The CNN reporter was 60 to 70 kilometers west the nuclear power plant, upwind.
http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-573238
Look at the Geiger reading !!! Wow !!!!
Ive been watching this since beginning, reading and several live feeds and I must admit that they seem very desperate now with those helicopters and trucks. A lot of things happening and seems that everything that can go wrong has gone wrong.. Hope they will avoid the worst case scenario.
Pretty wild looking those buildings atm... http://static.reuters.com/resources/assets/?d=20110317&t=1&i=fuku&w=&q=
Is a pretty good live feed source http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nhk-world-tv
A Tepco official has told a press conference in Japan that radiation levels at the site soon after 9.30 am were at 3,750 millisieverts per hour, Ian Sample has just told me. "These are absolutely dangerous levels," Ian said.
Also what I heard was that foreign countries advice their nationals to evacuate to +80km region from the plant.
Thanks for that link freelancah.
IMO there's a lot of bullshit going on there in regard to safety-measures.
For instance: they say lead-plates were put on the floors of the helicopters to block radiation. For sufficient blocking they likely need 6 inches of lead to block a significant part of the radiation, but still not enough I suppose. I wonder if a helicopter could lift roughly its own weight of lead + water.
Secondly, the helicopters don't hover still above the reactor to avoid continuous exposure. It is RADIATION, the name itself says enough.
Thirdly, the radiation is told to 100 milliSieverts, which is 5x the annual dose allowed for professionals who work with radioactive isotopes/sources (here in The Netherlands). They state that it won't be a health-risk?
I guess they're right for short exposures, but together with their non-hovering tactics and lead-floors it will all be fine in the end of course ;)
It's really sad that everything what could have gone wrong went wrong. IMO a perfect example of murphy's law and I think it really is out of control already.
I wonder though: if dikes/barriers here in The Netherlands break then we have pumps which are able to pump >12000 litres/minute from A to B.
All I saw on TV are nozzles at the top of the reactor which spray water. I can't believe they don't have any of these pumps somewhere in their country.
Now they're trying it with helicopters and the live feed shows how well that goes.
What annoys me as well is that in Europe anti nuclear energy groups proliferate/take advantage of this situation.
Here in The Netherlands there's a debate about building a second nuclear plant next to one we already have and last monday there was a demonstration against building a new one because of "look what can happen, look at Japan".
Yeah sure, sod off please, in Europe we barely have earthquakes, let alone earthquakes of this magnitude.
I hate it when people go over the back of other people for their own agenda.
I hope Japan sticks to nuclear energy (they have to I think). It's still most effective, cheapest, cleanest but also safest. Despite what happened in Japan, that is really extremely rare to have so much bad luck.
Quote from: freelancah on March 17, 2011, 08:27:53 AM
A Tepco official has told a press conference in Japan that radiation levels at the site soon after 9.30 am were at 3,750 millisieverts per hour, Ian Sample has just told me. "These are absolutely dangerous levels," Ian said.
Also what I heard was that foreign countries advice their nationals to evacuate to +80km region from the plant.
2-3 hours @ 3750mSV/h is lethal.
Just in case you wonder what radiation will do to your body, here's a chart that may help:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/50878956/CHART-WHAT-DOES-RADIATION-EXPOSURE-DO-TO-THE-HUMAN-BODY-2011
And in the case for Japan, it is unfortunate that they have used the wrong type of nuclear reactor.
The type in Fukushima is a GE design and it is a flawed design.
A much better design would be nuclear pebble bed reactor.
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on March 17, 2011, 08:38:29 AM
Yeah I agree with you completely. Here in Finland they just gave permissions to 2 new plants and I dont know if those decisions were finalized but this thing might have some political reprecautions towards that. In worst case scenario we will just keep buying cheap nuclear power from Russia instead of building new top security plants.
I hate that things like this has such effect that old plants will be driven till they have problems and new ones wont be built because of that. It's a bad spiral.
From what I've followed and deducted it seems that there was certainly some security problems prior to this quake and they were warned that this incident was indeed possible. It seems that the other Japanese plants have newer model of residual heat removal system of that of Fukushima and on top of that the backup systems failed. Generators were intact but the oiltanks apparently were swept away by the tsunami.
So much information floating everywhere and it's hard to say which is real and which is not but I suppose everything will come out eventually
Also TU I would assume they would use something like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demron So direct radation values would not tell the whole tale. But still serious health risk.
Updated PDF with latest RAD levels. Translated with google
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fi&ie=UTF-8&sl=ja&tl=en&u=http://www.tepco.co.jp/cc/press/betu11_j/images/110317b.pdf&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com
(http://img830.imageshack.us/img830/2125/sfpe.jpg) (http://img830.imageshack.us/i/sfpe.jpg/)
Here's a good graph that shows why the used rods need such extreme ammount of water
I don't know Martin, think again.
While chances are low that the plant in e.g. NL gets into an out-of-control situation, the problem is that IF it happens, the consequences would be beyond catastrophic. Which is a risk a society should not get into. Even if chances are low.
Secondly, I believe if all the money we spend on the cost of nuclear energy today, would go into research on optimizing renewable energy effiency, and into building vast farms for collecting sunlight, wind, energy from tides etc... and even research into nuclear fusion (which is the ultimate answer if you ask me), then we have a chance, as humanity, to leave the age of nuclear fission behind us for good.
I look forward to that day.
Regards,
Frank
There has been some talk about using thorium for the fission material. (I think it was thorium, it's been a year since I read about it) Thorium does not have a half life of 20,000 years; about 2 years I think.
Still, the several billion dollars used to build one fission plant would be better spent on renewable energy. Frank's right.
FrankB true. There are risks but as with everything it's matter of picking the best from the options we have. There aren't many options for stable primary energy production. renewable energy is nice and I do support it but it's still just a secondary form of production. And if we go into statistics hydropower has killed more people than nuclear when comparing the produced TWh
Quote from: freelancah on March 17, 2011, 07:09:38 PM
FrankB true. There are risks but as with everything it's matter of picking the best from the options we have. There aren't many options for stable primary energy production. renewable energy is nice and I do support it but it's still just a secondary form of production. And if we go into statistics hydropower has killed more people than nuclear when comparing the produced TWh
Exactly.
All this renewable this and that sounds very nice and especially fashionable, but if we ever intend to go that road, which I doubt we'll do soon (as it isn't profitable enough, for example), we still need a lot of years of energy until we get there and thus so far nuclear energy is still the most effective, cheapest, cleanest and most safe option.
I wonder why people tend to think it's different, clearly influenced by lobbys/politics.
Yes, nuclear energy waste can be nasty, but that has improved the last decades in terms of storage and treatment to cut half-time.
Still people seem to believe we still dump it in the sea or just in barrels on some kind of parking lot.
Hydropower destroys entire ecosystems and indeed kills people and in some cases entire cultures (see China/Asia). Coal powerplants or any combustion based powerplants are way more polluting than anything else. Solar-energy isn't efficient enough (yet) and wind energy isn't either (I should look that up again, but it was calculated that wind-mills are so expensive to produce and especially to maintain that they are not cost-effective). Economical and perhaps political models inhibit improvements as well.
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on March 18, 2011, 05:39:30 AM
...cleanest and most safe option.
...
I can't follow you on this conclusion. Two "theoretically too unlikely" worst case accidents in just 25 years doesn't seem all that safe to me. Look, we all have learned our points of view on nuclear fission over the course of our lives. I think it's time to re-evaluate.
Is this really the best form of energy we can come up with as a species? Yes it's probably cheap and it is probably the most effective to date, although I doubt "cheapest", as we not only pay the actual energy consumption at our homes, but also - albeit through taxes - the disposal.
However, what if we would put all these billions into research of making for example wind and solar more effective? There have already been great advances in the past few years. Maybe after a while investing into these, they become a very viable alternative. And what's cleaner than these?
Secondly, even while hydro might be dangerous, it will never have the destructive and lethal potential potential like a nuclear meltdown, which carries on its destrcution in our genes for generations to come, and poinson the earth for unimaginable time spans.
Aren't these thoughts worth re-evaluating our stances? Aren't the recent events worthy enough to to question what has been our point of view on nuclear power for the better part of our lives? Is a nuclear free world something worth striving for at least? I say yes. I'm not so sure about the greatness of nuclear power anymore.
Frank
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8)
I believe there is no way around nuclear energy for a very long time. Especially if we are to cut back on fossil fuels. Renewable energy has a long way to go to meet the demand of a energy craving world. Fortunately it seems to me that research on nuclear energy production has come along way since todays reactors were conceived.
Thorium reactors seems to be a very promising technology as far as I can tell. The differences compared with an uranium based reactor is that a thorium based fission needs to be deliberately ignited and maintained by means of a neutron radiating source. This source would be a particle accelerator. Remove the neutron source and the reaction stops. The thorium fuel will not need cooling down, and the risk of meltdown or uncontrolled heating is substantially reduced.
Thorium fuel can be used much more efficiently too - nearly all of it compared to the 5 percent of the uranium. The rest of the uranium is enriched to low grade plutonium - the infamous nuclear waste and weapons material - in the process.
I believe molten salt reactor is the key term for this new breed of reactors. I find this very Here's a link too:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html
Yup, we would be fools not to consider this technology. That is until we get another Tesla soon and without throwing mud at the person.
Nuclear power is still quite safe. Statistically speaking there will have to be a 50 Chernobyls a year before we get to the fatality level of fossil fuels. (quick calculation from the values of latest issue of science magazine, that came out just before the incident(finnish version)). Yet 36% of our energy production comes from fossile fuels. Approximately 1 coal plant is built in china per week and they dont even have enough power to give electricity for every home.
I think big part of the future is in high yield energy research. Renewable energy alone wont be anywhere near enough in any scenario, not even with substantial technology advances in efficiency . Still, I'm not saying we should put all of our eggs in one basket. We need several good options and renewable certainly is among those..
Btw I've studied electrical engineering in the uni and have over 2 years of experience in operating a 2006 built biofuel plant. I'd say I have some insight into the industry but, still I dont consider myself an expert by any standards. I've noticed that the real experts on this industry are the kind that leave you with no questions after having a talk ;D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk
I don´t know how it is handled in other countries, but here in germany nuclear power is not cheap. It seems to, when looking at the bill. But when you take into account all the money that has to be paid via taxes, then it´s not cheap at all. And until now they still don´t know where to put the radiating waste. I mean, thats almost like building a plane without possibility to land and then say, well, somewhere up in the air we will for sure have a great idea how to land.
I personally think that in theory it should be possible to build safe nuclear plants. But here are two reasons, why this won´t happen:
1) people that plan, build and work at those plants
2) companies that want to maximize their wins
Because of those two points you will never get a safe nuclear plant.
I just hope that they can stopp the catastrophe in Japan. They had enough to suffer from the earthquake.
Also I've read somewhere that the plutonium waste from uranium reactors may be reused in thorium reactors acting as the neutron emitting source. In this case the plutonium is inserted in between the thorium fuel in a 1:10 ratio. That would leave much less fuel in need of cooling in case of an accident. I believe this is what they have started doing in India now. There's also at least one plant already using this method in the UK as well.
Being a tech optimist I also hope that the efforts for fusion energy will finally bear fruits. Construction of the latest experimental tokamak fusion reactor started last year in Cadarache in southern France. It is supposed to yield 500 MW using 50 MW of input power to reach the mind blowing 150 million degrees Celsius necessary for the process. More on this at: http://www.iter.org/
If they can see this through nobody will want fission reactors. What a day and age we live in!
Old one but still quite interesting http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html
Quote from: Walli on March 23, 2011, 05:07:37 AM
I don´t know how it is handled in other countries, but here in germany nuclear power is not cheap. It seems to, when looking at the bill. But when you take into account all the money that has to be paid via taxes, then it´s not cheap at all. And until now they still don´t know where to put the radiating waste. I mean, thats almost like building a plane without possibility to land and then say, well, somewhere up in the air we will for sure have a great idea how to land.
I personally think that in theory it should be possible to build safe nuclear plants. But here are two reasons, why this won´t happen:
1) people that plan, build and work at those plants
2) companies that want to maximize their wins
Because of those two points you will never get a safe nuclear plant.
I just hope that they can stopp the catastrophe in Japan. They had enough to suffer from the earthquake.
That is why the people need to get educated about these new technologies rather then ignorance and fear mongering.
A type of new energy committee needs to be created ran by engineers and scientists who become educated on the new technologies.
The people rise up and demand these technologies to there governing leaders.
The "extreme" environmentalists realize that this stuff will not destroy the world nor taint the water and food supply.
Lastly, let's go after the excess greed/profit of these companies and hold them accountable even if it takes government interaction.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbyr7jZOllI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl5DiTPw3dk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k2cWD2mjhQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2mJtONjE14&feature=related