has done to the Japanese people and the annual toll on the world population from renewables, it turns out that the entire world's nuclear plant inventory could go Fukushima and not kill as many people as renewables do every year. Yes, the numbers for renewables are that bad.
You and I must be talking different languages because what you said makes no sense. I am speaking American English, you? Contingency planning plans for the contingencies, i.e., the hypotheticals. If this and this and this happens, we do that. If this other set of things happen, we do something different. This goes until you have covered the state space. At that point, all you have to do is observe the state and do what was planned.
