fukishima and the end of the world

Holy ****, sources. I don't think anyone else has used those in this thread yet.

You still ignore that the worst possible accident of a nuclear power planet can be far more destructive than any other kind of accident. Running a nuclear power plant always carries the risk of accidents that are far worse than anything we've seen so far. Death tolls are not everything. Having to give up whole cities that possibly are too big to evacuate (in which case the death toll quickly might end up higher than in any disaster we have ever seen) is the main reason why nuclear power is just too dangerous to be used long term.
Even if the chance is only a very tiny fraction of a % that it will happen it is still too much of a risk for a long term usage as an energy source, so we might as well try to get away from it now.

"Bury it" is a horribly irresponsible answer. Just because some weird happening a few billions years ago more or less reliably stored a few tons of waste does not mean we can do the same with tens of thousands of tons. Nobody can predict what happens even only tomorrow. How do you possibly want to predict what will happen in the next 100 or 1000 years to the storage you build?
As it stands the nuclear industry basically steals from the future by leaving behind their waste without ever paying for it.

Industry is a good point too:
Yes technically you might be right and if everything is done perfectly according to state of the art technology nuclear power might actually never blow up that bad.
But we are humans, our nuclear power plants are run by humans, controlled by companies that operate on the basis of maximizing profits. Not security.

Well...how much do you wade into other discussions?

check out the videos from this guy who lives in tokyo japan..
yes i live in canada and im concerned and im concerned about the people in japan.

The goverment is covering it up

I don't really class wading in as one or two longish posts, and a few references. You'll know I'm wading in when I start throwing out the LaTeX'd pdf documents because the word limit on forum posts is too restrictive.

I'm sorry, Colin, but you aren't convincing me that you are particularly knowledgeable about this technology. I have already described the worst nuclear disaster to befall us so far, and shown that it wasn't anywhere near as bad as the public misconception of it. I've also shown evidence that nuclear plants are actually the safest way of generating electricity on average, even when the death toll of accidents are included. All you have given me in return are some vague what ifs. Which nuclear reactor is too close to a city? What design is it? What flaw in it's construction do you think you have identified? Have you ever read a Design Safety Case for a modern reactor? Do you have any idea of the insane levels of detail and obsessive compulsive effort that goes into looking at all the possible failure rates. They compare failure scenarios, up to and including, and I kid you not, direct meteorite hits [1]. I have seen failure rate scenarios that are one in a 5,000 reactor-year lifetime incident worried over as too likely.

A staggering amount of time and effort has gone into ensuring that these devices are safe, and that has been vindicated by the fact that after 15,500 reactor years of operation [2], I could count the number of serious accidents on the fingers on one hand after a moderate chainsaw accident.

If you want to prove that reactors are unsafe, you need more than vague suppositions. You need to put in as much effort as the guys who are proving that they are safe.

This is just factually wrong on all accounts. The Gabon natural nuclear reactor stored approximately 28,000 tons of uranium and uranium by-products [3]. If you wish to rebut previous points, go ahead by all means, however this will be much more interesting if you do the research first.

There are some things that we can reliably predict. I can reliably predict that the sun will rise tomorrow morning [4]. I can reliably predict that a 1kg block of copper at 273 K will be heated to 293 K by the application of about 7.8 kJ of thermal energy [5]. I can predict that if I had 1 gram of iodine-131, then I will have 0.5 grams of it left after 8.0197 hours due to radioactive decay [6]. We have an entire system for predicting such things.

It's called science. It works Bitches [7].

I have spent the last four years learning how we model the diffusion of different elements through solids. Of the limits and tolerances to such models, and the vast quantity of evidence which backs these things up. If you have evidence suggesting that these models are not as accurate as the thousands of hours of work that dedicated scientists have put in to looking at these phenomena, then you should really write a paper on it. Disproving that much work would net a Nobel prize.

Not only that, but the concept that the nuclear industry doesn't pay for waste disposal is actually wrong. At least in most of the countries I am familiar with the licencing regime for. All plant operators are legally obliged to set aside a portion of plant profits aside over the course of the plant lifetime in order to pay for disposal costs.

If you honestly believe that causing nuclear accidents, either deliberately or through negligence, is good for the nuclear industry, on any time-scale, then I'm afraid I cannot follow your reasoning. Nuclear plants are already 60-80 year long projects from first conception to the last step of decommissioning [8]. These are people who are used to thinking on long term time-scales, and having a plant that has an accident 40 years down the road really is not in their best interests. They will do the best job they can to protect that reactor, and even if they make mistakes, I've already shown why the consequences really aren't that serious.

You have to remember a that all power production is a balancing act. If we don't build a reactor, then we have to build a coal plant, or a gas turbine, or a hydro-electric plant, or several hundred square kilometres of wind-farms and solar arrays with the monstrous reservoirs of pumped storage to back them up when the wind is calm and the sky is cloudy. The only other option is to not use electricity as our primary means of shifting and transforming large amounts of energy. One only need look at parts of the world that don't have reliable electricity to see what this does to the quality of human life. And the average lifespan [9].

No matter which way you look at it, nuclear power is the safest and most economical option. If you want to prove otherwise, then I'm happy to maintain an open mind, but I want to hear concrete evidence, not vague hypotheticals.

References:
1. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...reactor meteorite&pg=PA69#v=onepage&q&f=false
2. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Current-and-Future-Generation/Nuclear-Power-in-the-World-Today/
3. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1631070502013518#
4. http://www.polaris.iastate.edu/NorthStar/Unit3/unit3_sub1.htm
5. http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/specific-heat-metals-d_152.html
6. http://www.epa.gov/radiation/radionuclides/iodine.html
7. http://xkcd.com/54/
8. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=nuclear-power-plant-aging-reactor-replacement-
9. http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/graph-of-day-life-expectancy-vs-energy.html

A lot of very wise people put in a lot of thought indeed and I surely do not have a very deep insight into this technology.

Yet the Japanese thought it would be wise to build a power plant next to a shore that is known for extreme Tsunamis and extreme earthquakes without taking enough precautions.

"Bury it" also reminds me of the german storage "Asse". Basically they tried to use it as a storage place and after only a few years it turned it that it was leaking radioactive water. The responsible people even tried to cover it up.

Sorry but you can do as much theory crafting as you want, in the end some stupid human somewhere does a stupid mistake and suddenly everything breaks apart. Security that is based on a plain "this won't happen, because we prevent it" is false in my eyes

EDIT:
I tried to find the 28k tons in your source 3, but all I get is a pretty broken page (http://i.imgur.com/ibDJmZ7.png) that doesn't really tell me much. The "few tons" I found was at the wikipedia page you linked.

Indeed they did. And it seems they didn't choose too badly. Despite the fact that a 30 year old plant [1], was exposed to the 5th most powrful earthquake in history [2,3], and a once in 1190 years tsunami [4], rating the worst nuclear disaster for over 25 years, yet not one one person has died from radiation exposure.

I can think of few other industries which can undergo the most serious accident considered under their respective regimes, and yet not have a single death nor, any detectable adverse health impacts. In fact, I would like to quote the World Health Organisation's report here [5]:

Furthermore, the radioactive contamination so far has been both manageable and repairable. The area is currently perfectly habitable, with sensible radiation levels (1-25 mSv annual), and the main barrier to re-population being unjustified fear [6]. There is absolutely no reason why the area can be fully re-populated in a fairly short time-scale. 99% of any remaining problems at Fukushima are cause by misconception and media furore, rather than genuine, evidence based concern.

And what was the outcome of the Asse II mine storage leak? Was their any loss of life, injury, illness, loss or damage to property? Unfortunately much of the documentation is in German, which I'm afraid I do not speak, but the inventory of it looks like only low and intermediate level waste, neither of which looks that harmful in the context given [7]. It's clear that it could of been dealt with better, but their doesn't seem to be any damage, and I cannot find any assessments or investigations citing long-term irreparable damage.

What mistakes is this stupid human making? Can you give examples? Unless you are going to provide a concrete chain of events where one mistake leads to a catastrophic loss of life, then you are still in the territory of vague supposition, without providing any actual evidence. Even then, you need to show that such disasters are worse than the fossil fuel based alternatives, which are killing people as we speak.

There is a difference between theorycrafting, and genuine hard evidence from scientific experimentation, and solid empirical evidence. I have provided multiple, well accepted peer reviewed papers citing such evidence. Unless you have counter examples, then I'm afraid that it isn't I who is responsible for theory crafting. Do you understand the concepts of passive safety and defence in depth? Saying "all it takes is one idiot" really makes no sense unless you can given an example of who that idiot is, and what is he doing. Be scientific about it. What levers are they pulling, and what buttons are they pushing to cause such a disaster? It's easy to posit fear uncertainty and doubt. What you need to do is to give evidence as to why such FUD is founded.

This argument is just going to go back and forth without end, until you can give me a concrete chain of events that leads to a genuine, credible nuclear disaster, with a actual loss of life or property. I understand that you feel strongly about this issue, but I would appreciate some effort when doing your research.

References
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power_Plant#cite_note-1
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_earthquakes_by_magnitude#cite_note-USGS01-6
3. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqinthenews/2011/usc0001xgp/neic_c0001xgp_wmt.php
4. http://woody.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Tsunami-Hazard-and-Risk-Assessment.pdf
5. http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/78218/1/9789241505130_eng.pdf, page 92
6. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/03/18/fukushima-fear-is-still-the-killer/
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

I really am surprised to see this many sources and this much text from you even now that I really showed you that I basically am not that crazy interested into super deep research of the topic. My opinion is formed based on past failures in the nuclear industry that were all based on human's basically just hoping it would go right and getting lazy/greedy/etc pp.
Saying Fukushima was hit by a once in 1k+ year Tsunami is not what I read maybe a year ago. My memory tells me I read of a tsunami hitting that area that was like 20 - 30 meters in height not more than maybe 100 years ago.
Yes Asse may not have caused any real damages, but it is a perfect example of how somehow they fail to store this stuff away even only for maybe 20 or 30 years while you try to tell me storing that stuff isn't a real problem.
That just does not fit together with the information I've gathered on this topic during the last few years which ended up giving me the general opinion that the science behind this technology is very awesome in many ways, but sadly I believe humans are not capable of dealing with the dangers involved. Not because the science does not work (because science indeed does work ), but because the best science does not help you when responsible people get careless. They did in Fukushima, they did in Asse and a bit of google can quickly show up many more cases where they failed.
I am not even saying that we should shut down all plants "now at once". However I feel that any future investments should be made to get away from nuclear power not to get deeper into it.

@YourLocalMadSci, have I ever told you how much of a man crush I have on you? I love your work.

Then I shall lay off the citations for a moment, and speak on somewhat more philosophical grounds.

I understand, and this is indeed a complex subject. It just boggles my mind that there are people out there who will form a strong enough opinion on a subject, to the point of arguing it with random strangers on the internet (), when they haven't even looked at the available research on the subject. There are lots and lots of things where the jury is out, and there really is no definitive answer that humans have developed. Things like the role of religion in societies, and how much of our finances should be organised by public or by private enterprise. These are bewilderingly complex subjects that humans have been arguing about for hundreds of years, and will continue to argue over for hundreds of years more.

But nuclear power is not one of these subjects.

It is a topic with an incredible amount of evidence supporting it's use in responsible situations. Unfortunately, as with any complex subject such as evolution, or climate change, it is far easier to generate misconceptions, than to demonstrate the actual evidence behind such things. After all, misconceptions can be generated in an instant, while hard evidence takes years of hard study to come up with. A misconception in this thread could be expressed in a single sentence, but it will take multiple paragraphs, and several citations in order to show the evidence which debunks it.

I don't blame people for harbouring this flawed information, as they are only talking about what they have heard. But the only way to fight misconceptions is with raw, scientific evidence, painstakingly researched by the sweat, blood, and coffee intake of a million graduate students worldwide. This is why whenever I see such misconceptions, I will attempt to fight them, with egregious walls of text, and more citations than one can shake a stick at. For me not to do so would be like a game developer not defending his medium against those ludicrous claims that he is making "murder simulators".

I'm not going to advocate the unequivocal use of nuclear power in any scenario. No matter how much I want that nuclear powered toaster. I'm also willing to say that many parts of the nuclear industry could stand to be improved. Possibly by means of dumping their CEOs into their own reactors. However, the technology itself is sound enough that one can design around such human flaws. This isn't hubris. It's the experience of an industry that has accrued over 15,500 reactor-years worth of knowledge about how to make these things safe, and I think that it is a testament to this that nuclear disasters are significantly rarer and less severe than more mundane industrial accidents (such as chemical plant leaks, or oil refinery fires). I would be more worried about giving an idiot a sharp knife than putting him in the control room of a modern nuclear power station.

I rarely speak of my own political views on the internet. To do so paints a target on oneself, and it colours other peoples' opinions on all subsequent subjects. I will say this however. Humanity, is going to be facing a lot of challenges over the next few decades. There are going to be a lot of pressures in terms of resource shortages, overpopulation, climate change, and political or social disruption. These are not insurmountable challenges.

But we would be bloody stupid to confront potentially some of the biggest challenges our species has ever faced, without making use of the most powerful technology we have ever discovered.

Then I shall endeavour to do more.

I like the general thought behind your posts. I agree that a lot of radiation-fear is very irrational.
However I stay with my opinion that the worst possible scenarios are just too bad to be ignored and that the best security plan does not help you when faced with human error. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong after all

No reason to worry really. Nothing you can do anyway.

Lol, I honestly didn't see MadSci getting into this even knowing personally about him.

I felt the same as him though. If people used modern nuclear technology, then you get much more reliable results. They are even trying to perfect using hydrogen fusion, which leaves water as a byproduct. That I would swear is actual magic. However, nuclear power's volume and collectible waste is nearly ideal, we only wish we could collect all the pollutants of other not-even-as high volume power sources.

The idea is, keep it in a better location, with more recent technology, and there are better ways to dispose of the stuff. It has to go somewhere too, sure, but we mined it from somewhere, so whats the point?

This stuff can kill people, it has killed people, but there is no reason for it to kill people who intentionally handle it in this day and age, like MadSci said. Honestly, if anyone needs to be using 90% or even close to that percent of the world's petroleum supply, it should be Japan, while the US uses nuclear power considering the larger areas of land where very seldomly any natural disasters happen in. It is probably a mistake for an island nation to use it anyway, very few safe locations.

Fusing Hydrogen doesn't leave water as a by product. lol.

It consumes water. Some flavours of fusion will give you Helium (yay, balloons). Some flavours will give you heavier atoms.

Your posts have been very informative Madsci. It took away a lot of unreasonable fear from nuclear power plsnts. Though I still have to agree with Colin on one thing:

Murphy's Law states that everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Now it's unreasonable to believe that it will ever happen, but the worst case scenario with nuclear energy is still a very dangerous one.

You made the comparison with nuclear power plants and car accidents. Now what is the worst case scenario with car accidents?

Imagine every car in the world causing an accident at the same time. How many people would lose their lives? I don't really know, it's pure, uninformed speculation. But it would maybe be a quarter of the worlds population, probably more with the inclusion of collateral damage. I'm not really sure. But it probably would be much less than half the world's population.

What would happen if every nuclear reactorin the world would defect at the same time?
There probably would be no more world for us to live in.

So like I said, it's unreasonable to believe that it will ever happen. But it does mean that we can't treat nuclear power lightly, and that we have to be careful to avoid the worst case scenario at all costs.

Greetings

The worst case scenario for you walking outside tomorrow is a perfectly sized meteor to fall into the atmosphere and smack you across the head (killing you).

That's the worst case scenario.

And yet I do expect you'll go outside tomorrow, and the day after that.

What I'm trying to get at is this; making decisions based of the worst possible outcome is hilariously irrational. You weigh up the chances and the consequences, and make a decision that something is either too risky, or safe enough. That's a perfectly healthy way to live life.

The nuclear industry does the same thing.

Those that design nuclear power plants take this **** incredibly seriously. While it's inevitable that something bad will happen, they try to design them to keep the risks at an absolute minimum.

As a general note, I think the concept that many people struggle with is the relativity of risk. It boils down to a simple truth. Namely that every single activity carries a risk. It is inescapable and unavoidable. Driving a car? That's a risk. Riding a boat? That's a risk. Building a nuclear power plant? That's a certainly a risk, and I would be the first to admit it. However, building coal plants, oil burners, gas turbines, geothermal plants, wind turbines, solar arrays, tidal barrages, biomass stations, wave collectors, hydroelectric dams, or any thing else we can think of has a risk too. The question is not what is safe, but what is the safest? And this is actually something that nuclear power wins, as I pointed out in the deaths per terawatt hour table.

Well, strictly speaking, the worst case scenario I have ever seen anyone propose is that you are hit by a high energy cosmic ray particle (possibly from an ancient supernova on the other side of the universe), of such astronomically high energy, that it disrupts the hypothetical meta-stability of the current vacuum phase, nucleating a phase transition into a lower energy state. Such an even would create a bubble of altered vacuum stability, which would expand out from the initial event at close to the speed of light, eventually consuming the universe. The volume created would be incompatible to human life, and possibly inimical to life in general of any conceivable form.

But that truly is the worst case scenario.

If you figure out the amount of matter that comprises a human body as a percentage of the entire universe (a excruciatingly small number), and the energy requirements for such an event to occur (even if it is possible, which we don't fully know), it isn't hard to figure out that the probability of this occurring is such a staggeringly low number that it would be insane to worry about it. I also think that it highlights how basing ones perception of risk purely on the severity of the risk, rather than the severity and the likelihood is a poor way to go about it. An accident that kills a billion people once every thousand years may sound flashy, but it's actually far less dangerous than an an accident which kills one person every second (by a factor of ~31.6).

I wonder what Feedle has to say about all of this now?

Heh, that's basically what's happening at the Hanford site in Washington state. I was told they were able to put the waste into glass and then they bury the glass. Not sure how that can contain it..... but it's what I was told.

The problem I have with this argument is it completely ignores the other issues with a nuclear disaster that aren't reflected in the deaths per X statistics, namely radiation. Comparison of deaths may be applicable between other power generation technologies, but until you determine an objective measure of risk when talking about the potential for permanent (in all practicality) irradiation of a large area, deaths per X is meaningless, as it's ignoring what most people (I would argue) see as the key danger with Nuclear power.