Nuclear power

kabayiri

kittypimms wrote: »

I did not know that was a fault line. *makes note to learn more geography* apologies if you are correct

Either way, i'm sure some clever person somewhere has decided that scotland is not going to half fall off, and for C10MW potential it's safe to sink some snakes into the Firth (safer than the existing Nuke plant and Submarine depot one would assume...). Heck, if they survive the Haal, they'll survive anything...

I bid you goodnight chaps, and look forward to catching up tomorrow.

There are fault lines and there are active faults.

In Britain we have some of the oldest rock in the world. It's a pretty mature piece of rock, and can not even be compared to the likes of hawaii or japan.

ninky_2

A._Badger wrote: »

And thanks to you, as well, Ninky. But do carry on believing what you clearly wish to believe.

Personally, I'll just keep an eye on websites written by nucelar inspectors, engineers, scientists and journalists who are informed by them.

The IAEA site is quite good:

http://www.iaea.org/

I don't think it's owned by Rupert Murdoch, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, !!!!!! Cheney or Exxon - but you can never be sure.

well here is one such nuclear inspector and specialist who is highly critical of IAEA. but you keep believing what you want to believe....

http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/article.aspx?id=42002

Slamming the Japanese response at Fukushima, Russian nuclear accident specialist Iouli Andreev accused corporations and the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of wilfully ignoring lessons from the world's worst nuclear accident 25 years ago to protect the industry's expansion.

"After Chernobyl all the force of the nuclear industry was directed to hide this event, for not creating damage to their reputation. The Chernobyl experience was not studied properly because who has money for studying? Only industry.

"But industry doesn't like it," he said in an interview in Vienna where the former director of the Soviet Spetsatom clean-up agency now teaches and advises on nuclear safety. Austria's environment ministry has used him as an adviser.

Andreev said a fire which released radiation on Tuesday involving spent fuel rods stored close to reactors at Fukushima looked like an example of putting profit before safety:

"The Japanese were very greedy and they used every square inch of the space. But when you have a dense placing of spent fuel in the basin you have a high possibility of fire if the water is removed from the basin," Andreev said.

The IAEA should share blame for standards, he said, arguing it was too close to corporations building and running plants. And he dismissed an emergency incident team set up by the Vienna-based agency as "only a think-tank not a working force":

"This is only a fake organisation because every organisation which depends on the nuclear industry -- and the IAEA depends on the nuclear industry -- cannot perform properly.

"It always will try to hide the reality.

"The IAEA ... is not interested in the concentration of attention on a possible accident in the nuclear industry. They are totally not interested in all the emergency organisations."

Degenerate

macaque wrote: »

I have no idea whether modern nuclear reactors can default to a safe condition if all power and cooling is lost? From a risk control perspective however, such a capability would be a big plus (but not the end of the story).

They can. "Passive safety" as it is known, is what moved me to support nuclear again.

1984ReturnsForReal_2

Degenerate wrote: »

They can. "Passive safety" as it is known, is what moved me to support nuclear again.

5 & 6 are now heating up. And a 2nd fire in 4. Not to mention the others.

I think we can safely say "passive safety" aint working.

Degenerate

ninky wrote: »

no they aren't. huge areas of land are going to be contaminated. babies will be born with birth defects or have to be aborted. people will get cancer (it's not an if it's a when).

for some faced with the devastating health problems radiation creates they may well end up seeing those who died in the earthquake as the lucky ones.

Your hysterical wailing betrays a total ignorance of the subject. We simply don't have any information to indicate such a catastrophe at this stage.

First you need to understand that radiation and radioactivity do not mean the same thing, and that a simple reading of radiation levels is not in itself a useful measure of the harm to humans or the environment. The radiation at the plant may have peaked at a level harmful to human health, but if the workers were properly protected they may be fine. The quoted radiation figure of 400 mSv/hr is a measure of the biological dose, but it doesn't tell you what sort of emissions made up that figure. If it's mostly alpha their suits may protect them well.

Radiation, as the name implies, radiates outward, and unless it is being focused in a beam somehow can be expected to radiate isotropically, ie equally in all directions. It rapidly diminishes in intensity with distance. A release of radiation of any variety is only going be harmful to those in the vicinity at the time who are exposed to it. There are three main varieties of radiation relevant to nuclear science - alpha, beta and gamma. Each has distinct properties as to how far it penetrates and how destructively it interacts.

Alpha particles are the most harmful variety because of their propensity to interact with atoms of anything. This leads to the rearrangement of molecules, including the molecules of cellular DNA, generating potentially cancerous mutations. Fortunately, because of this tendency to interact, alpha does not travel far through the air before doing so, and is easily stopped by a good radiation suit.

Beta particles travel farther, maybe a few meters in air, but are much less harmful. It's a certainty that you have spent many hours of your life in front of particle accelerators shooting beta particles directly at you. They're called cathode ray tubes.

Gamma is the farthest penetrating and weakest interacting. We are constantly being bombarded by Gamma rays from across the universe.

Of more concern than an immediate radiation dose is the potential for release of radioactive isotopes. Nuclear reactor use them as fuel and create others as byproducts. These don't just radiate out, they have to be physically transported somehow, perhaps being carried by the wind or leeching into the groundwater, to contaminate a wider area. These substances undergo a decay process that causes them to emit radiation continually until they have fully decayed into a non-radioactive form, and therefore present a continuing radiation hazard until their decay is complete. They also have the potential to contaminate the food chain, and if they get inside a living creature can potentially cause much more damage internally than they would externally. But not all radioactive isotopes are the same. Some decay to benign forms within hours, days or weeks. Others may take years, decades or centuries.

So, the real thing to fear is not a one-off burst of radiation, but the release of long-half life radioactive isotopes. The nightmare scenario happened at Chernobyl, where a live reactor blew the top off it's primary containment in a steam explosion, spreading a large amount of these nasties over a widespread area and into the atmosphere.

They're obviously going to have a hell of a clean-up to do on the site itself, but depending on the type of radiation and/or radioactive material that has leaked, it's still possible that the surrounding area may be safe to return to within days or weeks, notwithstanding the fact that much of it has been trashed by the tsunami anyway. We don't know yet, but don't let that stop you from hysterically pointing to the nuclear bogeyman.

Degenerate

1984ReturnsForReal wrote: »

5 & 6 are now heating up. And a 2nd fire in 4. Not to mention the others.

I think we can safely say "passive safety" aint working.

I think we can safely say you missed the point that passive safety is a new innovation in recent reactor designs.

John_Pierpoint

http://www.breathingearth.net/

The longest suicide note in history.

ninky_2

Degenerate wrote: »

Your hysterical wailing betrays a total ignorance of the subject. We simply don't have any information to indicate such a catastrophe at this stage.

First you need to understand that radiation and radioactivity do not mean the same thing, and that a simple reading of radiation levels is not in itself a useful measure of the harm to humans or the environment. The radiation at the plant may have peaked at a level harmful to human health, but if the workers were properly protected they may be fine. The quoted radiation figure of 400 mSv/hr is a measure of the biological dose, but it doesn't tell you what sort of emissions made up that figure. If it's mostly alpha their suits may protect them well.

Radiation, as the name implies, radiates outward, and unless it is being focused in a beam somehow can be expected to radiate isotropically, ie equally in all directions. It rapidly diminishes in intensity with distance. A release of radiation of any variety is only going be harmful to those in the vicinity at the time who are exposed to it. There are three main varieties of radiation relevant to nuclear science - alpha, beta and gamma. Each has distinct properties as to how far it penetrates and how destructively it interacts.

Alpha particles are the most harmful variety because of their propensity to interact with atoms of anything. This leads to the rearrangement of molecules, including the molecules of cellular DNA, generating potentially cancerous mutations. Fortunately, because of this tendency to interact, alpha does not travel far through the air before doing so, and is easily stopped by a good radiation suit.

Beta particles travel farther, maybe a few meters in air, but are much less harmful. It's a certainty that you have spent many hours of your life in front of particle accelerators shooting beta particles directly at you. They're called cathode ray tubes.

Gamma is the farthest penetrating and weakest interacting. We are constantly being bombarded by Gamma rays from across the universe.

Of more concern than an immediate radiation dose is the potential for release of radioactive isotopes. Nuclear reactor use them as fuel and create others as byproducts. These don't just radiate out, they have to be physically transported somehow, perhaps being carried by the wind or leeching into the groundwater, to contaminate a wider area. These substances undergo a decay process that causes them to emit radiation continually until they have fully decayed into a non-radioactive form, and therefore present a continuing radiation hazard until their decay is complete. They also have the potential to contaminate the food chain, and if they get inside a living creature can potentially cause much more damage internally than they would externally. But not all radioactive isotopes are the same. Some decay to benign forms within hours, days or weeks. Others may take years, decades or centuries.

So, the real thing to fear is not a one-off burst of radiation, but the release of long-half life radioactive isotopes. The nightmare scenario happened at Chernobyl, where a live reactor blew the top off it's primary containment in a steam explosion, spreading a large amount of these nasties over a widespread area and into the atmosphere.

They're obviously going to have a hell of a clean-up to do on the site itself, but depending on the type of radiation and/or radioactive material that has leaked, it's still possible that the surrounding area may be safe to return to within days or weeks, notwithstanding the fact that much of it has been trashed by the tsunami anyway. We don't know yet, but don't let that stop you from hysterically pointing to the nuclear bogeyman.

thanks for the wikipedia lesson...i got an a in physics thanks....

it's not hysterical wailing. iodine 131 and cesium 137 are being detected in tokyo several km away - so that is a release of radioactive isotopes. government official saying the 'low levels' of course and "i hear this is not immediately harmful to health"....not very reassuring we know this, it is the longterm effects of absorbtion that are the problem, not immediate health impacts.

the burning of spent fuel rods is actually potentially more dangerous than meltdown because the radioactive cloud releases straight into the atmosphere.

the lack of level readings being given suggests an attempt to avert panic and / or cover up the level of danger.

however that all the workers are now evacuated suggests the levels are dangerous and that any attempt to contain the situation has now been abandonned.

macaque_2

A._Badger wrote: »

That's biased defined as: 'written by scientists who know something about the subject, as opposed to Guardian journalists', is it?'

As a matter of fact I used to eat my lunch several days a week within a quarter a mile of one and rarely gave it a moment's thought. You should read James Lovelock on the subject. He's on record as saying he'd have one in his back garden.

Badger, so you ate a sandwich near a nuclear power station. Well that should put all the doubter's minds at rest.

As a matter of interest, if a nuclear power plant was planned to be located one mile from your your house, would you object?

1984ReturnsForReal_2

macaque wrote: »

As a matter of interest, if a nuclear power plant was planned to be located one mile from your your house, would you object?

Only if the installation did not include a drive through McDonalds to pacify the local residents.