
Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now - lipowicztom
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/14/fukushiima_analysis/
======
potatolicious
... I'm not one of the "OMFG LOOK AT THE NUCLEAR ANGEL OF DEATH" people, but
can we wait for this crisis to reach some resolution before we make loud
proclamations either way?

The main information that concerns me right now is that there appears to be a
consistent radiation leak of 400 mSv/h at the plant. While not Chernobyl by
any measure, this is quite a bit of radiation, considering one's yearly dose
limit is 1 mSv total.

This seems to contradict the extremely optimisitc reports that all is well,
under control, and that no significant radiation leak has occurred.

[edit] One thing that optimistic reports consistently fail to address is the
situation with the spent fuel pools. While not capable of melting down, from
what I've read the pools are rapidly boiling dry and plant workers are
struggling to maintain cooling on them. Left to its own devices the fuel will
boil out the pool, light on fire, and then you have burning nuclear waste
drifting directly into the atmosphere (after all, the buildings no longer have
roofs). There is some speculation that the current radiation spike at the
plant is _not_ from any reactor but rather its spent fuel containment.

~~~
bahadden
"considering one's yearly dose limit is 1 mSv total."

In Ramsar, Iran the background radition is around 200 mSv/Y (compared to a
worldwide average of 2.4 mSv/Y) and _according to wikipedia_ this "high level
of radiation does not seem to have caused ill effects on the residents of the
area".

Call me confused.

Is the 1 mSv/Y total one of those made-up safety guidelines?

~~~
potatolicious
1 mSv is estimated to increase your odds of serious medical complications by
1/1,000,000. Not a significant amount, but one's _regularly_ allowable dose
should not be expected to cause health problems in the first place. Also,
these limits are very conservatively set for various reasons - most of which I
agree with (used to work in a nuclear facility).

So no, if you got blasted with 10 mSv all at once you shouldn't expect to
vomit blood or fall over dead, but it's still a sizable amount of radiation.

Also, 400 mSv/h is 3,504,000 mSv/Y (aka 3504 Sv/Y, aka 17,000 times the
radiation output in Ramsar, Iran). Of course, one doesn't expect this
radiation leak to last for a whole year, but the dose rate _does_ matter.
Sucking in 400 mSv over an hour is many, many times worse than getting it over
a matter of years or decades.

~~~
beefman
A typical CT scan will expose you to 10-15mSv. A dose of 100mSv infers a 1%
lifetime cancer risk. The effects of doses as small as 1mSv are not known and
are inferred by models.

------
antirez
Enough articles "everything is fine" for my tastes circulating onto Hacker
News, while instead the facts created more and more concerns. I think it's
better to just wait, and hope, instead of blabling about things that even the
top experts of the world are having an hard time to figure. There will be a
time, in a few weeks, and hopefully after a disaster was avoided, to speculate
about the real security of nuke power.

~~~
dublinclontarf
Sadly within a few weeks, armies of anti-nuclear campainers, writers, and
politicians will have jumped on this and pumped it so through the roof that,
even if everything in this article is correct most people won't listen. Look
at Chernobyl or Three Mile Island (study after study found no major exposure
by anyone).

The hysteria over this is caused by the anti-nuclear people and groups trying
to use this as a case against nuclear power, blowing everything out of
proportion before any facts are known.

I think a few articles calling for calm balances the shrieking cries of
"meltdown imminent".

~~~
bluedanieru
Just a quick point of order: study after study on _Chernobyl_ found major
exposure by just about _everyone_. It was serious business. This is where,
without any containment vessel at all, the fuel caught fire and the
radioactive ash spread all over the place.

But you are right about Three-Mile Island.

~~~
dublinclontarf
Yes there was exposure, certainly those 4000 children recieved high enough
levels. However this is a far cry of hundreds of thousands of dangerous
exposures, massive increases of cancer rates and birth defects that are still
happening that most people think of.

I myself thought just that until recently after investigating it.

~~~
sterling
I was studying in Russia when Chernobyl occurred, and I dated a woman from
northern Ukraine who was a teenager at the time of the accident. I saw the
results of the accident firsthand - basically everyone under the age of 10 was
affected - hair loss, skin rashes and nausea in the immediate years after,
cancer and early death later. But even so it isn't fair to judge the safety of
nuclear power by Chernobyl. Chernobyl happened because the Soviet system had
become incredibly incompetent, and technical decisions were being made by
thugs.

~~~
brazzy
The capitalist system quite often _also_ becomes incredibly incompetent and
has its technical decisions made by thugs. Tepco, the company that runs the
Fukushima plant, has a long history of corruption, faked security reports and
blatant incompetence.

What makes nuclear power unsafe is human error more than technical failure.
That's the aspect the naive technocrats (like the guy who wrote this article)
always ignore.

------
_delirium
_At Chernobyl, this actually happened inside the containment vessel and the
resulting explosion ruptured the vessel, leading to a serious release of core
radioactives – though this has had basically zero effect on the world in
general nor even much impact on the area around Chernobyl._

Even just as a matter of rhetoric and persuasion, I think trying to argue that
Chernobyl wasn't all _that_ bad isn't the route you want to go in reassuring
people.

~~~
BvS
I watched a documentary about Chernobyl yesterday
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiCXb1Nhd1o>) an although it's obviously a
little sensationalist/emotional I have a really hard time having any respect
for people claiming it didn't have that much impact.

Fukushima is very different but I agree with others that we should wait at
least a couple of weeks till we make any conclusions

Speaking of jumping to conclusions: Germany just started to shut down 7
nuclear power plants because of Fukushima...

~~~
gritzko
> Speaking of jumping to conclusions: Germany just started to shut down 7
> nuclear power plants because of Fukushima...

100% pure green hysteria. ~10.000 died because of the tsunami. Who died
because of Fukushima? None so far.

~~~
Tichy
Well there is cheap living space available around Fukushima right now. Would
you care to move there?

~~~
rglullis
The place has been just hit by an _8.9_ earthquake and a tsunami. If I had to
list reasons why not to go over there, my concern over likelihood of natural
disasters is _much_ higher than concern of nuclear accidents.

All else being equal, I wouldn't mind moving close to a nuclear plant. The
thing is, power plants (in general) are built in less hospitable places. So
it's never "equal" to begin with.

------
motters
Pretty jaw-dropping journalism, even by Register standards. Anyone trying to
suggest that the situation at Fukushima is "under control" and is somehow a
nuclear industry safety success story hasn't been paying close enough
attention.

~~~
lurch_mojoff
I guess you are right, but it's just as dishonest to present the situation as
completely out of control and use Fukushima as an excuse to paint nuclear
power as completely unsafe and dangerous. Which is what mainstream media has
been mostly doing.

~~~
paganel
> an excuse to paint nuclear power as completely unsafe and dangerous

50 people sacrificing their lives so that anything even shittier would not
happen "is safe and not dangerous"? I fail to imagine what you really find
"unsafe and dangerous".

~~~
rimantas
Pretty much every other energy source is more dangerous than nuclear.
[http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-
ener...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-
sources.html)

~~~
paganel
Then I guess people are stupid, aren't they, because of all the friends I know
none of them would prefer having his/her house close to a nuclear plant,
compared to having it close to a coal plant. And what do you know? These
stupid people (including me) do have the power to vote, and I sure as hell
would vote for nuclear power plants to be closed down were I given the chance
to do so.

~~~
paganel
In responding to jbri's comment bellow, as the "Reply" link doesn't show up
for me on that one:

> Are you suggesting that because ignorant people think something is unsafe,
> that means that it actually is unsafe?

Yeah, this is what I'm saying, but isn't this what web 2.0 people were calling
"wisdom of the crowds"? I guess back then it sounded cool, now it's just
"return to technocracy" once more.

~~~
jbri
You can click the "link" button next to the comment header to get a reply box
regardless.

Regarding this "wisdom of the crowds" crap, does the presence of a lynch mob
indicate that someone was actually guilty? If masses of people swear by a
medical treatment, does that magically mean it's not a placebo?

Crowds are _dumb_. The only time you want to follow the "wisdom of the crowd"
is when the crowd _is_ your marketable commodity.

~~~
paganel
> Crowds are dumb. The only time you want to follow the "wisdom of the crowd"
> is when the crowd is your marketable commodity.

We're settled, then, because this is where we disagree :) I believe in the
power of the people of taking decisions for themselves (even if the decisions
are dumb), while you suggest than an informed elite should have the upper hand
(if I read you correctly). I could go on and on about why I believe in what I
said above (maybe the fact that I grew up under an authoritarian regime), but
that doesn't belong in here, and I'm pretty sure you have your good reasons
for believing in what you said.

I guess history will decide.

~~~
khafra
If you're saying that mob rule has the power to irrationally stop nuclear
power production, I agree with you.

If you're saying this is the way things ought to be, I'm not sure if I agree
but I think you have a valid point about the democratic form of government.

If you're saying a dumb herd of people's panicky reactions to a scary
situation actually mean nuclear power is more dangerous than other forms,
you're dead wrong.

I don't think other people here understand which of these arguments you're
making, either.

~~~
paganel
Yeap, you're right on the first 2 points I was trying to make.

Reguarding this

> If you're saying a dumb herd of people's panicky reactions to a scary
> situation actually mean nuclear power is more dangerous than other forms,
> you're dead wrong.

I didn't say that people's reaction to nuclear power changes it into something
"dangerous", I was only saying that if people decide not to fund nuclear
development anymore (say, by not allowing their Governments to subsidize said
industry) then its voice should be listened to, even if to some it may sound
"dumb" or "panicky". This is why I said that if the voice of the majority
isn't listened to we're back to Technocracy, i.e. a small group of informed
elite taking vital decisions for the rest of us.

~~~
kstenerud
Actually, it's a plutocracy. People don't listen to technocrats unless they
have a good idea for generating wealth/power.

The reason you don't leave any serious decisions in the hands of the masses is
because it leads to instability, which is the worst thing that can happen to a
government.

In every form of government, you have a minority bloc which makes the most
important decisions unilaterally. The remaining decisions are, depending on
the visible form of government, passed on to various degrees to the public so
that they may feel they are participating in the running of their country's
affairs.

There is, of course, some give-and-take when a special interest group gains
too much power, but those can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

------
jeffreyrusso
Looking in awe at the fact that the plants are still standing after an
earthquake "five times stronger than the older Fukushima plants had been
designed to cope with" isn't the right way to look at this situation. Why were
these plants built in a massively earthquake prone zone and not designed to
avoid what is happening right now? If an earthquake this powerful was
possible, the most sensitive pieces of infrastructure should have been
designed to handle it. They clearly were not.

I'm no nuclear opponent... I believe that nuclear could very well be the only
safe and scalable answer to the world's energy needs - but if we can't make
the economics of building safer plants work, then nuclear is a nonstarter.

Proclamations like this that everything is and will be fine are really
reckless at this point. Every day it seems like we are finding out that things
are much worse than we had previously been told they are, and it looks as
though they are still in the process of losing - not gaining - control at
Fukushima.

~~~
krschultz
How can you say they "clearly were not"? I think the opposite is quite clear -
the main components survived the earthquake just fine.

The problem right now is the lack of power. The pumps are run on electric
power, and as soon as the earthquake came the power plant itself shut down. So
now you need external power to run the pumps. The power infrastructure failed
and no other power plants could power these pumps. So they switched to backup
generators, which were then wiped out by a tsunami. Then they switched to
batteries (which worked fine, until they ran out). Then they brought in backup
generators, which failed. Now we're onto pumping seawater in.

If sea wall had been 50' high instead of 30' high (estimates), the generators
would have survived and we wouldn't be hearing about this. If the batteries
were more than 8 hours we probably wouldn't be hearing about this. If the
external generators worked, we wouldn't be hearing about this. Those are the
only mistakes.

Compare that to Gen 4 reactors being designed today - no pumps required to
circulate fluid. If anything we should be building new plants because if this
had happened to a Gen 4 the fluid would be cooling the reactor even without
power and none of this would have been a problem.

~~~
jeffreyrusso
I suppose we can all have differing opinions on what an acceptable level of
risk is, but leaking radiation, fuel storage ponds on fire, and a situation
volatile enough to warrant a 30km exclusion zone says to me that the plant
_clearly was not_ designed to handle this kind of situation.

If the problem is the lack of power, then so be it - even more of a
preventable problem that wasn't properly assured against.

I'm hopeful for the Gen 4 reactors (don't know much about them, but what I've
read gives me the impression that they are a significant leap in the right
direction in terms of safety.) But I don't think that this particular article
is right in holding Fukushima up as some shining example of nuclear safety,
especially so early.

~~~
gsmaverick
Is dumping millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico an acceptable
level of risk for you? I don't see you saying we should stop drilling for oil.

~~~
OpieCunningham
You can't fault him for not saying we should stop drilling for oil - this
discussion is not about oil.

But since you brought it up, we _should_ stop drilling for oil, particularly
sea bed drilling, while operating with lax regulatory bodies and marginal
penalties for non-compliance.

------
caf
I got as far as the second paragraph before I knew that this was article was
of dubious accuracy:

 _"As the hot cores ceased to be cooled by the water which is used to extract
power from them, control rods would have remained withdrawn and a runaway
chain reaction could have ensued"_

This is rubbish. The control rods in every nuclear reactor, going right back
to the Chicago Pile, are fail-safe: if the power fails, they drop into the
core, stopping fission. (In the case of a BWR like the Fukushima reactors,
stored hydraulic pressure forces the control rods upward into the core).

Even without fission occuring though, the fuel rods continue to produce a
great deal of heat through beta decay of the fission products (immediately
after shutdown, heat is produced at around 7% of the operating power). This is
why a meltdown can still occur, if this prodigious quantity of heat cannot be
removed quickly enough.

------
Tichy
I hope the pro-nuclear power people are right when they claim everything went
according to plan. But forgive me if I am not used to "everything is under
control" looking like this on TV (explosions, people in protection suits and
gas masks, mass exodus).

------
othello
The article dates back from yesterday, 1pm GMT. More evidence that there
should be no conclusion drawn (one way or another for that matter) on nuclear
energy safety or lack thereof before this whole catastrophe has fully
unfolded.

Though the more recent developments would seem to point out that _Quake +
tsunami >> 1 minor radiation dose_.

------
StavrosK
Regardless of whether or not the situation is under control, I think the
triumph is more for the Japanese. I'm sure that if the plant were in Greece
the fallout would have been much greater because everyone would have cut
corners and not followed the safety procedures.

------
bron
Think the article is slightly old, with new events happening to the reactors
every hour. I get my updates from here

<http://mitnse.com/>

Lets just hope it does not get any worse.

------
mncolinlee
This article dramatically misses the point! Uranium is peaking. Oil has
already peaked. If we intend to use reprocessing to conserve uranium, then we
need to come up with new reactor designs that require less fossil fuel energy
and less money to build.

The problem isn't that reactors are inherently unsafe, but that building new
reactors without dramatically improving the underlying designs is inherently
inefficient. This means that nuclear energy, when all insurance and other
costs are included, does not present ANY savings over any other form of newly-
built power plant.

The main cost argument in favor of nuclear power is that existing thirty-year
old plants cost so little per year. This is an obvious diversionary trick. We
paid off the bonds ages ago. My house is also the cheapest on the street if
you don't include the mortgage.

The main argument in favor of nuclear power is that it provides reliable
baseload energy, which must only be shut down once every fourteen months or so
for refueling. This disaster is the proof that nuclear baseload energy is only
as reliable as its safety investments and contigency planning. Fukushima is
not the first plant to go silent forever.

The Fukushima disaster reminds me of what really happened to our I-35W bridge
locally. Over thirty years ago, someone built bridge with gussets too thin.
Over a decade ago, our state replaced its government bridge inspectors with a
for-profit firm that promised it would "save money" through efficiency savings
on labor. Seven years before the disaster, HNTB Corp. of Kansas City performed
a bridge analysis to try to win the contract from URS. They found the under-
sized gussets and demonstrated how the Minnesota Department of Transportation
could use "supplemental plates" and a new "oversize gusset" to strengthen the
bridge. HNTB never got the contract and improvements were never made. Later,
URS had the option to either re-inspect the bridge or to brace the bridge as
HNTB had suggested. They chose to re-inspect.

During court filings in the victims lawsuit, a URS bridge contractor stated in
an internal e-mail that they chose not to determine the stresses on all the
components in the bridge because "it was too much work."

The moral of the story is that saving money on engineering does not always
save money. I could cite numerous similar examples, like the infamous Boeing
787 project that I was involved in as a Cray Inc. contractor.

------
mncolinlee
First of all, recent studies show Chernobyl killed nearly one million people.
Don't trivialize Chernobyl!

<http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2010/2010-04-26-01.html>

Secondly, the real tragedies here are the high human health costs in cancer
and birth defects, the economic cost of losing twenty percent of Japan's power
indefinitely, and the outrageous modern day cost of building new reactors.
Given those high costs and the ten year construction times, it is unlikely
that these plants will be replaced by nuclear reactors even if we wiped
Japan's collective memory.

Many geeks are easily swayed by scientific talk that ignores social variables
and whole cost accounting. Remember Google's early motto, "Don't be evil!"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants)

------
blahblahblah
To those who insist that the Chernobyl accident was not a big deal, please
feel free to go build a home in Pripyat, live there for a few years, and let
us know how that works out for you.

------
david_p
I think it might be time for those who don't have a clue to stop talking about
this. People are and will be diing because of what is happening now. Calling
this "ok" and "safe" is borderline obscene.

Plus, as told in other comments, this article dates back to yesterday and
recent news are less and less reassuring (e.g. the containment vessel is now
broken in one reactor).

Thank you.

~~~
danparsonson
'People' have not died because of the reactor problems - there has been one
reported fatality due to a crane accident. And do you have a source for "the
containment vessel is now broken in one reactor"? A site linked elsewhere in
these comments (<http://mitnse.com/>) reports that the suppression chamber in
one reactor may be damaged but that's not 'the containment vessel'.

I agree with your desire to stop the FUD, but be careful you don't spread it
yourself.

~~~
astrange
There was a reported death in another prefecture, when someone taped all their
windows shut after hearing about it on the news. He forgot to turn off the gas
and suffocated.

------
InclinedPlane
The central problem is still ignorance, unfamiliarity, and fear. People are
more afraid of death and injury related to radiation exposure because it's not
something they're familiar with. That causes people to incorrectly weigh the
risks and tradeoffs involved.

------
Tichy
If it is all designed for that, and they had to give up the reactors anyway,
why don't they just wait and let the cores melt? Something doesn't add up in
this optimistic scenario, it seems to me.

~~~
serichsen
Cleaning up a molten core is quite a bit more complicated than dismantling a
functional reactor.

------
schintan
The worst case scenario of a nuclear reactor going wrong is much worse than
any other alternative, however slim the chances of that happening may be. This
fact is enough to be concerned about the safety of nuclear reactors.

~~~
VBprogrammer
Cars are the probabilistically one of the most risky form of transport. I
doubt that you are concerned about that fact when you get in to one.

~~~
whyenot
Risk of death isn't the only issue. In a car accident you don't have to worry
about cesium-137 rendering the area near the accident unusable by humans for
100 years or more.

~~~
dmm
Driving a car doesn't produce large, economical quantities of electricity
either, it's about managed risk and cost-benefit considerations.

------
kahawe
While the mainstream media is busy selling the global nuclear angel of death
scare to people, the techies are just as busy to convince everyone of the
other extreme: absolutely everything is fine!!!

While there are certainly quite a few engineering victories to be claimed
here, I would not call several explosions at a nuclear plant "nothing
happened". Also, the earthquake did damage at least reactor 4, there are two
approx. 8m² holes.

~~~
krschultz
Differentiate between the building around the nuclear reactor, and the
nucleaer reactor.

It's the difference between your house being blow away in a tornado while you
are in a tornado shelter, and your tornado shelter being blown away in a
tornado while you are in it. The first is bad news, but not a catastrophy. The
latter is a catstrophy.

