The Nuclear Fallout of Fukushima

The entire plant was built in the 60s and was not built to handle an earthquake of that scale.

Are you going to start complaining because people don't build houses to be fireproof?

 

When your house burns down, it doesn't render thousands of square miles uninhabitable for all your neighbors for 24,000 years.

Do you really expect people to take you seriously with those types of comparisons?

Germany knows. They're smart enough to see the writing on the wall. If you can boil water by other means than nuclear, only an insane person would opt for nuclear.

There is no such thing as a meltdown-proof reactor. None. All human inventions are subject to fatal flaws. The only "great new innovation" I've read about in nuclear reactor design is "passive" cooling systems in case of a power failure. These are mere tanks placed on the roof, where they trickle down water while the keystone cops scramble to put ??? [depending on the natural disaster/terrorist strike] back together. These great, new "safe" "innovations" are supposed to last a whole 72 hours! Goodness knows we'll have everything back to normal by then.

Or we can just boil water to steam using fresenel technology at a fraction of the cost to build, maintain and deal with the waste and disasters of nuclear steam:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkucHl4GgN8"]YouTube - ‪Concentrating Solar Power Plants 1 MW- 5 MW (Fresnel technology)‬‏[/ame]

 

You should keep up with the latest research

New York Academy of Sciences published a comprehensive report whereby almost 6000 medical articles were translated from Russian to English.



The Russians used almost 600,000 personell (mostly military personell) on cleaning up CHernobyl. They used about 10,000 miners who dug the tunnel underneath the Chernobyl reactor core, of which approximately 1/3 died from radiation exposure related diseases.

The Russian Academy of Medical sciences have published reports that estimate the number of deaths caused by Chernobyl is approximately 300,000 to 400,000

The UN estimate of 47 deaths plus 4000 additional deaths due to exposure is a farce.

 

And when we say 24,000 years we are referring to the half life of Plutonium.

For the Plutonium to decay down to something close to safe background levels, approximately 10 half lifes are neede

So when we say 24,000 years we really mean 240,000 years.

Europe will be contaminated by Chernobyl fallout for the next 600 years with respect to Cesium137 and Strontium90

About 40% of Europe is contaminated.

Japan is finished

 

LOL

The only nuclear fission reactors that are meltdown proof are the Thorium based reactors.

Thorium cannot self-sustain a nuclear fission chain reaction. An external neutron source must be injected into the Thorium reactor to trigger fissioning.

So if there was a total power and cooling loss in a Thorium reactor, fissioning stops automatically.

The Chinese have installed a reactor safety plug for their Thorium reactors. Even if the temperature rises the THroium core will melt the plug and fall into a safety containment area. Even if there is no power, no cooling, and no personell present.

Now Uranium and MOX Reactors CANNOT be designed to avoid metldown because if the cooling fails, fissioning CANNOT be stopped. Its self sustaining.

Fukushima has over 2000 tonnes of nulcear material at the facility

Chernobyl had 200 tonnes and lost about 50 tonnes to the atimosphere and environment resulting in about 985,000 deaths over the past 25 years

Its all over Japan

 

*claps* Lovely. Except we can mine more fissile material if we need more power, we can't make the sun shine any more frequently.

I know knew technology is scary and all, god knows people were scared of the Spinning Jenny as well.

 

Yes Alchaeon. It's very very sad. Germany is a bit too late on their decision. If we stopped all new reactors and shut down the old, we'll still have a nightmare we will be "gifting" future generations beyond the span of time we have of our own recorded history.

Warspite, when you get on the side of sanity, let us know..mmm K?

 

How many nuclear accidents has France had, exactly? Is their rate of cancer *higher* than that of NFZ countries?

In order to have high returns there must be high risks - of course, in the case of nuclear power such risks are miminal if you're intelligent about it as the French and Canadians have done.

 

Intelligent? An islamic extremist or other terrorist could blast one of the French reactors or a Canadian one. Your argument is like saying "well see that field over there filled with land mines? None of them have gone off yet! What a safe field that is, what a good farmer who tends it..

You're promoting madness. And the thing is, you know you are..

 

The risks are NOT minimal.

The risks are extreme. Japan's problems have just started with these plants, and others will occur.

Aside from natural disasters, rest assured that it is not being lost on war planners and terrorists alike that they merely need to deprive these kinds of plants (a common design) of cooling water for 5 hours, and they will melt down, as it turns out is what REALLY happened here, rendering hundreds or thousands of square miles of land uninhabitable.

 

Or, as is more likely, they'd be incarcerated or shot for tresspassing.

Again, how many nuclear accidents has France or Canada experienced?

I'm not the one advocating continued reliance on fossil fuels.

 

Here's an idea: don't let terrorists have access to the plants, and pre-emptively shut them down if there's imminent risk of sabotage.

Y'all have brains. Use them.

 

Nice fantasy!

How do you stop suicide squads? And if they get close enough to the plant, you run into the problem of too much defensive firepower will damage your nuclear plant, which defeats the purpose of the defense.

"Pre-emptively shut them down?" A proven, pointless action! At Fukishima, one plant was ALREADY shut down for repairs for WEEKS, and the others "shut down" immediately when the earthquake hit, well before the tsunami. It did NO GOOD whatsoever. It is kind of like shutting off the power to a deep fryer when your baby grabs the power cord and starts pulling it off the table. Until it cools off (3 to 5 years for a nuclear plant) it still is going to cook whatever it is contact with, shut down or not.

Here is a video of the problem when you count on humans to "save the day" with security. Nothing has changed since this video in 2009 anywhere in the country.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jEjtiioOrw"]Nuclear Security Guards Sleeping![/ame]

 

Yeah Warspite, the tide's against you. Have you heard that one of the world's top nations is done with nuclear? Back on the farm that's what we call a Swansong. Invest wisely..

We know what's coming for Japan and like the other posters here pointed out: they've only seen the tip of the iceberg of what's in store for them thanks to one little cooling problem. Where will be the next reactor disaster? It's like playing an insidious game of spin the bottle. And when it lands pointing at your country, you get to take off your economy until you're naked.

 

Exactly how does shooting terrorists in the brain carry a risk of causing a meltdown?

Because the backup power was poorly positioned - the Fukushima plant was a flawed and outdated design (admittedly the designers did not expect a dual earthquake/tsunami of that magnitude).

Intelligent people look at Fukushima and learn lessons in nuclear reactor design. The rest succumb to the hype and fearmongering spread by the Green Lobby. Like I said, y'all are as bad as the WHO concerning Swine Flu.

 

Boo hoo, a bunch of crazies on an internet forum have succumbed to terror. Psh - I don't expect the Germans to do any less considering how conservative their government is. World War II appears to have broken their spines.

What's hilarious is Germany intends to reduce its emissions after shutting down the reactors. I've yet to see how this will be possible.

 

IIRC, the French are planning to build new reactors. My guess is they'll be selling energy to Germany to make up in the shortfalls of their planned billion dollar renewable energy project.

 

Like I said, it REALLY says something when the Germans are frightened and the French are steaming ahead

Vive la France eh?

 

It's those rainbow powered unicorns they are going to get from Barack Obama.

 

Well, the French did have the stones to free themselves from Kings.

 

Hopefully in a decade or so the hype will blow over and the energy crisis will be severe enough to marginalize the foolishness of the Green Lobby.

 

Consider all the damage that fossil fuels have and all the disasters that happen over oil.
Now, lets imagine a world full of nuclear plants.
At the present rate there have only been three major "catastrophes" in nuclear energy in the last century. If we keep at that rate (which would go down because technology and safety would improve over time) then the downsides of nuclear disasters far outweigh the problems with oil and its harmful effects on the environment.

Why not go nuclear?

 

Come on. We have already long since established that you know NOTHING of how a Western nuclear plant is constructed, you know NOTHING of how well they are built, and you know NOTHING of what it would take to "blast" one. Just stop, you're embarassing yourself.

 

Seems to me you get the hat trick: you are certainly dishonest and obviously ignorant. The jury is still out on "stupid", however.

Chornobyl was a poorly-designed graphite-core reactor with, incredibly, no containment building. Those designs DO NOT EXIST in the United States or western Europe. Chornobyl blew because all safeties were, astoundingly, bypassed, and it was being made to run well past its design limits. A Western reactor simply will not do that...it will shut itself down.

There HAS been a meltdown at a nuclear plant in the US...and the area is so contaminated that the other reactor at the same plant is still running to this day! (Yes, unit one at Three Mile Island is still generating electricity!)

I'll take a dozen nuclear power plants in this area as soon as they can be built, please. I'd prefer Thorium reactors or fast-breeders...but I'm also fine with Westinghouse PWR's or GE BWR's.