Recent Greenpeace article re Fukushima:
The environmental impacts are already becoming apparent, with studies showing:
- High radiation concentrations in new leaves, and at least in the case of cedar, in pollen;
- apparent increases in growth mutations of fir trees with rising radiation levels;
- heritable mutations in pale blue grass butterfly populations and DNA-damaged worms in highly contaminated areas, as well as apparent reduced fertility in barn swallows;
- decreases in the abundance of 57 bird species with higher radiation levels over a four year study; and
- high levels of caesium contamination in commercially important freshwater fish; and radiological contamination of one of the most important ecosystems – coastal estuaries.
Coming out of an ecology program? And observing the Chernobyl data?
None of that is remotely as damaging to the natural environment as continued human habitation of the area that has been evacuated. Cry not for the fishes and birds, for they are better off with slight genetic damage than they are with us.
The threshold at which people become uncomfortable about radiation is several orders of magnitude lower than the threshold at which it causes population decline in wild populations, and people cause declines and extirpations in wild populations all the time.
It's a rather dubious claim that "fishes and birds are better off" in the deserted areas around the reactor. The studies mentioned by Greenpeace talk about morphological defects, heritable mutations, decreased fertility and decreasing numbers. Animals have a level of consciousness too. At some level they're going to be aware of being unwell. Are you going to point to mutated fir trees and DNA-damaged butterflies and say they're better off now because they no longer have to suffer the presence of human beings?
Humans will evacuate an area on the basis of enough radiological threat that one in a hundred gets an additional tumor sometime in middle age, or perhaps if one in ten neonates in the same area are born with some visible deformation.
Wild animals need a threat thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of times higher to actually threaten their ability to sustain themselves. All they need to keep the population up is replacement-level fertility on average, and most animals are physically capable of many, many times that level.
In this higher dose scenario lifespan is reduced so much that it starts to impinge on their reproductive capabilities, which are usually food/habitat limited by human influence (or previously to humans, by predators and disease as well).
Humans made a tradeoff towards k-selection: in order to support these huge skulls & brains, we made childbearing an epic process that takes a decade, and made childbirth quite dangerous. For something like heavily r-selected fish, two parents might produce ten thousand eggs, and only two of them need to survive to breed to sustain the population. Remove all the other things that kill this example fish, and each generation is five thousand times the size of the previous generation. Most mammals are somewhere between fish and humans.
Free up the habitat and let them reproduce ad libitum, and over all but the worst-hit areas, wild animal populations will grow rapidly because the radiation is less of a population stressor than the people, their cars, their pavement, their agriculture, and their fishing nets were.
This was not an expected result. The efficacy of Chernobyl as a wildlife preserve was kind of a wake-up call for ecologists about how deep into the anthropocene epoch we actually are.
So a rational ecology program should advocate irradiating wide swathes of land?
Of course the people displaced from the area didn't disappear, they're affecting wildlife somewhere else. Seems like mostly zero sum in that specific regard.
"Should" is a word I'm uncomfortable with. Define your goals, and I can provide an answer.
If you want to re-establish the wild ecology of ~4000 years ago? You need to get the people out. Modern human habitation & agriculture claims a right to every last square meter of land, and even the supposedly reserved natural areas are often cut & planted as if they were pseudo- lumber factories.
If this is your goal, irradiating wide swathes of land is a good start; There are few simpler or more reliable mechanisms to force sustained evacuation and shunning of an area for the centuries or millennia necessary to re-establish, for example, old-growth forest. Some legal regime might buy you a few decades, but don't kid yourself about the longevity and commitment of a particular political system.
The changes in species composition associated with the climate, then with megafauna, and later with the Columbian exchange & globalization, are going to pose some durable problems if you want it to look exactly the same, but you can form a complex ecology with most of the same niches filled with at least similar creatures.
Irradiation works, but it would be a bit silly to advocate it. If you're going to force people to move, you might as well just pass a law reserving the area as a park and prohibiting people from living there. Of course, people who want to live there will oppose you, but they'll oppose your irradiation plan too. Irradiation works here because it was accidental. Nobody accidentally passes a law to reserve a bunch of inhabited land as a park.
There's a major question in ecology of how we feel about our "anthropocentric" civilization. For many environmentally conscious thinkers it seems like a world without humans would be preferable.
A world without humans would be necessary to fulfill their goals of the environment being unmolested by humans. We cannot live in perfect harmony. That's not a thing.
At best, we can establish areas that look roughly like they used to look before humans, but this is no less deliberate design than the styrofoam rocks at the zoo, it's just on a different scale. Many such areas are, in fact, better seen as zoos, because of their small size or limited variety. Most of the productive arable land is predictably already being used for something by somebody.
Personally, I'm a humanist. The worst things environmental devastation can do to us are disrupt some of our services, like agricultural collapses; After that environmentalism is mostly a romantic or novelty-based aesthetic, albeit an attractive one. Pit it against human lives and human profit, and groups of humans will nearly always make the same decision.
As much as i abhor commenting online do bear with me.
You say that "We cannot live in perfect harmony". That's not a thing", however what is this in comparison to. Surely this would be comparative to the rest of the eco-system. Animals make changes, they create habitats and dam rivers, however as it is more rudimentary (sticks and holes in earth) we dont consider it a change to the enviroment.
Creating our homes in a more ecological and recycleable way would be in perfect harmony. The arguement is whether we should go further and drastically change the enviroment, do we have the right as the dominant species on the planet to abuse its resources for ourselves (as seen in the attached xkcd whose figures roughly show the populations of mammals who we have artifically inflated to such proportions for our dietray wants).
So if we changed our architechture and agriculture then yes we could live in perfect sync and harmony, it's just that we wont.
There is no such thing as "harmony" in nature. Species come and go, some destroy their own habit, others drive their competitors to extinction. We do need to be careful about how we use natural resources and that we don't change our environment in a way that is detrimental to us. But understand that change is the status quo for nature, that's especially easy to miss when it happens on timescales longer than a human life, but happen it does.
A Greenpeace report is simply a propaganda piece. For an accurate appraisal, we'd need systematic reviews of the various areas of study in this report, published in a reputable journal. And comparing this incident to Chernobyl is inane.
Absolutely. I would even suspect intent to deceive, as is so common with anti-nuclear propaganda. People have not been harmed to an alarming extent by this event, as they certainly were with Chernobyl. The reactor is a completely different passive-safe design. In all probability long-term damage will be limited to some hard-to-attribute secondary effects (changes to the land use patterns in the region will confound statistical analysis), and of course, massive psychological devastation due to all the panic and misinformation. Sadly this is by far the greatest threat posed by modern nuclear power (or rather the cultural context in which it is placed).
If the Japanese government would legally allow me to live next to the reactor I would take them up on it tomorrow.
I'm volunteering to live next to the reactor, because I think the risk of doing so is negligible. I am legally prohibited from doing so, and these people were legally prohibited from staying. If there is in fact no ongoing physical health risk as I am claiming, the harm caused to them is part of the psychological damage from (the cultural context around) nuclear power that I mentioned. It doesn't lessen what these people have been through of course.
Here's what the press release says concerning Chernobyl:
> The Fukushima disaster is the single largest release of radioactivity into the ocean and one of only two Level 7 nuclear disasters in world history - the other being Chernobyl.
So, can you explain what is so wrong or inane about this statement? I think it's rather informative and to the point, tbh.
The IAEA maintains the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, under which a level 7 incident is one that requires the implementation of countermeasures to protect the public[1]. The details of those countermeasures and the scope of the accident is not significant - all that matters is that _some_ plan to counteract the effects of radiation was undertaken. The IAEA even cautions against using the scale as a means of comparison between facilities and incidents. In this context, the Chernobyl incident involved the release of 10x the radiation [2]. The effects on human and animal health also appear to be orders of magnitude different. So really, grouping the two incidents together is counterproductive. Doing so, to me, reflects a misunderstanding of the INES - one that I suspect is deliberate on Greenpeace's part.
I guess many people like myself disagree with the use of this seemingly arbitrary category. Maybe it is based on an estimate of total long-term and predicted impact on the immediate environment compared to some threshold? And what probability does it use for future containment leakage?
As far as I can tell, so far the "Level 7" category is useful mainly to cite in this very argument. Surely we can do better, are there at least some individual score factors?
As I mentioned in a sibling comment, the INES just specifies that the accident required countermeasures to ensure public safety. That's pretty terrible; agreed.
Thanks for finding this documentation. And yeah, the grouping tells us how likely different authorities were to use countermeasures as much as anything.
We do build mock facilities and we have recently started working on the Fukushima Daiichi inspections, and there is only so much I can actually say but I'll share what I can. I'll explain what caused the failure in this part and then I'll move onto the fun stuff in the next post (robots!).
In the past, the mock facilities we have made in the past were a quarter of a full scale reactor, rather than a quarter scale reactor, if that makes any sense at all.
Anyway back to Japan. I'm assuming people have a basic understanding of how fission reactors work (Boiling Water Reactors if you are interested in doing further reading).
To break the situation down, the cooling failed (believe it or not, diesel generators don't work too well on water!) on reactors 1, 2 and 3, causing a complete meltdown of the fuel rods. When cooling failed, all of the cooling water was turned into steam, which in turn reacted with the released radioactive isotopes creating hydrogen. I'm assuming people know mixing hydrogen with oxygen is basically a recipe for an explosion, and that is important for what happened next. They tried to vent the gases out to the atmosphere to prevent the pressure vessel from exploding, but the hydrogen went the wrong way and caused reactors 1 through to 3 to explode in various places. I can't remember correctly (I think its reactor 3?) but the explosion happened within the pressure vessel which is why there was a large contamination breach. Because of this complete loss of control of the reactors, and the meltdown currently happening, they flooded the whole system with sea water and pumped as much out into storage as they can, but they lose a lot of it out to the sea, hence the Americans whining about the radiation in the Pacific. Now, the reactors are stable (ish) and they are continuing to pump water in to stop them going critical again.
I'll move onto the robots when I get home in part two, but right now I need to go have an argument with a lawn mower as my hair is getting unruly. The video linked below explains more about the actual failure of the reactor:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMaEjEWL6PU
I should probably also mention there's 6 reactors on site, 4, 5 and 6 were relatively unharmed by the tsunami and 5 and 6 could actually be turned back on. However for obvious reasons they have been decommissioned and wont be turned on ever again.
Are there real reasons not to turn them back on once the cleanup is complete? Or is it just the matter of politics/popular perception?
AFAIK, fukushima was actually a very small "disaster", with negligigle human life loss (if I recall correctly, no life loss, except due to the evacuation panic)
There were some design flaws that were exposed with this incident.
Would you, in conscience, turn back on a series of nuclear reactors that had their emergency backup generators located in an area that can easily be flooded?
There are a lot of other human/social aspects involved as well.
It's better to apply the lessons learned from Fukushima to a safer type of reactor, built better, designed safer, and operated with a different set of procedures and by a different company (not TEPCO, for example).
The quarter rig (imagine cutting a 90 degree cross section out of the reactor and plonking it into a rig hall) we made was for a remote solution we did for EDF for some of the nuclear fleet in the UK. As much as it would have been fun to make a full size to scale rig, it would have cost a small dortune and we are a business afterall and profit is our end goal. So we only made enough of it to be able to train the operators to deploy the kit on site.
In terms of Fukushima, the manipulator we are developing will eventually have a testing rig built for it, however we have only just been involved on the project in the last month and as such haven't reached a stage where we need to build the rig yet. With the Japanese government funding though I imagine it will be a similar job with a scale rig.
We probably aren't going to use a ROV for our solution as it doesn't suit and they're a pain in the arse quite frankly.
To start, I'll address the issue with the 'wires' failing. An American company built a ROV that was heavily shielded and was driven via an umbilical. Wireless is hard to use and autonomy is too hard to use as the reactor conditions are unknown. The ROV was a good design and could survive the radiation for a reasonable amount of time, however for whatever reason they used PVC wire sheathes that break down under heavy radiation, and as a result the wires touched and shorted the electronics out, rendering the ROV useless and 'dead'.
In terms of why it takes so long and why we can't use an off the shelf version, basically radiation is a bitch. At the base of the reactor vessel, just above the corium, the radiation output is estimated to be around 3000 microsieverts per hour, that translates roughly to a human life expectancy of around 6 seconds, give or take. This amount of radiation causes electronics to fail (transistors commonly), and materials to break down. The breaking down of materials caused the American ROV to die, and another example would be that it can causes greases to harden, which stops motors working.
Reactors aren't big spacious areas either, so it's not like we can just deploy a lead (lead weighs a metric shit'tonne) shielded tank to have a look, it's just too big and cumbersome. We decided against using a ROV as it had to be 30kg or less, which is absolutely nothing once you bring in drilling packages and the likes.
Also quite often you will be deploying through a hole between the size of your fist up to just smaller than the diameter of your head, so that restricts you hugely as well.
You also have material compatability. If you get something stuck you have to be sure that it won't react and cause the reactor to become critical again, which could happen in one of the reactors (can't go into more detail sorry).
One last major consideration as too why it takes so long to build and test a ROV to suit. The reactors are under immense thermal stress, and metal likes to bend and warp when it's heating/cooling. You have to build your solution around the worst case scenario. An example would be we went into a boiler tube trying to plug a 1 inch hole from 18m above it using a manipulator arm. That's already hard on its own, but then we discovered the originally 7mm gap we were aiming for was actually now as small as 3.5mm. Trying to develop ROVs and remote solutions is really not easy, the best way I can put it is that this line of work is an art, not a science. That's why it will probably take the best part of a century I reckon to fix this problem.
The alternative and what is most commonly used for control, in the nuclear industry, is a very long 'umbilical' (wire with loads of cores). A lot of nuclear providers are against people using wireless as if you lose connectivity and it gets stuck you are in trouble.
Also we are going to use a manipulator arm more than likely. Manipulator arms are cheaper and more widely used in our industry.
Your idea would be perfect if we were just doing an inspection, however we have other work we will need to do down there which will require various packages so it has to be somewhat bulkier.
If it's flooded, just use a commercial underwater ROV. The oil and gas industry has been using them for decades.
You don't need a hundred-tonne robot to find a fuel rod, so they can at least get that part sorted. Once they know where they are, build something super rugged (I'm thinking basically a remote controlled shielded fork lift) to do the lifting.
You seem to be assuming that it's entirely flooded. Seems probable that there are areas that are partially flooded, entirely flooded, or flooded and filled with wreckage. ie, an open water ROV may not be at all appropriate.
Certainly if the answer was actually as simple as "buy this off the shelf thing" then all the smart people over there would've figured that out at some point in the last 3 years.
Part of the problem is that the R&D has not been done. Under the Myth of Nuclear Safety, Japan has absolutely neglected to do research into designing and building robots that can handle high levels of radiation (if people are working on robots that can handle hazardous environments inside a reactor, that might inadvertently communicate the idea that nuclear power is dangerous).
Of course we don't. If we did, we would have given them to Japan. Also, nuclear power advocates in the US would, imo, really not like Fukushima to be a decades long demonstration of the risks of nuclear power. Which it is going to be.
There is no Myth of Nuclear Safety, all energy production has known pro's and con's and approaches are made to mitigate these risk factors. Nuclear energy's risk factors are the easiest to swallow for the waste output.
The Fukushima reactor was built to withstand a huge amount of risk factors, they just all happened at the same time. The risk mitigation concept would be to say that you need to design a house to withstand a 10,000 year storm.
I think you're oversimplifying it. The temperatures are unpredictable, with molten nuclear fuel possibly at 2000 degrees celcius (it might not be there because it's since cooled down, maybe there are temperature probes that can tell you what the current situation is)
There are gases circulating around, free hydrogen gas, volatile gases that could explode if exposed to a spark - so the robot has to be built to not spark or have inert mechanisms for turning, moving, etc.
Parts are submerged, so this robot needs to be water tight to irradiated water and have some mechanism of moving when submerged (buoyancy control).
Radiation is the highest danger to electronics, it's said that all the wires degrade, all the parts of the robot steadily break down when trying to get inside. The chips and control circuitry needs to be radiation hardened, and I bet the "wires" the article refers to means servo control wires - which needs to be linked to servos that are on the limbs - so it's harder to shield. (whereas control chips, the cpu, etc can be shielded by lead plates in a central location)
The treated water should probably be pumped onto tanker ships and taken to the middle of the ocean for release. It would be so massively diluted as to be harmless, and remove any chance for local contamination. It would be far safer than leaving it in tanks on-site, which are subject to leaks, intentional damage, etc.
The treated water isn't the problem, it's all of the water that has yet to be treated. Currently they are accumulating more water in tanks then they are treating it, which is a difficult process. Interestingly some of the cutting edge treatment techniques are being pioneered at the Hanford Nuclear site in Washington State, USA. I went on a tour there and talked to one of the scientists working at the ground water cleanup facilities and he said they have sent a lot of scientists over to Japan to help with Fukushima. Though he mentioned off hand that Tepco has not been as cooperative as they would have hoped.
I thought one of the lessons of Hanford groundwater cleanup was that it's an impossible task, at least with current methods---the returns of processing the water over and over diminish to nothing long before the task is done. (Sorry I have no source on this.)
In all seriousness, radiation shielding (necessary thickness of metal, etc) is quite well understood. It's probably not even an especially hazardous cargo compared to what most tankers haul.
With adequate precautions (to name a few examples - shielding, crew dosimeters, crew rotation if more than one trip needed), I imagine it'd be a pretty safe cargo to take. I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually safer than hauling something like oil.
Depends on what your dealing with. Many schools are built using cement that's radioactive enough to be detectable. So, we would call it radioactive waste if it was used near a reactor and not contaminated. But, if it was part of a school and exactly as radioactive then no problem.
I can't find the school example, but this stuff is a hodge podge of different rules. The basic problem is:
Depending on who "owns" the waste, its handling and disposal is regulated differently. " In 10 C.F.R. § 20.2002, the NRC reserves the right to grant a free release of radioactive waste. The overall activity of such a disposal cannot exceed 1 mrem/yr and the NRC regards requests on a case-by-case basis. Low-level waste passing such strict regulations is then disposed of in a landfill with other garbage. Items allowed to be diposed of in this way are: glow-in-the-dark watches (radium) and smoke detectors (americium) among other things."
"Low-level waste (LLW) is nuclear waste that does not fit into the categorical definitions for intermediate-level waste (ILW), high-level waste (HLW), spent nuclear fuel (SNF), transuranic waste (TRU), or certain byproduct materials known as 11e(2) wastes, such as uranium mill tailings. In essence, it is a definition by exclusion, and LLW is that category of radioactive wastes that do not fit into the other categories. "
Of note, there is no exclusion for naturally occurring radioactivity.
Stunningly too expensive, according to the article they have "nearly million tonnes of radioactive water". That's a billion kilograms. Even at a pretty phenomenal $15,000 per kg to launch into space that would run an impressive $15 trillion.
And that really only puts it in low earth orbit, where it would fall back down again after a few months/years, maybe decades if you get it high enough.
I used to live here! Not in Fukushima exactly but in Aizu, and I've traveled to Fukushima City. The closest I've been to the reactor is probably 40 miles away from the train in Koriyama.
Unclear. In terms of deaths the number caused by Fukushima is comparable to an equivalent coal plant[1] and we still use coal plants for some reason so the consensus seems to be that the electricity is worth the cost. I'd guess that the Fukushima cleanup and containment costs are going to be small compared to the human costs. As to the cost of the evacuation, that might very well be enough to zero out the economic value.
It's interesting that, in Japan's political environment, the local fishing industry has enough clout to veto TEPCO's proposal to allow radioactive water to leak into the ocean near the site.
It's also interesting that the fishing industry, which is usually (correctly) assigned blame for depleting fish stocks is, in this case, protecting fish habitat.
They deplete fishing stocks by fishing. They don't want people worried that their fish are contaminated, and they don't want their stock depleted by a different cause than fishing.
I guess nuclear contamination is in a different category than say, pollution from coal burning power plants, which add a lot of mercury to the environment which then ends up in high level ocean predators like tuna. The fishing industry doesn't seem to have the ability to stop that kind of pollution.
Maybe it's because many sea food consumers people casually ignore mercury levels in fish they eat. Or maybe it's because the Japanese seafood supply chain is well enough managed and regulated that people really know where a piece of fish in a market actually came from. Perhaps people carry geiger counters into the supermarkets there. I don't know.
The robot problem is simply a lack of imagination. Just set up a long drill, like an oil rig, aimed sideways into the reactor. Drill six inch hole with cutting torch drill head, then insert equally long periscope. No rad hard electronics needed.
- High radiation concentrations in new leaves, and at least in the case of cedar, in pollen;
- apparent increases in growth mutations of fir trees with rising radiation levels;
- heritable mutations in pale blue grass butterfly populations and DNA-damaged worms in highly contaminated areas, as well as apparent reduced fertility in barn swallows;
- decreases in the abundance of 57 bird species with higher radiation levels over a four year study; and
- high levels of caesium contamination in commercially important freshwater fish; and radiological contamination of one of the most important ecosystems – coastal estuaries.
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/press/releases/20...