"If the mistake had been discovered, the company might have been bankrupted, he said." ... "At the time, I felt like a hero," he said.
Tough choice. On the one hand, you have your friends, family, and your company; on the other hand, who could have expected there'd be a 9.0 earthquake.
> who could have expected there'd be a 9.0 earthquake
Your comment makes it sound like the defect had an incidence, but it's specific to reactor 4 alone, and reactor 4 was empty when the earthquake happened. For all we know putting the pressure vessel back in shape may have had little effect on its resiliency.
For me, the real story is the cover-up that occurred when he reported his story years ago. He did the right thing in terms of public safety and got called a liar.
>who could have expected there'd be a 9.0 earthquake
In 2007 the probability of an earthquake with a magnitude of Mw8.1–8.3 was estimated as 99% within the following 30 years.[1] The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami was larger than the predicted event, but occurred in the same area and caused major flooding in the Sendai area.
It wasn't that unexpected. It was just stronger than expected. I guess that's a consequence of there being a longer pause between major earthquake than expected
Keep in mind, log scaling makes 9.0 not just a wee bit bigger than 8.3 (and the plants were virtually unaffected by the quake, it was the tsunami that got them, because quakes were the events they spent most resources planning for).
Tsunami is a Japanese word, no? If the language has a particular word for giant seismic waves, and you have a nuclear nuclear plant sitting right on the Pacific coastline, a large tsunami seems like exactly the sort of thing you might expect to occur in combination with an earthquake.
Do you remember that 2004 earthquake in Indonesia, the on followed by a huge tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people? It swamped a coastal reactor in India, ~1000 miles away. Statistical evidence suggests that Japan gets hit with tsunamis every 8 years on average; this is the 3rd in the last 30 years with waves >10m. Fukishima Daiichi is 6m above sea level. I know they're not psychic, but it was rather predictable.
It is a much more sensible objection to say that the incident happened because the tsunami was 10 meters instead of nine meters, and the possibility of it being 10 meters was suggested by a previous tsunami mentioned once half a decade ago by a single engineer on the basis of an estimation gleaned from historical records that predate England, by not pursued further. But when you phrase it like that, it sounds like the awesomely accurate 20/20 hindsight that it is, and the narrative needs a villain.
That interpretation requires a lack of intellectual curiosity that borders upon the obtuse. From the link above, which it appears you didn't bother to read:
Japan has suffered 195 tsunamis since 400, according to Japan’s Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, which produced a report on tsunami threats to nuclear plants on the opposite coast to Dai-Ichi in July 2008. Three in the past three decades had waves of more than 10 meters.
A 7.6-magnitude quake in 1896 off the east coast of Japan created waves as high as 38 meters, while an 8.6- magnitude temblor in 1933 led to a surge as high as 29 meters, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Yes, it was a very big earthquake and they were very unlucky, but the country is famously earthquake prone. I mean, nobody expected that Indonesian earthquake to be as big as it was either. they had an earthquake 15 years ago that wiped $100m off their GDP and killed thousands, and which surprised everyone considerably. If they are being astonished by natural phenomena on a regular basis then maybe their intellectual confidence is somewhat misplaced. The concept of >10 meter waves off the coast of Japan is hardly beyond imagination: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8Ok7XT4IAwo/TRQYSauk1gI/AAAAAAAAAH...
They were, but the actual damage done by the tsunami was to wreck the fuel tanks for the diesel backup generators, which were intended to keep the cooling systems operating if the grid power supply failed. The failure of the backup system led to failure of the cooling system, allowing the heat to build up inside the reactors, causing the pressure explosions around the reactors and seemingly inside one or two of them, if reports about cracked containment chambers are correct.
A seawall was supposed to handle any large waves, but among other problems, some fuel tanks for the diesel generators were immediately behind it - not really the ideal place to put any component of your backup system. There's a before & after photo here: http://everist.org/pics/Fukushima/Fukushima_fuel_tanks.jpg
The reactors themselves would have been hard to move, but would likely have been OK had the backup systems been more robust - and being external and modular, they could have been made more robust, and ought to have been.
Even if it were an all-or-nothing proposition, the additional data gathered in the years since the plants' construction was sufficient to justify a re-evaluation of risk; if the risk were sufficiently probable but impossible to mitigate, then decommissioning would be the appropriate response. Sure, that would be very expensive, but much less so than a post-disaster situation like this. Going ahead with a plan that's known to be flawed because you've already put a lot of money into it is known as a 'sunk costs fallacy'; the amount you've already spent has zero bearing on the future probability of failure, so if the latter is unacceptably high then the size of the former is no excuse for inaction.
This highlights the biggest problem I have with the rabidly pro nuclear people who insist that we now know how to build safe reactors. They always assume everyone involved has the best intentions, but we know that that is not the case.
Nuclear industry PR reminds me of NASA's attitude to space travel prior to the Challenger explosion.
The fact is that there are fewer than 500 reactors in operation worldwide, representing a significant fraction of the total number ever built. Even if you don't consider Chernobyl a civilian reactor, a substantial fraction of the reactors ever built have now suffered severe accidents. Like the shuttles, nuclear failures are essentially black swan events. The shuttle program's probabilities of failure looked great prior to Challenger and Columbia. Now they look like dangerously experimental technology.
Likewise, nuclear power is still essentially experimental. No one can credibly quantify the risk involved, or the chances that containment features will work, when there is so little data to draw conclusions from.
This argument is popular, but I don't find it compelling. The dangers of most other energy sources are front loaded (let's ignore global warming for a moment), while the risks from nuclear power are spread over many many many years.
So, your argument is that because it's harder to make judgements about the impact of fossil fuels, surely our judgement about nuclear power must be worse?
Isn't your analysis a victim of what Nassim Taleb calls the narrative fallacy? The fight is between "true" and "false", not "compelling" and "abstruse".
The carcinogens and particulates emitted by coal do all their damage immediately? They don't build up in people's lungs and cause cancer and other diseases many years later?
Surface coal mining doesn't leave many square miles of more or less uninhabitable wasteland that remains uninhabitable for many years in the future? Underground coal mines don't catch fire and render entire towns completely uninhabitable?
Many other energy sources have risks which are spread over many years. They just don't have that "omfg, scary scientific stuff I don't understand" factor.
"The carcinogens and particulates emitted by coal do all their damage immediately? They don't build up in people's lungs and cause cancer and other diseases many years later?"
There are orders of magnitude differences between this time span and radioactive material, right? The same is true of all your points, right?
I'm not anti nuclear, it may be preferable to coal, but it doesn't make the logic of those stats any better.
The half life of some plutonium radionuclides is spectacularly long. But because of the nature of nuclear power (to wit: turning very big atoms into smaller ones), the stuff that actually contaminates the environment in the worst accidents is more boring. Cesium-137, one of the more obnoxious contaminants, has a half life of 30 years.
Coal will do more damage than nuclear on this metric, too.
Of course, catastrophic failure of a coal or wind power plant kills plant workers and maybe a few unlucky bystanders.
The Fukushima disaster, on the other hand, is poisoning square miles of land, air, sea, most likely the groundwater and probably hundreds of workers.
When you score risk, you multiply probability by impact. The power output and operational history of nuclear power indicates that the probability of failure is very low, but the impact is very high. (both in terms of severity and duration)
The Fukushima disaster, on the other hand, is poisoning square miles of land, air, sea, most likely the groundwater and probably hundreds of workers.
Should I say "citation needed" or just call it as FUD?
I'd say that even with such a disaster at Fukushima, the impact has been very low. Even less so compared to the alternatives:
1) What are the levels of radiation that the workers were exposed to? Is that fatal or problematic for their health? How many people suffer from respiratory diseases related to fossil fuel burning?
2) What is more damaging to the environment: a nuclear plant or a coal mine? The amount of "poisoning" that happened will make the land inhabitable ever again? How much farm land would have to stop producing crops to give way to wind turbines?
I don't know how you can accuse me of making up FUD, while asserting that the impact is "very low".
Since the NY Times reported this morning that unprotected workers were burned by contaminated water suspected to be leaking from the #3 reactor, after ignoring warnings from personal radiation warning devices. I don't think its unreasonable to think that workers will suffer adverse health effects.
A safely operating nuclear power plant with an uninterrupted supply of fresh water and electricity has less impact to the surrounding area than your average coal mine. The problem is, as Fukushima aptly demonstrates, is that many of these facilities do not fail safe.
Again, think risk management. Probability vs. impact. You're letting your fondness for nuclear energy blind you from the obvious.
Didn't that same article suggest that what they were likely to end up with apart from an exposure to 180msv† was the equivalent of a bad sunburn?
It's not like we don't have any idea what radiation does, is it? It's among the better studied of the human industrial health hazards, right? A lot better understood than, say, endocrine disruptors?
Because coal kills 30-60 industry workers every year. (Down from ~1200/yr in the late '40s).
† (Which, while more carcinogenic than the air in Chicago, is far less carcinogenic than failing to eat enough leafy green vegetables or a 4-times-a-week habit of eating red meat)
The industry worker casualties are flatly insignificant compared to the deaths caused by release of SO2 and NO2.
In the whole world, roughly a million people die every year due to the direct effects of coal power production. Most of that is because of the very dirty plants in use outside of the western world -- but even here, more than 50,000 people die every year because of coal.
I think you are vastly underestimating the amount of damage coal power generation causes.
If nothing new and catastrophic happens in the near future (it looks like the worst is being contained, but if another earthquake and/or tsunami hits the plant right now, the damage will be massive), the most casualties caused by the Daichi nuclear plant will be in Germany.
This is because Angela Merkel caved to political pressure and ordered the seven oldest nuclear reactors in Germany shut down for at least 3 months. During those 3 months, the plants would have generated 17 TWh, which will now need to be supplied from other sources. The most likely candidate for most of it is coal, because there is currently plenty of underutilized capacity. Coal power releases lots of SO2 and NO2 to the atmosphere, which directly kills people. By current data, 1 TWh of coal power produced in the western world kills roughly 15 people -- so when Merkel signed that moratorium, she signed death warrants for 250 people. (This estimate is probably seriously low -- notably, the coal plants currently running are the newer and cleaner ones, and the capacity that will be brought up to replace them will be dirtier. Also, I have not counted CO2 emissions in any way.)
If every nuclear reactor in the world operated constantly at the level of leakage and operator casualties that are happening at Daichi, nuclear would still be preferable to coal. If there was a Chernobyl every year, nuclear would still be preferable to coal. The normal operation of a coal plant over it's lifetime is more costly in human lives than the worst case nuclear accident of a modern nuclear plant.
The problem is that people are not afraid of dying -- they are afraid of dying in disasters. Nuclear accidents are concentrated. The casualties and the environmental damage caused by coal are diffuse.
While I'm also actually a fan of nuclear power, I'd like to point out that the land use profile of wind turbines doesn't actually preclude the land still producing crops. You lose a couple of percent of the actual acreage where the turbine is actually standing, but the rest of the acreage needs to stay clear for obvious reasons, and is still every bit as fertile.
Longer-term, you'd also have to factor in the benefit of being able to use electric tractors. (I don't think anybody actually does yet, mind you, but there's a clear advantage.)
How exactly are you quantifying severity? The worst case for a reactor is vastly worse than anything that can happen at other types of plant. The financial bill for cleaning up nuclear accidents is already in the billions of dollars, not counting Fukushima.
The financial bill for mitigating the damages being caused to the environment (not to mention foreign policy) by fossil fuels is dwarfing that of nuclear power.
A "severe" accident results in loss of life, or in square kilometers of land unexpectedly rendered unusable for habitation or agriculture.
The worst case scenario for global warming involves a change in climate so devastating that the earth may be able to feed little more than 100 million humans and may take hundreds of thousands of years to return to the point we are at now. It makes the dangers posed by nuclear energy seem fairly trivial.
I have yet to read any worst case scenarios for nuclear energy accidents which are anywhere comparable to this.
Is it much worse than the Banqiao Dam disaster where an estimated 90-230k people died? What would happen if there was a catastrophic failure of the Hoover dam?
This is not to say nuclear failure isn't bad news, just that many large scale electricty generating schemes have a big downside and it's going to be a big ask to find 100% benign alternatives.
By "severe accident" you appear to mean "event that renders a plant incapable of further operation", which is an analysis that suggests that hard drives are more dangerous than nuclear power.
This seems like a disingenuous way to dodge the simpler and more relevant statistic: how many fatalities are attributable to nuclear vs. coal.
What are you, HN's resident troll? I responded politely and informatively to your dickish 'citation needed' post, and your only response is to call me disingenuous?
Thank you for finding an interesting statistic. I was just thinking, while ordering pizza for my family, that despite the fact that your statistic absolutely didn't make the case your original uncited post made, I was still happy to see it, and appreciative that you'd take the time to find it.
I disagree with you. Strongly. I think you're on the wrong side of an argument that simple math demonstrates the right side of. But I don't think you're a jerk for making your argument, and certainly don't mean to be "dickish".
the nuclear industry seems to be caught in the multiple "9"s trap : it costs enormous amounts of money (and thus provide motive for taking shortcuts) to build a device with 0.999999999... reliability. That sucks in all the money what could otherwise have been spent on multiple, yet built to less "9"s and thus cheaper, additional levels of protection, say several more metal containment/enclosing vessels instead of the current 2 - the reactor's vessel itself and the containment structure.
There are a lot of examples when the same or less amount of money spent on cheaper components allowed to organize them into more reliable or performant system.
Is everyone who supports nuclear power "rabid", or do we just need to adequately demonstrate our bona fides to you first? And, are the people who build coal power plants part of a monastic order that shields them from making selfish bad decisions? Because the statistics on fossil fuel power generation are worse.
Considering that the reactors survived the initial impact of a disaster that killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, I'd say they fared quite well.
Go back to the first day and read the comments on HN about how everything is perfectly fine, and nothing bad can possibly happen to these reactors. That was blind faith that turned out to be wrong. Those people, instead of becoming more reasoned after being wrong, continue to make bold claims about how all future reactors will be perfectly safe.
These are ideological thoughts, not reasoned thoughts. That's what I mean by 'rabid'
Can you please be specific about the things you believe have gone spectacularly wrong? I can see why you think people are getting "more rabid"; you might think, for instance, that they've been shown to be wrong by the events at Fukushima. What you're not taking into account is the notion that the people you're debating may have taken all of this into account --- in fact, like me, they may have been bracing for far worse outcomes, such as hundreds of casualties --- and still be capable of reasoning through a comparison with the damage caused by fossil fuels.
Documented casualties directly linked to the production of energy with fossil fuels simply dwarfs that of nuclear power, and probably will for as long as fossil fuel remains in common use.
And that is to say nothing of the indirect but fairly obvious casualties to the developing world of lack of electrical infrastructure. Simple diseases such as dysentary, which can be mitigated in part by electrical infrastructure, take HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF LIVES A YEAR.
You seem to believe that I think we shouldn't use nuclear. What I'm saying is that bad arguments and ideological blinders from some people on the pro nuclear side is not helping the case for nuclear power. On the first day when they say things like, "these reactors have a containment dome and there is no way for it to get out of the containment dome", then it does in fact get out of the containment dome, it discredits those people.
When those people then claim that science is on their side, and I'm a luddite or something ... it's annoying.
You can't treat this like a football game where you're on the pro nuclear side and everyone else that is pro nuclear is on your team.
That's a fair critique. I probably am polarizing this discussion, and I'm sorry for that. But the points you're making are straightforward to knock down: fossil fuel power generation, which has a worse track record than nuclear, is also deployed and maintained by commercial interests; and, "front loaded" or not, fossil fuels are doing more damage to the planet. Those aren't random things I brought up; they're responses to arguments you've made.
This is the 'rabid' I'm talking about. I have never once said that fossil fuels are safer than nuclear. You however insist on projecting that view onto me, and arguing with a strawman. Why? Because I've asked some questions and pointed out one flaw I think exist in a commonly used argument for nuclear power.
If someone like me is trying to make sense of this stuff by participating in a discussion and asking questions, someone like you comes along and decides that I'm on the opposite side of some fight from you. Despite the fact that I'm not. I'm on neither side, and am trying to reason about these issues, and I found one argument unconvincing. Now I'm your enemy apparently, and you're "knocking down" my points, which I don't even have.
That's what worries me about nuclear power. A well maintained plant is probably very safe but there is an incentive for operators to cover up flaws in order to save money.
Let's wait until more power plants get old. They probably should be shut down but that's the time when they are the most profitable and fixing problems is the most expensive.
A missing or damaged filter on a coal plant is sufficient to contaminate the surrounding environment with uranium-235, uranium-238, and thorium-232 (not to mention arsenic). Your long term exposure to radionuclides is actually probably worse from coal plants allowed to continue operating negligently than your exposure would be if you lived 30km from Fukushima.
If we spread enough plutonium dust around, it will make original sin look like a walk in the park. (Which it was I believe :-)
On the other hand, if we spew enough CO2 there might not be any sinners left in 50 generations.
People are standing around waiting for a techno fix. That won't happen without incentives. We need to tax the heck out of carbon. Fine to cut other taxes and pay Grandma's heating bill. But we must change relative prices to get the right focus. Economic forces are much more powerful than a few government research projects.
Is anyone driving less at $100 oil? We need about $50-$100 of tax per barrel to get the ball rolling. And a carbon equivalent tax on coal and gas.
And so, if you live in an area of Subsaharan Africa with poor to nonexistent infrastructure, your answer is basically "die of dysentary"? You cannot look at this problem solely from the surroundings of your couch. I promise you, the dysentary entamoeba pathogen is many tens of thousands of times scarier than 100msv of radiation.
The prohibitively high cost of energy in the world is actually a bad thing.
Plato had this theory that in drama, you had to show the bad guys being bad, so that they would be morally worthy of the hero killing them. Of course, they actually get killed by the unexpected combination of sword and internal organs.
A lot of the reporting about TEPCO seems to be "Aldight alright, we get it, your plant got physically hit by a thirty foot tall wave... but you were asking for it what with your shiftiness on that totally unrelated inspection years ago."
Wait, how is a coverup and botched inspection leading to an unsafe containment vessel unrelated to a situation decades later in which a sister vessel is compromised?
EDIT: clarified that the vessel from this story was not the exact one that just failed; it's simply another of the same design made by the same company during the same era, overseen by the same agency.
But the one next to it has! Do you really think the corrupt construction of one of these structures has no bearing on the failure of the others? That they're independent events in history?
Occam's Razor: was in the corrupt construction or the power interruption caused by the ten meter high wave hitting their diesel generators? Here, let's try an experiment: take a reactor not maintained by TEPCO. Turn it off. Interrupt power to cooling systems. Wait.
Result: bad shit happens, in a fairly predictable sequence. The French nuclear agency actually did this with a containment pool to study disaster effects. Water heats? Check. Water boils? Check. Zirconium slags off? Check. Spent fuel rods begin to melt as heat rises? Check. (The video of the control room during this experiment was broadcast on Japanese TV.)
They then, of course, turned the power back on and restored cooling. TEPCO didn't have a button they could push to do that. Not because they're evil bastards who left that button out to save a buck, no, it's because they got hit with a ten meter tsunami.
Forgive me if I keep coming back to that detail, but it is fairly important to understanding the failure.
Hopefully we agree here that the most important goal is to understand the entire chain of events (from plant design to construction to operation to earthquake to tsunami to power failure to meltdown to vessel breach), in order to better avoid something like this happening again in the future.
Insofar as a containment vessel appears to have failed--regardless of the reasons--gross negligence by the firm that constructed it, which is known to have led to a structural flaw that could hasten a breach in another vessel at the same plant, is not "unrelated" news.
I'm probably being unfair, but your snarky dismissal of this article seems to amount to, "act of god; nothing to learn here; move right along".
Your implicit premise seems to be that no reasonable containment vessel standards could have been envisioned or successfully engineered to survive a total, prolonged power failure--in this case the result of a 30' wave hitting the plant's diesel generators. Therefore, because that unlikely event occurred, everyone is off the hook for structural flaws that could have hastened any subsequent meltdown and breach. I don't buy the premise, or the conclusion given the premise.
I think the point of the containment vessel is to be a last line of defense in case everything else goes wrong. So when everything else goes wrong you don't get to say "everything else went wrong, so it's not really relevant whether some of the vessels were poorly made".
In any case, I suspect we're arguing "at" rather than with each other now, so I'm happy to give you the last word and then drop it, unless you'd really like a response...
If there was a cover-up that we know about, is that relevant for wondering whether there was a cover-up we don't know about? And there was thus a chance of a cover-up we don't know about effecting the broken reactor know about?
The chain of reasonings seems fairly clear ... something done by someone you know does shoddy work breaks. What do you imagine might have happened?
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadTough choice. On the one hand, you have your friends, family, and your company; on the other hand, who could have expected there'd be a 9.0 earthquake.
Your comment makes it sound like the defect had an incidence, but it's specific to reactor 4 alone, and reactor 4 was empty when the earthquake happened. For all we know putting the pressure vessel back in shape may have had little effect on its resiliency.
Still, of course, a very tough choice.
In 2007 the probability of an earthquake with a magnitude of Mw8.1–8.3 was estimated as 99% within the following 30 years.[1] The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami was larger than the predicted event, but occurred in the same area and caused major flooding in the Sendai area.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/869_Sanriku_earthquake_and_tsunami
It wasn't that unexpected. It was just stronger than expected. I guess that's a consequence of there being a longer pause between major earthquake than expected
Do you remember that 2004 earthquake in Indonesia, the on followed by a huge tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people? It swamped a coastal reactor in India, ~1000 miles away. Statistical evidence suggests that Japan gets hit with tsunamis every 8 years on average; this is the 3rd in the last 30 years with waves >10m. Fukishima Daiichi is 6m above sea level. I know they're not psychic, but it was rather predictable.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-25/tsunami-risk-well-k...
Japan has suffered 195 tsunamis since 400, according to Japan’s Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, which produced a report on tsunami threats to nuclear plants on the opposite coast to Dai-Ichi in July 2008. Three in the past three decades had waves of more than 10 meters.
A 7.6-magnitude quake in 1896 off the east coast of Japan created waves as high as 38 meters, while an 8.6- magnitude temblor in 1933 led to a surge as high as 29 meters, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Yes, it was a very big earthquake and they were very unlucky, but the country is famously earthquake prone. I mean, nobody expected that Indonesian earthquake to be as big as it was either. they had an earthquake 15 years ago that wiped $100m off their GDP and killed thousands, and which surprised everyone considerably. If they are being astonished by natural phenomena on a regular basis then maybe their intellectual confidence is somewhat misplaced. The concept of >10 meter waves off the coast of Japan is hardly beyond imagination: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8Ok7XT4IAwo/TRQYSauk1gI/AAAAAAAAAH...
A seawall was supposed to handle any large waves, but among other problems, some fuel tanks for the diesel generators were immediately behind it - not really the ideal place to put any component of your backup system. There's a before & after photo here: http://everist.org/pics/Fukushima/Fukushima_fuel_tanks.jpg
The reactors themselves would have been hard to move, but would likely have been OK had the backup systems been more robust - and being external and modular, they could have been made more robust, and ought to have been.
Even if it were an all-or-nothing proposition, the additional data gathered in the years since the plants' construction was sufficient to justify a re-evaluation of risk; if the risk were sufficiently probable but impossible to mitigate, then decommissioning would be the appropriate response. Sure, that would be very expensive, but much less so than a post-disaster situation like this. Going ahead with a plan that's known to be flawed because you've already put a lot of money into it is known as a 'sunk costs fallacy'; the amount you've already spent has zero bearing on the future probability of failure, so if the latter is unacceptably high then the size of the former is no excuse for inaction.
Besides the Sanriku earthquake was estimated 8.6
The fact is that there are fewer than 500 reactors in operation worldwide, representing a significant fraction of the total number ever built. Even if you don't consider Chernobyl a civilian reactor, a substantial fraction of the reactors ever built have now suffered severe accidents. Like the shuttles, nuclear failures are essentially black swan events. The shuttle program's probabilities of failure looked great prior to Challenger and Columbia. Now they look like dangerously experimental technology.
Likewise, nuclear power is still essentially experimental. No one can credibly quantify the risk involved, or the chances that containment features will work, when there is so little data to draw conclusions from.
Surface coal mining doesn't leave many square miles of more or less uninhabitable wasteland that remains uninhabitable for many years in the future? Underground coal mines don't catch fire and render entire towns completely uninhabitable?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania
Many other energy sources have risks which are spread over many years. They just don't have that "omfg, scary scientific stuff I don't understand" factor.
There are orders of magnitude differences between this time span and radioactive material, right? The same is true of all your points, right?
I'm not anti nuclear, it may be preferable to coal, but it doesn't make the logic of those stats any better.
Coal will do more damage than nuclear on this metric, too.
The Fukushima disaster, on the other hand, is poisoning square miles of land, air, sea, most likely the groundwater and probably hundreds of workers.
When you score risk, you multiply probability by impact. The power output and operational history of nuclear power indicates that the probability of failure is very low, but the impact is very high. (both in terms of severity and duration)
Should I say "citation needed" or just call it as FUD? I'd say that even with such a disaster at Fukushima, the impact has been very low. Even less so compared to the alternatives:
1) What are the levels of radiation that the workers were exposed to? Is that fatal or problematic for their health? How many people suffer from respiratory diseases related to fossil fuel burning?
2) What is more damaging to the environment: a nuclear plant or a coal mine? The amount of "poisoning" that happened will make the land inhabitable ever again? How much farm land would have to stop producing crops to give way to wind turbines?
Since the NY Times reported this morning that unprotected workers were burned by contaminated water suspected to be leaking from the #3 reactor, after ignoring warnings from personal radiation warning devices. I don't think its unreasonable to think that workers will suffer adverse health effects.
A safely operating nuclear power plant with an uninterrupted supply of fresh water and electricity has less impact to the surrounding area than your average coal mine. The problem is, as Fukushima aptly demonstrates, is that many of these facilities do not fail safe.
Again, think risk management. Probability vs. impact. You're letting your fondness for nuclear energy blind you from the obvious.
It's not like we don't have any idea what radiation does, is it? It's among the better studied of the human industrial health hazards, right? A lot better understood than, say, endocrine disruptors?
Because coal kills 30-60 industry workers every year. (Down from ~1200/yr in the late '40s).
† (Which, while more carcinogenic than the air in Chicago, is far less carcinogenic than failing to eat enough leafy green vegetables or a 4-times-a-week habit of eating red meat)
In the whole world, roughly a million people die every year due to the direct effects of coal power production. Most of that is because of the very dirty plants in use outside of the western world -- but even here, more than 50,000 people die every year because of coal.
If nothing new and catastrophic happens in the near future (it looks like the worst is being contained, but if another earthquake and/or tsunami hits the plant right now, the damage will be massive), the most casualties caused by the Daichi nuclear plant will be in Germany.
This is because Angela Merkel caved to political pressure and ordered the seven oldest nuclear reactors in Germany shut down for at least 3 months. During those 3 months, the plants would have generated 17 TWh, which will now need to be supplied from other sources. The most likely candidate for most of it is coal, because there is currently plenty of underutilized capacity. Coal power releases lots of SO2 and NO2 to the atmosphere, which directly kills people. By current data, 1 TWh of coal power produced in the western world kills roughly 15 people -- so when Merkel signed that moratorium, she signed death warrants for 250 people. (This estimate is probably seriously low -- notably, the coal plants currently running are the newer and cleaner ones, and the capacity that will be brought up to replace them will be dirtier. Also, I have not counted CO2 emissions in any way.)
If every nuclear reactor in the world operated constantly at the level of leakage and operator casualties that are happening at Daichi, nuclear would still be preferable to coal. If there was a Chernobyl every year, nuclear would still be preferable to coal. The normal operation of a coal plant over it's lifetime is more costly in human lives than the worst case nuclear accident of a modern nuclear plant.
The problem is that people are not afraid of dying -- they are afraid of dying in disasters. Nuclear accidents are concentrated. The casualties and the environmental damage caused by coal are diffuse.
Longer-term, you'd also have to factor in the benefit of being able to use electric tractors. (I don't think anybody actually does yet, mind you, but there's a clear advantage.)
A "severe" accident results in loss of life, or in square kilometers of land unexpectedly rendered unusable for habitation or agriculture.
I have yet to read any worst case scenarios for nuclear energy accidents which are anywhere comparable to this.
Lots of people die in mining accidents and mining byproducts cause water pollution.
NO2 emissions are horrid for human health—I don't have death count numbers at hand.
This is not to say nuclear failure isn't bad news, just that many large scale electricty generating schemes have a big downside and it's going to be a big ask to find 100% benign alternatives.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
By "a substantial fraction", you mean...?
By "severe accidents", you mean...?
Cite, please?
This seems like a disingenuous way to dodge the simpler and more relevant statistic: how many fatalities are attributable to nuclear vs. coal.
I disagree with you. Strongly. I think you're on the wrong side of an argument that simple math demonstrates the right side of. But I don't think you're a jerk for making your argument, and certainly don't mean to be "dickish".
How about a nice simple metric of dollars/kWh, including an accurate accounting for externalities?
(I'd also like a pony.)
Jaslovske bohunice A-1: plant contaminated and decomissioned http://www.omegainfo.sk/kuruc_30th_anniversary_of_reactor_ac...
Chalk River: reactor destroyed http://www.ccnr.org/paulson_legacy.html
But from this (a bad list but I couldn't find better) http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/mar/14/nuclear-... it seems that the reprocessing plants are much more dangerous than the actual nuclear plants.
The evidence isn't yet in whether this has any impact on Fukushima's current troubles
These are ideological thoughts, not reasoned thoughts. That's what I mean by 'rabid'
Documented casualties directly linked to the production of energy with fossil fuels simply dwarfs that of nuclear power, and probably will for as long as fossil fuel remains in common use.
And that is to say nothing of the indirect but fairly obvious casualties to the developing world of lack of electrical infrastructure. Simple diseases such as dysentary, which can be mitigated in part by electrical infrastructure, take HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF LIVES A YEAR.
When those people then claim that science is on their side, and I'm a luddite or something ... it's annoying.
You can't treat this like a football game where you're on the pro nuclear side and everyone else that is pro nuclear is on your team.
If someone like me is trying to make sense of this stuff by participating in a discussion and asking questions, someone like you comes along and decides that I'm on the opposite side of some fight from you. Despite the fact that I'm not. I'm on neither side, and am trying to reason about these issues, and I found one argument unconvincing. Now I'm your enemy apparently, and you're "knocking down" my points, which I don't even have.
Breach possible at troubled Japanese power plant: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_japan_earthquake
Makes you wonder what other nuclear reactors have had cover ups and what can possibly can go wrong when the unexpected hits.
If we spread enough plutonium dust around, it will make original sin look like a walk in the park. (Which it was I believe :-)
On the other hand, if we spew enough CO2 there might not be any sinners left in 50 generations.
People are standing around waiting for a techno fix. That won't happen without incentives. We need to tax the heck out of carbon. Fine to cut other taxes and pay Grandma's heating bill. But we must change relative prices to get the right focus. Economic forces are much more powerful than a few government research projects.
Is anyone driving less at $100 oil? We need about $50-$100 of tax per barrel to get the ball rolling. And a carbon equivalent tax on coal and gas.
The prohibitively high cost of energy in the world is actually a bad thing.
A lot of the reporting about TEPCO seems to be "Aldight alright, we get it, your plant got physically hit by a thirty foot tall wave... but you were asking for it what with your shiftiness on that totally unrelated inspection years ago."
EDIT: clarified that the vessel from this story was not the exact one that just failed; it's simply another of the same design made by the same company during the same era, overseen by the same agency.
Result: bad shit happens, in a fairly predictable sequence. The French nuclear agency actually did this with a containment pool to study disaster effects. Water heats? Check. Water boils? Check. Zirconium slags off? Check. Spent fuel rods begin to melt as heat rises? Check. (The video of the control room during this experiment was broadcast on Japanese TV.)
They then, of course, turned the power back on and restored cooling. TEPCO didn't have a button they could push to do that. Not because they're evil bastards who left that button out to save a buck, no, it's because they got hit with a ten meter tsunami.
Forgive me if I keep coming back to that detail, but it is fairly important to understanding the failure.
Insofar as a containment vessel appears to have failed--regardless of the reasons--gross negligence by the firm that constructed it, which is known to have led to a structural flaw that could hasten a breach in another vessel at the same plant, is not "unrelated" news.
I'm probably being unfair, but your snarky dismissal of this article seems to amount to, "act of god; nothing to learn here; move right along".
Your implicit premise seems to be that no reasonable containment vessel standards could have been envisioned or successfully engineered to survive a total, prolonged power failure--in this case the result of a 30' wave hitting the plant's diesel generators. Therefore, because that unlikely event occurred, everyone is off the hook for structural flaws that could have hastened any subsequent meltdown and breach. I don't buy the premise, or the conclusion given the premise.
I think the point of the containment vessel is to be a last line of defense in case everything else goes wrong. So when everything else goes wrong you don't get to say "everything else went wrong, so it's not really relevant whether some of the vessels were poorly made".
In any case, I suspect we're arguing "at" rather than with each other now, so I'm happy to give you the last word and then drop it, unless you'd really like a response...
The chain of reasonings seems fairly clear ... something done by someone you know does shoddy work breaks. What do you imagine might have happened?