42 Replies to “Fukushima And Chernobyl”

  1. Those 3 scientists are obviously racist homophobes….as they present facts counter to the argument, and must never be heard.
    So many gullible humans.

  2. So SUZUKSTER is the main health menace….once again….
    BTW….Chernopbyl proved the “China Syndrome” is merely a Hollywierd concept.
    The Chernobyl facility had a full blown core meltdown but the core material remain in the reactor containment….it formed a puddle on the concrete floor……it is now in the parking lot, covered by a pile of gravel.
    The exclusion area surrounding Chernobl is a healthy (although radio-active) wildlife refuge…..complete with Bison, wild horses, and wolf packs……..

  3. Soooo…we can believe a promo vid commissioned by an industry body with vested interest in the nuke biz? Sorry I’ll wait for a valid 3rd party report – the type of isotope disbursement emitted from these radiation leaks is indirect and cumulative in the bioshphere – the extent and effect on people/environment will not be fully known for a number of years. In any event, caesium isotopes have a half life of 30 years so there will be plenty of opportunity for research.
    I’m going to commit a sacrilege here in the eyes of the nuke pimps, but if you have some understanding of the efficiency of reactor containment technology (particularly in its dilute commercial application), you will realize that a nuclear reactor’s “safety quotient” in an electric utility application is only as good as the integrity of the operator and the diligence of the regulator. Commercial nuclear applications are far from fool-proof and far from safe, particularly if you are stubbornly determined to build them on fault lines, tsunami fronts and earthquake zones – they represent a potential catastrophic hazard at all times. Personally I would take them off line and refit for the new clean solid fuel systems but we have a large nuclear industry with the largest international political lobby next to transnational banking.
    I would have thought this incident’s PR and cost of containment would have had Japanese government (and other energy dependent nations) motivated to go to the new cost effective, environmentally friendly verdant fuel- fired systems (which convert 99% of their carbon output back into energy) but I see the nuke lobby is in full swing shaping public opinion with utopian conditioning that ignores the facts on the ground – http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/japan-nuclear-fallout/

  4. The media have always left the impression that any exposure to the area around Chernobyl will immediately affect your health and yet when you google Youtube and Chernobyl many videos of the area are available. Curious.

  7. Occam, I stand to make much more money from designing process plants that use hydrocarbons, but if nuclear is better I’ll go with that.
    Talk to the French, who seem to be doing a good job of it and ex-US navy sub engineers.
    Sorry about triple posting in this thread.
    Paul

  8. “So many gullible humans.”, sums it up well, as does PiperPaul’s comment, “Lets not allow facts to get in the way of a good story.”.
    Chicken Little with the sky is falling does not have a monopoly. OT, same goes for the anti-GMO crowd.

  9. Well if you go here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY
    And watch this i am sure it is only a matter of time. There is a 3 hour long video that you can watch that explains in detail the ups and downs of the lftr energy production.
    Note : chilea already has one and is using it as a deslination plant. Any way this type of enerygy is the future. just needs about a decade or so i think.

  10. To give anyone a bit of an idea of what is happening around Chernobyl check out “Wolves in Chernobyl dead zone” available on youtube.

  11. Occam – I can only speak for the industry I have the most knowledge of (purebred dogs), but I do know that when you want the facts, you have to come to us. There is no such thing as a “third party observer”, as that group simply cannot accumulate the knowledge required, in the time required, to add anything meaningful to the discussion.

  12. Occam
    me thinks you chicken little a little too much, there has been sufficient data from the nukes dropped on Japan during WW2, and tho this industry may try and minimize the effect it is well known that the “hate nukes” type over state the effect of radiation. Having had radiation treatment for cancer I have read about the effects to some extent and have come to realize that things aren’t as bad as some would have us believe. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t improve standards, as it is clar that in construction of Fukushima there were “short cuts” made that should have been flagged and corrected.

  13. The nukes dropped on Japan? Have you ever seen the world map for the above ground nuclear tests? We should all be dead by now.

  15. The releases from the Daiichi plants were well monitored and the dose received by all involved have been well calculated. There exists reams of literature on the effects of radiation on humans, especially through the Hiroshima and Chernobyl events, and thus the estimation of future effects on the people at Fukushima have a reasonable degree of probability. This also goes for “indirect” exposures.
    We have seen three catastrophes in the nuclear industry — Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. The total loss of life resulting from these is likely less than 100. Meanwhile no one discusses the 1000-odd deaths from mining coal each year, much less the effects of smog and pollution on the health of millions. And oddly enough, no one talks about the thousands who died from fires caused by ruptured gas lines in the Fukushima tsunami. In this light, the nuclear industry is hardly alone in being a “potential catastrophic hazard at all times.”
    It’s worth remembering that the nuclear meltdown was not the direct cause of the eartquake or the tsunami. Nuclear plants automatically shut down when an earthquake triggers. The Daiichi design requires backup generation when it goes offline to keep the core and spent fuel cool. In this case, the reactors survived the earthquake and tsunami intact, but the deisel generators were placed in a location that was swamped with water and debris. Portable generators were unable to be brought there on time, and so ad hoc measures had to be employed to pump seawater into the facility. Ironically, if the reactors were allowed to stay online, the meltdown might not have occured.
    It’s worth mentioning here that the nearby Fukushima Daini reactors, of the same vintage as Daiichi, were used as a refuge for hundreds of residents as it was the only facility in miles not to have suffered significant damage. The cooling-systems generators at Daini, of course, were above the high-water mark. It was very safe in this event, even given its design flaws.
    Modern reactor designs are even safer than the obsolete Fukushima reactors. They use a passive cooling system so that, in the event of a shutdown, the thermal energy in the water drives the pumps and drives heat off the core and spent-fuel rods.
    Again, looking back at the worst aspects of the tsunami and aftermath, the Japanese arguably made their island less safe by greatly increasing their imports of natural gas and not using their generally secure and operable reactor fleet.

  16. (Disclosure: I work in the unraium-mining industry, apparently part of the second “largest international political lobby” in the world.)

  17. Think you’d better strop your razor, Occam. It slices like a sponge.
    “disbursement”? heh. That means “handing out funds”. The word you sought was “dispersal”.
    “build them on fault lines, tsunami fronts and earthquake zones” Of course, any proposed reactor site on the surface of the planet will magically become one such in the view of the Nimbys. If not that, then home to an endangered species of newt.
    “verdant fuel” Please define, with cite.
    You are quoting SciAm as a “neutral” scientific authority? Heh. Triple heh.

  18. When tsunami and resulting Fukushima disaster occurred, it swung me from anti to pro-nuclear. Here we have a (primitive, by modern standards) reactor that is hit with an earth quake & tidal wave and the end result is no one dead, no scorched earth for a hundred miles and most of the hype just that.

  19. “Living within 5 miles of a nuclear power plant for half a century represents the same risk to you as driving 10 miles on the interstate highway or spending half and hour in a coal mine or 6 minutes in a canoe. And I think of all the environmentalists paddling in their canoes worrying about nuclear power plants.” Thomas Sowell

  20. Nuclear power is synonymous with the age of reason. The hysteria directed against it represents the pull of a return to the dark ages. Unfortunately it’s very difficult to separate the distortions, impediments, hysteria, and subsidies from a situation which would have existed in the absence of so much government involvement.

  21. But, but, but. Just last week I heard on tv and read in dead tree media
    that radiation pollution from Fukushima is about to reach the North America west coast and people from Alaska to California are about to be nuked. It’s
    a good thing obama brought in his health care program because those poor people are going to need it when their skin starts boiling and peeling off
    and they all go blind. That’s what I took away from the story and I was
    brought up to believe MSM doesn’t lie or fabricate so it must be true.

  22. Yah, butt they weren’t good for radiation “effect” studies. The nukes dropped on Japan did provide for good case studies.

  23. There is a very simple way to slice a razor through the BS on this topic – unfortunately Occam hasn’t figured it out.
    The most knowledgeable individuals about the risks of generating nuclear energy are the people who work in the plants. Their a**es are on the line a couple of thousand hours per year. These highly educated people understand the situation better than Occam or I.
    As long as these experts happily continue to work in the industry, have no trouble getting insurance, live near the plants and raise and school their children in the area I feel comfortable.
    If they were up in arms about the risks, I would be also.

  24. Those 3 scientists are obviously racist homophobes….as they present facts counter to the argument, and must never be heard. Dave in Missisauga
    Agreed, and since an actual, physical gulag ala USSR would be too overt, let’s build a virtual gulag that we’ll call political correctness.

  25. Occam – would you be ok if we just restricted reactor operation to those built for defense needs – specifically, breeding plutonium for nuclear weapons (which form the ultimate deterrent to war)?

  26. Certainly in terms of danger to human lives even with the Chernobyl catastrophe coal may kill more people every single year than nuclear historically. Even so, though I’d trust industry sources a thousand times over media, I’d also assume industry bias long before I’d assume none. The NFL’s insider head trauma experts were very convinced concussions caused virtually no problems, no surprise. From what I know, though, the radiation levels from a Fukushima level disaster are actually a health benefit at least in terms of cancer. The theory seems to be that cells protective mechanisms are triggered by non-damaging levels of it.

  28. There is inherent risk just getting out of bed in the morning and someone dies of something every day. We now have such aversion to risk that we can’t even play with normal lawn darts, kids can’t play with balls on the playground, bicycles are too dangerous to ride without helmets and a .039% trace gas essential for life is seen as cause for mass panic. In other words we have turned from logical independent trail blazers into cowering weenies afraid of their own shadows with all actions sanctioned by one government bureaucracy or other. Where we once took pride in getting it done, the pride for half the population has shifted to getting it stopped. Our national anthem definitely needs changing from true north strong and free, to something more realistic, like undefended north, weak and vague memories of being free. Nuclear power has a excellent safety record but this risk free mentality has brought us nothing but inefficiency and regressive economic pain that was completely avoidable. Perhaps when or if politicians ever regain the control they handed over to bureaucrats and activists we can actually do what’s best for the country. That would be building Nuclear power plants with a total ban on bird shredder and solar panel subsidies. Less than 1% of all Nuclear power plant have given us a problem. That’s a great track record.
    http://www.world-nuclear.org/Nuclear-Basics/Global-number-of-nuclear-reactors/

  29. Rob, the effect to which you refer is called hormesis, and there’s been a lot of evidence to show it exists from work done over the last 20-30 years. It’s led the leading science organizations to consider that there may indeed be a demonstrable de minimis radiation dose, below which radiaiton can pose no harm. That level seems to be about 100 mSv per year. To put that in context, natural background radiation dose is about 3 mSv per year.
    Put it this way, normal radioactivity of plant discharge water is about 10 Bq/L (bequerels per litre). One becquerel is one disintegration per second. Normal tap water has a level of about 15. River water has about 30-50, and the salad oil you have on your dinner table has about 4500.

  30. Peter, everything in your post is spot-on except for one small bit. Within government, any panic over the effects of radiation ALWAYS comes from the elected officials, never the bureaucrats. This is because in government the first thing that any elected politician says is, “how will this affect my election chances.”

  31. Politicians thrive on creating paranoia in the populace, and then pretending to ‘save’ them.

  32. This killed Alberta’s chances for a Nuclear plant to shorten the use of water resources here to process the oil. Besides brining cheap power to Alberta.
    Though today governments don’t care about power unless it has an effect on their usage.

  34. cgh- what is the source of the radioactivity in cooking oil? This is common to all cooking oil?

  36. yeah, I’d also like to see some data to back up that radioactive cooking oil assertion. A Google search turns up zilch. The biodiesel industry would be all over that if it was a significant hazard.

  37. yeah, I’d also like to see some data to back up that radioactive cooking oil assertion. A Google search turns up zilch. The biodiesel industry would be all over that if it was a significant hazard.

  39. “We have seen three catastrophes in the nuclear industry — Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima.”
    Disaster yes, catastrophe probably not. Please add to the list Windscale (’57) and Kyshtym (also ’57).
    Another incident worth recalling was the bombing of the Italian built LAMA nuclear lab by coalition forces during Desert Storm (’91). Subsequently, Iraqi authorities sent in salvage crews without adequate protection gear into the plant. The number of casualties is unknown.

  40. It’s the Carbon 14 and Potassium 40 content, present in all living or recently living organic matter.
    And no, it’s not a significant hazard. Absolutely everything in the known universe, you, me, your pet cat, your carpet, the wood in your furniture, rocks on Mars, is radioactive to some degree. The only question is how much.

  41. So since there is radiation all around us, don’t worry be happy.
    “do you fret about a CT scan”…I know I do, and I told the doctor no.
    One scan is like 100-300 x rays all at once, and most of the time these procedures are not needed. They are just done to cover the doctors butt, even if they are needed there are alternatives like MRI that can be done. Funny thing is you will not be told this because the MRI costs more money$$. Its impossible to prove the CT scan is bad for you. In 20-25 years when you get cancer, they can just blame it on anything else.

  42. It’s standard in the radiation medical community for any registered professional to be able to tell you what the dose is from any procedure. Even your dental hygenist should be able to tell you what the dose is from a dental X-ray.
    As I said above, radiation is universal. What matters is how much.

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