fukishima and the end of the world

This has always been my argument, right back to my first points with a comparison about motoring. If people would ban nuclear power on the argument that it is "not safe", then that is their prerogative. But if they are being consistent, they should also ban pretty much everything else on the same grounds. They should also ban the act of banning these things, because that isn't safe too, by their own definition.

It is not a consistent viewpoint.

I'm not aware of any other industrial accident that can make an area uninhabitable like radiation can - "Danger" is not just about how many people die or are injured in an event; it includes environmental impact too, which you haven't taken into account. In other words, how many deaths is equal to X square meters of permanant eco damage? I don't think you'll find 2 people that agree on a value for this, which is the point: You can't just look at nuclear power in terms of deaths/injuries. Otherwise, nuclear power would still be "safe" even if half the world became uninhabitable, so long as there were few deaths in the process.

Chemical plant disasters can make areas uninhabitable as well, and there are way more chemical plants than nuclear plants.

Quite true, though in many cases these can be cleaned, whereas we do not yet have a way of cleaning radiation.

Exactly my way of thinking. Show me a way to clean a heavily radiated larger area within a reasonable time and by reasonable means without endangering humans that work on it and I agree that nuclear power should be used everywhere where we can use it.

I've repeatedly stated that this concept of a nuclear accident releasing enough radiation to leave areas uninhabitable is not a reasonable risk. It's a myth. Let's look at some areas that have had the greatest radiological release in the history of mankind, and play a little game called spot the radioactive wasteland:

Hiroshima:

Looks a pretty nice place actually. Lets look at Nagasaki:



Nope, still no wasteland.

What about the site of the worst radiological accident, and pretty much the most foolish nuclear accident ever? It turns out that even the area around Chernobyl isn't some barren badlands:



Pripyat actually seems pretty vibrant, save the lack of people. In fact, interestingly the area surrounding Chernobyl is actually considered to be one of the world's best wildlife preserves now [1]. The main reason is that the area is now absent of something far more harmful to wildlife and the environment than mere radiation: human habitation.

Indeed, if we wanted to, we could actually repopulate most of the area without any real trouble. The radiation in much of the "zone of alienation" is a fairly modest 60-70 micro-rems per hour [2], or in SI units about 6.132 millisieverts per year. This may increase slightly if you also ate food grown in the area, but not by a significant margin. The maximum permissible annual dose for nuclear industry workers in the UK under non-accident conditions is 20 millisieverts per year [3] (other countries have similar regulatory conditions, but I'm unfamiliar with them, so they may vary a bit). The average dose of a member of the public varies between about 1 and 8 dependant upon location, diet, medical treatment, flights taken, and a variety of other things [4]. There are a few places around the world (some parts of the middle east I seem to recall) where that dosage can go as high as 50 mSv/a, all from natural sources. It is entirely possible that you are getting a larger annual radiation dosage in your own home, than if you lived in the centre of Pripyat. Fundamentally, the reason for this is actually quite simple. Radioactive material doesn't breed or multiply. If you spread your radioactive source out over a wide area, then the actual dose you would receive in any one location is lessened. In the case of Chernobyl, the radioactive material was dispersed over a large area such that after the initial disaster was over, and some of the shorter-lived isotopes decayed, the area has largly recovered. The disaster did cause a lot of plant death in a nearby forest at the time of the accident, but the area is perfectly habitable now that the isotopes have spread out and decayed away. The only reason it isn't repopulated is down to social stigma, and fears based on ignorance.

I'm sorry Raven, but where are you getting your information from? This is just flat out wrong [4]. There are dozens of different techniques for dealing with radioactive contamination, dependant upon the type of isotope and how it is spread. The most simple technique is just to wash the affected object. Most radioactive contamination takes the form of a fine radioactive dust which coats the contaminated object. if you wash off the dust, then the object will no longer be irradiated. Certain additives may be mixed in with the water in order to chemically bind the isotopes (e.g. detergents), but the basic method is very simple. The water (which now contains the isotopes), is then distilled or filtered (usually in an ion exchange column) in order to move the isotopes into either a concentrated effluent, or a concentrated solid filter. This is then disposed of as Low or Intermediary level waste depending upon activity and regulatory regime. Other techniques exist for cleaning larger areas of ground, or for cleaning the surfaces of buildings.

Nobody is claiming that radiation and radioactive materials aren't dangerous if handled incorrectly. But then again, so is the stuff coming out of your car exhaust. Dealing with radiation is a mature and well understood field, and is not to difficult to do.


References:
1. http://www.thewildlifenews.com/2012/12/31/chernobyl-wildlife/
2. http://pripyat.com/en/monitor
3. http://www.hse.gov.uk/radiation/ionising/doses/
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Natural_Radiation_Atlas_of_Europe.jpg
5. http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/201...radiation-exposure-simpler-than-you-may-think

Nuclear weapons do not release the level of fallout as Nuclear power plants do if they melt down. The small quantity (and type) of nuclear material combined with the explosive blast reduce the effect, duration and concentration of radioactive material, so Hiroshima and Nagasaki can't be compared to a nuclear power plant disaster.

"Pripyat actually seems pretty vibrant, save the lack of people".
"we could actually repopulate most of the area without any real trouble"
Emphasis mine. It's not ok simply because the area that is permanently uninhabitable isn't the full size of the area currently not inhabited. Also, cleaning isn't just a matter of washing once. Wind will continue to blow radioactive material into previously cleaned areas, meaning you'll need to constantly clean everywhere (and this is what is required in some places nearby that are inhabited).

Nuclear power is dangerous in a different way to other power generation methods. It can't be compared based on numbers of deaths alone, and it's not possible to have an objective measure of it's risk to the environment compared to other power sources.

A weapon also produces an immediate burst of neutron radiation which activates the material that the bomb is made of, along with any material near the bomb when it goes off. As those early bombs were extremely large (in terms of mass, not so much yield), they did indeed produce a large amount of fallout. The Isotope distribution is different from a nuclear reactor accident, but it is still dangerous and has a significant quantity of radioactive fallout released. It is very analogous to contamination from a reactor accident, and much of the data gathered from the victims of the atomic bombings has formed a core source of information which remains relevant to this day, and is part of the basis for various different radiation risk models.

The emphasis is indeed yours, and doesn't reflect the actual point of what I was saying. The actual area which will remain contaminated on a long term basis from Chernobyl is actually just the reactor building itself - a single building with a footprint smaller than the average office block (about 40000 square meters) . This is representative of the land loss due to the most severe possible form of nuclear disaster. In order to lose a significant quantity of land, we would be talking about every reactor their ever was exploding Chernobyl-style at once. This is what I mean when I say that it is not a reasonable risk.

Even the reactor hall itself could be reclaimed if the Ukrainian government thought it was worth it. Dealing with the High level waste is more expensive than a simple contamination clean up, but it is still perfectly feasible, and has been done on smaller scales when decommissioning older reactors. The only barrier to returning the area to a pre-disaster condition is the financial capabilities of the Ukrainian Government. If this had happened in a wealthier country, it would already be well on the way to full restoration by now.

There is no such thing as a level of contamination that cannot be cleaned up, and very few accidents have ever hit the point where the cost of that clean up becomes problematic. None have hit the point where it becomes prohibitive. Even if you want to measure the "land wastage per terawatt" hour instead of the deaths, and include accidents, nuclear will still come out as the lowest land usage because plants are so small compared to the large areas that must be set aside for other forms of power generation. Let alone the ecological devastation cause by strip mining coal or the rare-earth metals used in wind turbines and the more efficient forms solar cells. Of which you will find the clean up method for heavy metal toxins is nearly identical to that for radioactive isotopes.

Raevn, I'm sorry, but you don't seem to understand many of these issues. Radiological health and safety is a complex subject, and it's one that isn't taught to a good level in most general education systems. I would suggest you find a good introductory book on the subject. I would recommend an Introduction to Nuclear Power by Geoff Hewitt and John G. Collier, but it's a bit technical, and too expensive if you don't have access to a library. I know one of the professors who wrote it, and it has a detailed breakdown of the causes and effects of a number of nuclear accidents. Otherwise, I would recommend an introductory book specifically on radiological health and safety hazards. Let me know if you have any questions.

Because in Japan, we have a thing called "Shouganai".

People in Japan have told me that hiroshima is actually a kinda depressing place, because you can still feel and see traces of the nuclear catastrophe that happened there. Those people have told me stories about how people there had to live with that and try to lead a normal live despite of all that. But I've not been there, yet. So it's a really subjective argument
I'm making. I just want to point out that posting some pretty pictures is not going to prove your point, Madsci. If you're so involved with nuclear power, then you should probably visit those places someday to be able to either confirm, or regret your opinion on that matter.

Assault and Sniper are OP.

Again, I don't think you are understanding my point: A solar power plant doesn't kill thousands of people when it fails, neither does a wind power plant or coal. They also don't poison a huge area for decades, centuries or worse, cause cancer, death and panic. The worst thing I can think of with conventional power plants is water power. If the dam breaks that could be very nasty depending on what's downhill. Still, you can think of contingency measures and evacuate in time. Large dams don't just disintegrate spontaneously, there are long warning periods when the concrete fails. And even if you get the worst possible accident, no radiation. You can rebuild. You don't poison a huge area.

You got to see this from my point of view. This is Europe. People live close together here. If they have an accident in France, Spain, Belgium or the Netherlands there is no way the fallout is NOT ending up at least partially in my garden. Building nuclear power plants over here is irresponsible and just outright stupid. I can drive through 3 other countries in 2 hours over here.

I absolutely agree that the way German politicians responded to Fukushima was stupid. They wanted to show off and get results stat. Cost us an arm and a leg and it was badly planned in every conceivable way. I don't disagree with shutting down the nuclear power plants though. We can easily replace them and we should!

Yes, a solar plant should rarely harm anyone when it fails, but what harm is brought to people from the regular operation of a coal fired power plant?

Building damns displace people and wildlife, and affect the local environment (after all, you literally are making an artificial lake). Human error can put a heck of a lot of water downstream, and no amount of watching concrete disintegrate is going to help solve that. Human error can cause a positive-feedback reactor drive too hard and meltdown. I fail too see the difference between them.

My point here is that you can point out the hazards and dangers of nuclear, but you seem to be blind of the hazards and dangers of everything else.

Your overall point is that nuclear disasters kill thousands of people, and poison large tracts of land, while other sources of power do not have this risk. Is that the point you are trying to make?

If that was true, I would agree with you that nuclear power is too unsafe, the same way coal is. Except those things are not true.

I don't think you are understanding my points. Solar plants do kill people. They kill the villagers in China who have to suffer from cadmium sulphide poisoning caused by photovoltaic manufacturing. They ruin land with the pollutants which are carelessly discharged by factoriese. They kill the people who work at heights, and fall off rooftops when installing them. They kill the people who have traffic accidents when delivering and carrying the resources around. Nuclear kills people in similar accidents to these as well, but it kills a lot less because you only need to build one nuclear plant to provide a large quantity of electricity. Nuclear is extremely efficient in it's use of fuel and construction resources for the amount of power produced meaning that less people are killed in the supply chain. Furthermore, you are grossly exaggerating the death and destruction caused by a nuclear accident. Nuclear plant disasters don't kill thousands, they tend to kill tens of people. Even worst case scenarios like Chernobyl. You really need to look at some of the figures I have already taken the time to research and post previously, because your basic assumptions about the casualties caused by actual and even potential nuclear accidents are just flat out wrong.

Yup, I don't want a Chernobyl or Fukushima in the EU. Even if it doesn't kill anybody, there are always nasty consequences. Like you said yourself, the fallout dust can be removed with water very easily. Water like in rain! You can't really tell where it's going to come down and where it will collect in hotspots. Might be a high population area. Might be along a river like the Rhine that happens to flow through my city. Might be the sea. (Too bad grimbar is no longer here to give us his point of view on this. )

Anyway, somebody gets screwed. Cities or towns, local farmers, fishermen. Somebody pays the bill.

Pripyat might look idyllic from the outside but I prefer my cities with people in them...

If those factories wouldn't make solar panels they would produce children's toys and colors from solid lead with a fine aftertaste of plasticizer.
Don't blame the solar panels for the problems of the Chinese government to enforce safety and environmental regulations.

Besides, you US boys are not allowed to criticize bad environmental behavior as long as you are fracking for fun and profit and spilling oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Oh wait, that was BP.

Look, I'm not saying there is no room for nuclear power. I'm just seeing it more on spacecraft that are moving out of our solar system. Put nuclear power where the sun doesn't shine, that's where it is useful.

I was trying to stay out of this endless discussion, just to read a german article about this:
http://ens-newswire.com/2014/01/03/u-s-sailors-sue-japanese-nuclear-plant-owner-tepco/

Makes me think of the problem of radioactive particles in drinking water. What if the radiation had spread into the drinking water of more people. Unrealistic? They are even now having incredible amounts of highly radioactive water. Who says that won't end up somewhere where people take their drinking water from? How do you clean radioactive ground water supplies? Wash them with water?

The german source I found this also lists a lot of more or less old articles about all the issues with radioactive water they still have. Like tons and tons and tons of radioactive **** they don't know where to store anymore.
So many problems. YEARs after the accident. You could basically say that the accident is still happening and it will take years to get in full control. What other disasters are dangerous for years?

EDIT:
The fact that the US Navy themselves wants to have measure they were not exposed to any radiation is also yet another thing that will keep me from believing lots of those science articles. What does it help to say "less than 25 percent of the annual radiation exposure to a member of the U.S. public from natural sources" when more than 70 rather young people suddenly have a myriad of illnesses that seem to have come out of nowhere.

I'm afraid you still aren't getting it. Do you honestly believe that radiological health experts aren't aware of water-flow and groundwater as a vector for introducing radioisotopes in an environment? The radiological release from accidents like Chernobyl gets spread over a wise area. When it does so, it becomes extremely dilute, and of negligible risk. Whether it is a dust, in the water, or absorbed by plants and livestock, there would need to be a method of concentrating it a lot before it would become harmful. And if it becomes concentrated, it is in one place, more easily contained, and therefore less likely to harm a larger number of people. This is basic physics. There is a finite quantity of radioactive material released during an accident, and it can only be stretched so far. It doesn't breed, or multiply. In fact, it actually decreases as time goes by due to decay. Even with all the possible vectors that you could become irradiated by from an accident, that enough to make the risk associated with such a release more dangerous than millions of other activities that we do not worry about.

Why do you think I'm from the US?

I'm happy to accept that many of the laxities of the solar plant industry should be blamed on the Chinese government, and lack of regulatory regime, rather than on solar technology itself. But if that's the case, you must also accept that nuclear accidents such as Chernobyl and Fukushima are the fault of the Ukrainian and Japanese regulatory regimes, rather than nuclear technology itself. It is a complete inconsistency to blame the accidental deaths attributed to one technology on it's practitioners, while blame the accidental deaths of a different technology as inherent to the technology.

As I have already stated, the quantity of radioactive contamination of groundwater really isn't a problem. Will radioactive isotopes wash into water supplies? Of course they will. Is there a sufficient activity of them that drinking the water will be dangerous enough that people should worry about it? Not a chance. Remember, if the radioactive material spreads out, it is harmless, and if it is concentrated, then it is containable or avoidable until it has decayed. Furthermore, the more active the isotope is, the shorter it's half-life. This means that the more dangerous a particular isotope is, the less time it is around before it has decayed into something less harmful.

This is also why the radioactive water storage at Fukushima is being massively over hyped by the media. The reason large amounts of water are stored there is because that keeps the concentration low, and therefore lowers the risk from it. It really isn't that dangerous. I'm not joking when I say that you could swim in the stuff, and as long as you had a good shower afterwards, you would be perfectly fine. In terms of getting rid of the stuff, the most likly scenario is to run it through an ion-exchange column, and then dispose the gel as LLW or ILW, depending upon how active it is.

You really don't seem to understand how radiation dosimetry works. The good it does, is that it tells us that these symptoms are nothing to do with radiation. The symptoms claimed are either not associated with radiological health issues at all, long term issues that could not possibly have developed in the intervening time, or deterministic effects. Deterministic effect cannot arise unless a person has received a large dose in a very short period of time, normally more than about 400 mSv. According to that article, those people received about 0.5-1 mSv. Whatever issues these people have, it cannot be due to radiation damage, unless the numbers presented are wrong. Remember correlation does not imply causation. It is most likely a case of pre-existing conditions coupled with psychosomatic symptoms induced by needless fear of radiation.

Look, I really don't like saying this, but you do realise that you are arguing about nuclear science with a nuclear scientist, right? The vast majority of these points are so basic that they would be covered in the kind of 2 week radiological health and safety course that construction workers would have to go on before they could work on a nuclear licensed site. If you want to demonstrate that nuclear power kills and contaminates more people than the alternatives, then you are going to have to do a lot more work than a few vague hypothetical scenarios, because so far, the evidence is very much against you.[/quote]

So I might as well talk to the nuclear powerplant lobby that tries to push their multi million dollar profits into a good light. I see. Not blaming you personally. But you are obviously quite deep in this whole stuff. Can be good. Or can mean you are payed (or hope to be payed in the future) by this industry.

EDIT:

I don't know of Jessep, but I am _not_ blaming the technology itself. It's awesome tech in many ways. Just the average human is too irresponsible to handle it, as you seem to kind of hint at yourself with that statement.

EDIT 2:
If the water is really that harmless maybe all the people arguing for nuclear power should take a bath in those tanks and we will see how their health develops If they all stay healthy you'd have a nice argument that I would actually trust.

Back in 2011 I remember hearing that the Nuclear plant at Fukushima was built in the 70s and wouldn't have failed if it was built with the modern standards and safety precautions.

Very informative. Good read. I've been in favor of nuclear power since high school, and the sources MadSci posted reaffirmed my stance.

It's a good thing I don't read the other sections MadSci posts in though, reading that much that often would get tedious.