Look at the Geiger counter reading

Started by penang, March 17, 2011, 07:51:58 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

penang

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 !!!!

freelancah

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

freelancah

#2
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.

Tangled-Universe

#3
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.

Tangled-Universe

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.

penang

#5
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.

freelancah

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

freelancah

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.


freelancah



Here's a good graph that shows why the used rods need such extreme ammount of water

FrankB

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

Henry Blewer

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.
http://flickr.com/photos/njeneb/
Forget Tuesday; It's just Monday spelled with a T

freelancah

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

Tangled-Universe

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.

FrankB

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