I read it. By and large it was "don't worry, this won't be another Chernobyl because the control rods went in and shut down the reaction and the cores don't contain flammable graphite".
So, yeah, it wasn't Chernobyl, it wasn't TMI, it was its own Fukushima Daiichi style of meltdown disaster better in some ways and worse in others.
But the many experts and analysts who went on record early saying this wasn't going to be a major disaster and that it was a "victory for nuclear engineering" were flatly proven wrong and it reveals the blind pro-nuclear bias in their thinking.
Agreed. It's striking how many intelligent, rationally-identified people can't see their shared blind spot even when the evidence is captured on the page. Anybody who was involved in the discussions would do well to go back and reread what you said and when you said it, and think about how it looks based on where we are now.
Can you say more about this? I went back and read what I wrote (not sure if I meet your criteria but I consider myself rational) and don't see the 'blind spot' you mention. (which I suppose would make sense given the definition so help me out here :-)
I said "No matter what happens at Fukushima Daiichi, even if all four of the reactors and their spent fuel rods turn into slag candles fused into the foundation of the plant, a rational person would say 'Gee it really is great that we don't have magnitude 9.0 earthquakes with accompanying tsunamis every year, if we did, and they can do this to a nuclear plant, it would be foolish to take those risks.'"
That was my comment about the difficulty in having rational discussions on emotional topics.
I noted "I dislike the medidiots who conflated a hydrogen explosion with a nuclear explosion. There is however one risk here that neither folks in the media, nor have I seen yet on HN, and that is the danger of old fuel meltdowns."
On the very controversial (in terms of coverage) blog posting about not being worried about the accident:
"2) Its important to understand that since the reactor is shut down, its only source of heat is the decay products from when it was running, minus the heat they pulled off while running on battery power. Further the engineering design target (one assumes they test to that target) is that if you integrate over all the heat you generate from all the byproducts from a reactor that was running at 'full' and now has all of its control rods inserted, is less than the heat you would need to add to melt the containment vessel (the flask) You won't be able to restart it but you won't have the core melt through the vessel either."
Which seems to have been the case. (comments about holes in the vessel that are plugged by graphite and can leak small amounts of fuel out the bottom of the reactor came later, but the original design continues to keep nearly all the fuel in the reactor's flask.)
"And as others have pointed out, if you get a "full meltdown" with the control rods fully inserted, the resulting uranium/boron alloy is not critical.
In short hand, once the rods are in, its game over, just a question of how hard the final result is to clean up.
If you keep it under the melting point of the core you can just pull the fuel and dispose of it in the normal way, if not you have to clean out the non-critical slag core."
Seems to be where we'll end up. removing the remains of the fuel rods from the bottom of the reactor where they ended up after the fuel pins lost their integrity.
I'll reiterate, bad accident, not a 'huge disaster.'
Could it get worse? I can imagine scenarios where it could. The waste fuel pond structure could crack and all the water could drain out of those ponds, that would lead to a lot of gamma rays for anyone line of sight to the rods and a possible criticality event if enough neutrons were generated. Will it get worse? At this point it seems the events that would be required are improbable at best. An asteroid or sufficiently large space rock hitting the plant would be sufficient, another 9.0 earthquake disrupting power again, a pipe rupture in the existing cooling recirculation system which sent coolant water outside the building.
On the other side, there are the people that hear the word 'nuclear' and think that there is an atom bomb in the middle of the plant with wires coming out of it, ready to explode if someone looks at it funny.
So what? Sloppy thinking on the other side doesn't excuse sloppy thinking on yours. Nuclear advocates should be talking about how nuclear can move forward in the light of the dangers that are more obvious than ever now, not playing a game of "yeah but you're dumb too" with the anti-nuke crowd.
My point was that sloppy thinking about the pro-nuclear crowd doesn't automatically make the anti-nuclear crowd correct (or 'right') because there is plenty of sloppy thinking to go around on the issue.
They said that based on the information that was available at the time, which was reasonably comforting, given the circumstances. Those that said that it was a major disaster were speculating wildly, mostly based on unofficial (and mostly wrong, even in hindsight) information. That they were right in hindsight doesn't change that.
Five GE MK I reactors lost all forms of cooling for a period of many hours to days. Some had fresh fuel and were operating right up until the time they lost power. They began emitting high levels of radiation and the outer buildings were exploding. Cesium and Iodine were detected externally.
Most of this basic information was very well established and confirmed by multiple sources. Those of us who knew this was a huge disaster unfolding were not "right by accident".
You wrote:
"Five GE MK I reactors lost all forms of cooling for a period of many hours to days."
And you missed the second part "After experiencing a 9.0 earthquake, which scrammed the reactors, and then a 47' tsunami which destroyed the cooling systems."
And you missed the third part "Nobody was killed."
Everytime we have a 9.0 earthquake and a 40' foot Tsunami I expect to have deal with a lot of damage and loss of life and general scrambling around because so many things are put under strain at the same time.
You could look at this and say "How often do we have 9.0 earthquakes?" and you could see that over the last 112 years we've had six. You might ask about how many of those occurred where we might build a nuclear plant (2) and how many were accompanied by a tsunami on the same coast (1). And you might conclude that this is a pretty rare occurence, probability suggests that it is one you, your children (if you have any), and their children (if they have any) will never see again.
You also said "Most of this basic information was very well established and confirmed by multiple sources. Those of us who knew this was a huge disaster unfolding were not 'right by accident'."
The place where I and perhaps other disagree with you is when you use the phrase 'huge disaster' here. I've not checked all the comments but most people said early on that this was no doubt the worst possible accident these plants could experience, there were folks who expressed confidence in the layers of systems which are designed to keep such accidents from becoming 'disasters.' What wasn't clearly articulated I guess was the definition of disaster.
There are many square kilometers around Chernobyl which were rendered uninhabitable from that accident. In Fukushima's case nowhere will be rendered un-inhabitable. While there are people evacuated currently, those evacuations are temporary. In all likelyhood no one will have died or suffered permanent injury from the Fukushima accident (again due to a variety of safety systems). That wasn't the case in Chernobyl.
So an accident which doesn't harm human life, doesn't damage any property not belonging to the power company, and doesn't do any lasting or even long lived damage to the environment, does not rise to the level of 'huge disaster' in my opinion.
And looking back at some of those comments they acknowledge that the lack of data from the plants directly left only speculation as an option and they covered the scenario that TEPCO seems to have observed after regaining access to reactor #1's control room. That the engineering of the plants defensive systems, in the absence of the cooling system, the backup system, and the backup backup system, contained the accident's results to the pressure vessel and the containment structure. Water used in the response has collected in the concrete basements under the reactors. The longer lived radioactive by products of the fission process have (as far as anyone can tell) remained contained within the structures designed to contain them. The reactors themselves are a total loss and can probably not be economically be recovered so will no doubt be dismantled.
It is the worst possible accident you could have at the plant. As with a luxury car's crumple zones and air bags and other safety gear, the plants systems designed to contain and mitigate the accident have done their jobs. Protecting lives and property.
From the moment the wave washed over the plant everyone knew it was a serious accident, the only question has ever been what were the long term ramifications of that accident.
My guess is that the plan will involve dismantling reactor #4, using the building and space as a processing center to process recovered material from reactors 1, 2, and 3 separating out the long lived waste from the low energy / short lived waste. The low level waste will become non-waste on its own by alpha/beta decay and the remains of the fuel will be stored with other high level waste that the plants generate.
This comment reminded me about the most overlooked detail of the whole shebang, in my opinion:
There was a 9.0 earthquake near a population center. There are 15037 people confirmed dead and 9487 people missing. Estimates of material loss range up to $300000000000. Also, a powerplant broke.
I don't understand why this isn't the dominant view of this disaster. A dam also broke and killed more people than Fukushima has to date. Nobody pays attention to such things because it doesn't have the novelty and sex appeal of a reactor meltdown.
The reactor was hit by a natural disaster of unprecedented proportions, it broke, it caused dangerous side effects. Congrats, welcome to the technological age. What happens when a tsunami or a 9.0 quake hits an LNG storage facility that creates a giant explosion that destroys a lot of real estate and kills a lot of people? Will people blame the technology of LNG or will they just blame the natural disaster?
That is not overlooked: it's just that everyone agrees on that, so there's no need to 'discuss' those facts. The consequences of it have been spoken of at lengt, in both moving and practical ways.
So an accident which doesn't harm human life, doesn't damage any property not belonging to the power company, and doesn't do any lasting or even long lived damage to the environment, does not rise to the level of 'huge disaster' in my opinion.
I disagree. I think the second-worse nuclear disaster in history is a huge disaster, especially since it looks like it will leave a large area uninhabitable.
Even by the INES standards, INES 7 (ie, Fukushima) is defined as a "Major Accident": Major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended countermeasures
I do understand your point of view here though.
It is the worst possible accident you could have at the plant.
It's not, and not by a long way. For example, there was no damage caused by any aftershocks, which was incredibly lucky.
People are told these reactors are safe in the event of a terrorist missile attack - it's pretty clear they are no where near that safe.
From the moment the wave washed over the plant everyone knew it was a serious accident, the only question has ever been what were the long term ramifications of that accident.
This is wrong. Read, for example Brave New Climate (one of the main envio-nuclear advocacy sites). Quote: There is no credible risk of a serious accident. 12 March (ie, 2 days after the Tsunami): http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/12/japan-nuclear-earthqua...
I thought I was done saying my piece but I looked up the references for some friends and they dovetail nicely into 'nl's comment here ...
I disagree. I think the second-worse nuclear disaster in history is a huge disaster, especially since it looks like it will leave a large area uninhabitable.
This isn't born out by the monitoring done by the US Dept of Energy [1] and others. There has been some Cesium-137 detected outside the plant, but its in trace amounts rather than large quantities.
If you look at the data collected by the DoE you will see two things, first that they haven't detected any deposits that have occurred after March 19th, and second that their highest reading was 91uSV/hr (9.1mRem) which corresponds to 218 mRem/day. which is high (relative to background radiation) and below what is considered a public health hazard of 1000mRm over 4 days. (slide #10 in the link). Third to get that dosage you would have to lay down in the dirt 24/7.
So no area outside the plant will be 'uninhabitable' [2] Some places will no doubt be targeted for local decontamination, the Cesium will decay on its own making each year after the accident less of an issue than the day before. Is it great? No.
It's not, and not by a long way. For example, there was no damage caused by any aftershocks, which was incredibly lucky.
Actually that wasn't luck, the plant is designed to handle violent earthquakes, it would be astonishing if there were an aftershock greater than the main shock. Anything signficantly less than an 8.0 was part of the design.[3]
People are told these reactors are safe in the event of a terrorist missile attack - it's pretty clear they are no where near that safe.
Think about that statement for a moment. The energy released ina 9.0 earthquake is the equivalent to 475 million tons of TNT, or 23,000 bombs the size of the one that hit Nagasaki. [4] If North Korea dropped a nuclear bomb into the plant it would clearly destroy it, but there isn't a terrorist organization on the planet that has the capability of deploying that much energy to the plant.
I understand that nuclear power can be a scary thing to some people. But if you take the time to educate yourself on the risks and the engineering which goes into keeping those risks from turning into accidents. It might be possible to get past the fear factor and see them in a more balanced light of power delivered over time vs their risk factors.
>>It's not, and not by a long way. For example, there was no damage caused by any aftershocks, which was incredibly lucky.
Actually that wasn't luck, the plant is designed to handle violent earthquakes, it would be astonishing if there were an aftershock greater than the main shock. Anything signficantly less than an 8.0 was part of the design.
And yet the reactor vessel was breached. Given that it was already breached, I believe a significant aftershock (not of 8 magnitude, but maybe a 6.5-7) would have caused additional damage and/or spread contamination worse than it was.
>>People are told these reactors are safe in the event of a terrorist missile attack - it's pretty clear they are no where near that safe.
Think about that statement for a moment. The energy released ina 9.0 earthquake is the equivalent to 475 million tons of TNT, or 23,000 bombs the size of the one that hit Nagasaki. [4] If North Korea dropped a nuclear bomb into the plant it would clearly destroy it, but there isn't a terrorist organization on the planet that has the capability of deploying that much energy to the plant.
You and I both know comparing the "energy released by the earthquake" with something like a deliberately positioned shaped charge on the reactor vessel is silly. A properly designed shaped charge would be almost infinity smaller, and yet almost sure to cause a breach - eg: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/m15...
It's pretty clear that a "sensible" terrorist organization wouldn't need anything like a nuclear bomb to cause a significant incident, and probably a leak too. It's always been claimed (since Chernobyl anyway) that the reactors have defenses in depth and multiple containment layers. It turns out that this is misleading at best, or a lie at worst, because the outer containment vessels are - in some cases - only designed to contain a pressure leak. Sometimes (eg this case) they are designed to blow out if the pressure is too much!
Good post but I think you're probably wasting your time. If it makes you feel any better the Japanese public's reaction for the moment is basically 'Hmmm... we'll have to temporarily put off building a few of the reactors we had planned until we can better verify their safety.'
So, yeah, it wasn't Chernobyl, it wasn't TMI, it was its own Fukushima Daiichi style of meltdown disaster better in some ways and worse in others.
But the many experts and analysts who went on record early saying this wasn't going to be a major disaster and that it was a "victory for nuclear engineering" were flatly proven wrong and it reveals the blind pro-nuclear bias in their thinking.