Is this the beginning of the end for the nuclear power industry?

[Cutlass]

PopSci just published an article online on the basics of nuclear power for those that need a primer.

http://www.popsci.com/node/52720/?cmpid=enews031711

 

[onedreamer]

Only in situations where they poorly designed and forced to undergo stresses they were never designed to undergo and suffer severe damage from tremendous acts of nature.
Yes, if something goes seriously wrong with a nuclear plant, the consequences aren't fun. However, the numerous safety mechanisms are there to make sure it never gets too serious. Remember, outside of research reactors the technology we are using is around 40 years old and I can list all of the 'disasters' on one hand. When 40 year old technology has held up that well, imagine what modern technology can do.

Bla bla bla.
In summary: Nuclear Plants are not safe, they can explode, nuclear waste must be monitored for centuries, not 40 years (who cares, it's a cost and risk that our descendants will pay for us and because of us), if something goes just wrong, consequences aren't fun, when something goes seriously wrong a metropolis with 30 millions inhabitants risks contamination. So the position of pro-nuclearists now shifted from "fairly minor incident" to "not fun". Let's all switch channel and watch a comedy movie. Nuclear plants are safe, if built with future generation technology. Too bad that present plants are built with present generation technology, which becomes past generation in a few years. What do you propose to do Adjidica, switch channel or scrap all nuclear plants of old generation? That's probably 80% of them. Yeah, this is a convincing argument on the safety of nuclear plants. Not.
Last news for Adjidica: the 40 year old technology has NOT held up, that is why we are discussing the matter. You reached the apotheosis of negationism with your last sentence.

 

[GoodGame]

You should have had a "NO" option. I vote "NO".

Was Exxon Valdez the beginning of the end for the oil industry? No. Will $10/gallon gas be the beginning of the end, I think maybe so.

 

[kojimanard]

I think many of us have hoped that fusion would be the answer, for many reasons. I know someone with an advanced physics degree who spend years on fusion. He quit because he concluded that it was not possible for fusion to occur in a controlled environment (of course, it creates explosions, like the sun, or a bomb).

 

[Disgustipated]

yeah my hopes are fading of fusion. I just don't think it's technologically possible (without putting more energy into it than you get out)

 

[Dragonlord]

yeah my hopes are fading of fusion. I just don't think it's technologically possible (without putting more energy into it than you get out)

I don't know if I'd go quite that far - as I understand it, it is at least theoretically possible, but the problems to be solved are pretty basic. In other words, technological breakthroughs are needed - and, by their very nature, you can't predict when they will be achieved, if ever.

So, fusion should certainly be researched further, but it is not something we should pin our hopes on.

Also, if you read sources from the 40s and 50s, people then pinned their hopes on nuclear fission in exactly the same way as some do now with fusion - it was supposed to be the end of all energy problems, with cheap energy for all.... yadda, yadda. Who knows today what problems will surface with fusion, if and when it ever gets going....?

 

[Duo]

Nuclear power has a lower death rate per TWh than any other energy source. People just hate it because it is hip. Apparently it's really uncool to give a ... about the thousands killed every year while mining coal or saddled with related health problems.

 

[Formaldehyde]

That's a great way to strawman all the acknowledged experts who disagree with your personal opinion. They just aren't "hip" enough to realize they are killing people by merely demanding sound technological answers for the well-known oustanding issues which may end up killing far more people.

Nuclear accidents which release sizeable amounts of radiation happen all the time. We really don't know how many people actually get killed in the nuclear industry because these accidents are often deliberately hidden from the public, and any deaths which eventually result due to cancer are frequently dismissed as being due to some other reason.

 

[MobBoss]

Nuclear accidents which release sizeable amounts of radiation happen all the time.

Citation needed.

We really don't know how many people actually get killed in the nuclear industry because these accidents are often deliberately hidden from the public

If they are hidden from the public, how do we know that they happen all the time?

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

What exactly constitutes "sizable radiation?" Three Mile Island released "sizable radiation" but most of it was Xenon and didn't really do much of anything. Its not just quantity of material, its type. A little bit of Iodine-131 is going to matter a lot more than a lot of Xenon-135.

 

[Cutlass]

Sizable radiation means that you cannot approach it without suffering a fatal dose.

 

[MobBoss]

Sizable radiation means that you cannot approach it without suffering a fatal dose.

Then whats occurring in Japan isnt even sizable as it hasnt even reached that level yet (to my knowledge).

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Sizable radiation means that you cannot approach it without suffering a fatal dose.

Approach what? The reactor? The building?

 

[Cutlass]

The reports say that workers cannot approach safely. Helicopters have been forced to withdraw because the radiation is too high.

To put it in perspective, when a nuclear plant is functioning right, you can enter the water next to the nuclear fuel safely.

http://www.aws.org/wj/sept03/feature1.html

Nuclear diving was pioneered in the 1970s, when the first nuclear power plants were reaching middle age. Plant engineers found they could perform minor underwater maintenance activities during scheduled refueling outages. Those involved nonwelding operations such as replacement of steam plugs, as well as quick welding repairs to the transfer carts used to move fuel rods. Soon, more elaborate operations were being performed, such as reinforcing fuel pool liners with large stainless steel plates and modifying spent fuel storage racks.
In a sense from a UCC training video, a diver works on a spent fuel rod assembly. A typical reactor produces about 20 metric tons of spent, but highly radioactive, uranium every year. This uranium, encased in spent fuel rods, is often stored in steel-lined concrete vaults filled with water. As the plants run out of spent fuel storage space, they employ underwater welders to "re-rack" the old rod storage assemblies, making them more space-efficient.

In some ways, it is safer to work on fuel rod racks and other plant projects under water than it would be to drain the containment pool. Radiation is well shielded by demineralized water, so a commercial diver working in a nuclear environment can often perform a given task with less exposure than a worker in the same environment if it were "de-watered."

"Nuclear reactor diving is the best diving, the safest diving," said Kyle Wilkins, a nuclear diver and project manager for Underwater Construction Corporation (UCC) in Essex, Conn. He pointed out that there is unlimited visibility and no marine life in the highly purified water.

 

[El_Machinae]

The problem with fusion, is that there's very little the consumer can do to 'boost' the R&D. We can write our politicians with moral support for funding the big projects, but that's about it. (or we can write in support of larger science budgets, which is probably vastly more useful). With solar, we can buy solar-power products (at the individual or at the city level) which will help its tech curve. Same with wind (though it's harder). But fusion? How to help shuttle money into fusion research? It can't really be done, except at the government level.

Onedreamer, I think that you're making two mistakes. The first is upbraiding the technological progress. In the end, the technological progress required to make nuclear "safe enough" is discoverable. This means that, over time, we make progress in that direction. Our tech today is better than 30 years ago. 30 years from now, it will be better than today. However, since "safe enough" is discoverable, eventually we'll reach the time when advancing decades don't improve the safety.

Now, I don't know if we met the threshold in the 90s or in the 2020s (it's not something I'd know). But it's a fault in the criticism.

Additionally, we can talk about the cost to future generations (and we should!), but we also have to talk about the benefits to the future generations. Wealth compounds. Sufficient energy sources allow the creation and accumulation of wealth. This means that the proportion of wealth required to 'handle' future nuclear containment will go down (as a proportion) the more wealthy the future generations are. Now, nuclear containment will be costly (yes), but it will be much cheaper to pay for that future containment than to not have the problem, but also not have the benefit of nuclear power in the next few generations. Do you think the Japanese would be better off with the costs that these nuclear plants have caused (with their malfunction) or if the Japanese had never migrated to advanced energy sources? Japan is a wealthy country. Hell, the tsunami is going to be a survivable travesty (for the the whole country) because of how wealthy Japan is.

Our main choices are to (a) use less energy (b) use more fossil fuels or (c) use alternates while we phase down fossil fuels. Now, society is not going to use less energy (and it wouldn't be a good thing to use less energy). The damage to the ecosystem from fossil fuels vastly outstrip the potential damage from nuclear. Especially as we migrate away from land-based oil wells, and start to increase under-sea drilling and increase coal mining. Those two things are going to cause economic damage on scales that are obvious, if we don't migrate away from fossil fuels.

 

[SG-17]

Everywhere geologically stable.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Being dangerous to approach doesn't really constitute "receiving a fatal dose." I mean, what determines a fatal dose is time of exposure. I could get a lethal dose from a CT scan if I stood in front of it long enough. Pripyat citizens would have gotten lethal exposure in four days immediately after the disaster, but standing on the roof of Chernobyl Reactor 3 would give you a lethal dose in 45 seconds. Louis Slotin got a lethal dose from the Plutonium he was holding in about two seconds flat. Saying "you could get a lethal dose" is a meaningless statement without a proper time frame.

 

[Cutlass]

Radiation Exposure Could Curtail Workers’ Efforts
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
Published: March 14, 2011

As radiation levels rise at the crippled reactors in northern Japan, a basic question arises: how long can workers keep struggling to ward off full meltdowns?

The workers are performing what have been described as heroic tasks, like using fire equipment to pump seawater into the three failing reactors to keep the nuclear fuel from melting down and fighting the fire at a fourth reactor.

They are operating in places that have been contaminated by radioactive isotopes from all four reactors. Technicians who have not been evacuated face an escalating exposure, and will have to be replaced if the fight is to go on.

“If they exceed a certain amount, they can’t go back in for a day or a week or longer,” said Dr. Lew Pepper, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health who has studied the effects of radiation on nuclear weapons workers. And the pool of available replacements is finite, he said: “What do you do? You don’t have a lot of people who can do this work.”

The nuclear plants’ operator, Tokyo Electric Power, has declined to provide details about the workers.

But Arnold Gundersen, a consultant who worked in American plants nearly identical to the stricken Japanese ones, said it was likely that the company was calling in retirees and workers from unaffected plants for help. And perhaps for sacrifice, as well. “They may also be asking for people to volunteer to receive additional exposure,” he said.

People who are working close to the reactor — pumping water, or operating valves inside the secondary containment structure — would almost certainly be wearing full bodysuits and air packs, Mr. Gundersen said. But some forms of radiation can penetrate any gear.

Gamma rays and other penetrating radiation can cause cancers and other long-term illnesses or, in high amounts, near-term illness or death.

Health physicists should gauge the radiation level in the work area, and the workers would normally be told how long they can remain. “There may be a health physicist who will say, You only have an hour or two to do this job,” Mr. Gundersen said. Each worker would carry a dosimeter, which measures radiation exposure, “and they’ll be looking at it,” he added. “When it hits a certain number, they should leave.”

Suits and air packs are meant to keep radioactive particles off the skin and out of the lungs until the workers return to a safer area.

Workers are trained to remove the gear in a specific way to avoid leaving any particles on their skin that would result in continuing exposure.

While regulations may differ somewhat in Japan, in the United States the usual radiation exposure limit for nuclear power plant workers is 50 millisieverts, or 5 rem, per year (compared with the 0.3 rem that the Environmental Protection Agency says most people get from normal background radiation). When there is an emergency, the limit can be raised to 25 rem, which is still far below the level at which people would show symptoms or get sick.

The explosion at Fukushima’s Reactor No. 2 on Tuesday morning sent radiation levels spiking, to 8,217 microsieverts an hour from 1,941 about 40 minutes earlier. Later Tuesday, Japanese nuclear officials announced much higher levels and evacuated most of the emergency workers.

During the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine in 1986, when the reactor caught fire, operators and firefighters received high doses of radiation, sometimes within minutes and without being made aware of the dangers. More than two dozen of them died of acute radiation illness. “People in Chernobyl were just over overexposed,” Dr. Pepper said. “The outcome for those folks was death.”

Determining allowable exposure is usually based on three principles: distance, time and shielding. In the Japanese plants, extensive contamination would mean that distance and shielding are not really factors, so the controlling variable is time.

Mr. Gundersen said that when he worked at the Vermont Yankee plant, which is nearly identical to some of the crippled Japanese reactors, he had one maintenance task where the “stay time,” in which workers would be exposed to their yearly limit, was three minutes. He hired local farmers, trained them on a mock-up for two weeks, and then sent them in for their brief stint. “Then I’d send them home for a year,” he said.

In Japan, the plant operators do not have the luxury of time for training. “You need somebody who is familiar with the plant, because you need somebody to do it now,” Mr. Gundersen said.

Japanese workers might be so committed that they might be willing to exceed accepted levels of exposure. But that might not extend to extremely high radiation.

“I don’t think anyone is going to take 50 rems,” he said. “But if it’s a difference between 5 and 7, they might say: ‘I’ll take it. It’s worth the risk.’ ”
A version of this article appeared in print on March 15, 2011, on page A12 of the New York edition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/science/15workers.html

 

[MobBoss]

“If they exceed a certain amount, they can’t go back in for a day or a week or longer,” said Dr. Lew Pepper, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health who has studied the effects of radiation on nuclear weapons workers. And the pool of available replacements is finite, he said: “What do you do? You don’t have a lot of people who can do this work.”

Doesnt sound exactly fatal to me yet, and your story doesnt include that word anywhere in it.

Dangerous? Yes. Fatal? Uhm......?

 

[Ajidica]

So anything less dangerous then 'crapping your intenstines out' means screw the damages?