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Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now

142 points by lipowicztom 16y ago

_delirium 16y ago
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.
- tnorthcutt 16y ago
  Agreed. It is nice, however, to read coverage of the event that's devoid of sensationalism.
  - notahacker 16y ago
    When an editorial is so desperate to take a contrarian view to what everyone else is saying it starts claiming Chernobyl didn't affect the area much (linking as supposed evidence to an article whose second page is entirely devoted to observed negative effects of the radiation on the wild animal population two decades later...) it's ill-researched sensationalism itself. I realise The Register may have published the story before the relevant Japanese authorities abandoned their face-saving pretence that there weren't going to be any further problems, but that doesn't mean this kind of denialism masquerading as scientific counterargument deserves any more credence than the doomsday prophecies spreading elsewhere. Particularly when it's written by a layman masquerading as an authority whose last article was entitled "Balanced, neutral journalism is RUBBISH and that's a FACT" :-)
    - motters 16y ago
      It is a curious social phenomena that people often want to believe the best possible interpretation even when the evidence shows that things are not going well at all. In this case denialism is probably a strategy to avoid panic, which could have even greater negative consequences.
- BvS 16y ago
  I watched a documentary about Chernobyl yesterday (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiCXb1Nhd1o 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...
  - dublinclontarf 16y ago
    Chernobyl wasn't as bad as has been made out to be. In total around 50 deaths are directly attributable to radiation exposure(firemen and resue workers). 4'000 children contracted thyroid cancer as a result but with nearly a 99% recovery rate. In terms of cancers or birth defects there have been no increases over the average in effected areas. Seriously, study after study by various international organisations have come to the same conclusion. See these links for the reports. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326129 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326129 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326672 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326672
    - Tichy 16y ago
      And for years strawberries, mushrooms and deer were off limits on the food table. Sure maybe that pales compared to actual deaths, but it didn't help to endear nuclear power to my heart. Of course other power sources pollute the environment, too, but they can be improved as well, for example by installing better filters.
      - chokma 16y ago
        > And for years strawberries, mushrooms and deer were off limits on the food table. There are still areas in Germany were wild pigs have to be tested for radioactivity, as some of them are too fond of radioactive mushrooms. (lang=de: http://www.zeit.de/2010/46/U-Strahlende-Wildschweine?page=all http://www.zeit.de/2010/46/U-Strahlende-Wildschweine?page=al... )
- knuton 16y ago
  The National Geographic article, the author links to, states that The effects of the Chernobyl catastrophe are still being felt today—whole towns lie abandoned, and cancer rates in people living close to the affected areas are abnormally high then goes on to say that But it turns out that the radioactive cloud may have a silver lining. Recent studies suggest that the 19-mile (30-kilometer) "exclusion zone" set up around the reactor has turned into a wildlife haven. So basically, the accident at Chernobyl turned the area into a wildlife haven, because it was left to wild animals. If this were to mean that Chernobyl had a net positive effect, it would still contradict the author’s claim that there hasn’t been “much impact on the area around Chernobyl”.
  - marshray 16y ago
    The author must be one of those people who believes the Earth is better off without people in general.
- zalew 16y ago
  It wasn't that bad at all. In every discussion about Charnobyl I link this (translation from Polish) http://goo.gl/Djbag http://goo.gl/Djbag > So what Chernobyl has taught us? > That nuclear energy is the safest source of energy currently available. The Chernobyl disaster was the worst we can imagine a nuclear power plant. In addition, Chernobyl defied every rule of safety. This property was one big scandal. But that's not all. Following the outbreak of the reactor were released into the atmosphere huge amounts of radioactive substances, which reached even to Antarctica. And what? And nothing. Killed 31 people - less cluttered than in January hall in Chorzow. Dangerously contaminated was less than a square kilometer of land.That's it!
  - bluedanieru 16y ago
    It killed 31 people more or less immediately. Thousands of cancers are linked to it.
    - lukeschlather 16y ago
      How many cancers would you wager could be linked to emissions from a coal plant of comparable energy output? What if there was a tsunami and it blew up? What if we took the average number of fatalities per gigawatt-hour generated for coal and compared that to the worst-case ever scenario for nuclear, Chernobyl? Does anyone have these figures? I think we could all really use them to put this whole thing in proper perspective.
      - beefman 16y ago
        Coal mining killed more than 6,000 people in China in 2004 (a typical year). Early deaths due to air pollution from coal combustion are measured in the tens of thousands per year in the United States. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe0809178 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe0809178 Chernobyl was the worst possible nuclear accident. It caused between 50 and 5000 early deaths. As a major industrial accident, it was only average. It pales in comparison to the 1984 Bhopal disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster It took a long time to convince myself of this, but it really is quite obvious: because of the energy density difference of ~ 1,000,000 between fission and everything else, just about everything you'd care to measure about fission is going to be at least an order of magnitude better. That's because the amount of energy we're interested in is roughly constant, so the upper bound on destruction is roughly the same, but the material flows for fission are a million times smaller. Actually, appropriate use of fission should increase the demand for energy somewhat, and this would be a very good thing.
motters 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    > 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 16y ago
      Pretty much every other energy source is more dangerous than nuclear. http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...
      - paganel 16y ago
        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.
        jbri 16y ago
antirez 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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".
  - hartror 16y ago
    I consider myself a leftie greenie politically, and I am pro nuclear (with some small reservations). It pisses me off no end to see the same people campaigning for action on climate change campaigning against the one proven at scale technology that can help us out of the climate change mess.
    - billybob 16y ago
      I'm not an environmentalist, but as a technology person, I'm extremely skeptical of claims that nuclear power can be safe, however well-designed the reactors are today. It's hard enough to tell whether my web server will be able to handle next year's traffic. Nuclear power produces waste that is dangerous for thousands of years. How can anyone say, with a straight face, that they have a plan for that? All of us will be dead and every government in the world will have changed. Our current languages won't be spoken anymore. The location of the waste deposits will likely be forgotten. There is absolutely no way to predict what will happen to the waste, and it seems awfully selfish to foist that kind of problem on people in the future to solve our very short-term energy needs. If there is a form of nuclear power that completely expends its fuel to the point where its demonstrably not dangerous TODAY, or if we can launch the waste into the sun, I'm all for it. But lets not pretend we can control the damage from things that will persist for thousands of years after we're dead.
potatolicious 16y ago
... 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 16y ago
  "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?
  - StavrosK 16y ago
    Well, it's prudent to low-ball the dosages in safety guidelines.
  - potatolicious 16y ago
    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.
othello 16y ago
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.
bron 16y ago
Think the article is slightly old, with new events happening to the reactors every hour. I get my updates from here http://mitnse.com/ http://mitnse.com/ Lets just hope it does not get any worse.
kahawe 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.
david_p 16y ago
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 16y ago
  '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/ 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 16y ago
    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.
StavrosK 16y ago
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.
jeffreyrusso 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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.
deepGem 16y ago
Finally an article that puts the right perspective to the reports from world nuclear news and the MIT NSE blog. India is planning to go ahead with Thorium based reactors and some dickheads in the Indian media are writing reports that India's reactor plans will be put on hold owing to the latest accidents in Fukushima. Are journalists really this jobless in India. I don't mean to be a hater of my own countrymen but such juvenile reporting deserves nothing better than hatred.
Tichy 16y ago
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).
schintan 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      Driving a car doesn't produce large, economical quantities of electricity either, it's about managed risk and cost-benefit considerations.
  - OpieCunningham 16y ago
    Quantitatively, cars are extremely safe based on the number of drivers and the frequency with which they drive. If you put a billion people around Chernobyl during the accident the number of people dead would greatly outnumber the number dead from all car accidents throughout history. Put another way, on average driving 100 million miles is safer than flying 100 million miles (contrary to popular belief that flying is safer than driving). http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/planecrash/risk-01.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/planecrash/risk-01.html You can see the fallacy of "cars are dangerous" when you compare cars to motorcycles on that chart, because most people don't ride motorcycles so the probability of death for most people is lower than for a car. Fukushima is extraordinarily safe for everyone living in Iceland. It is far less safe for everyone living in Japan.
- 16y ago
9ec4c12949a4f3 16y ago
Before we jump up and down shouting the slogan of the mass un-informed... can we please qualify that standard nuclear reactors are our best option? http://gigaom.com/cleantech/terrapower-how-the-travelling-wave-nuclear-reactor-works/ http://gigaom.com/cleantech/terrapower-how-the-travelling-wa...
caf 16y ago
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.
InclinedPlane 16y ago
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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Cleaning up a molten core is quite a bit more complicated than dismantling a functional reactor.
mncolinlee 16y ago
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 16y ago
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 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_plants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_...
blahblahblah 16y ago
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.

142 points by lipowicztom 16y ago

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.

tnorthcutt 16y ago
Agreed. It is nice, however, to read coverage of the event that's devoid of sensationalism.
- notahacker 16y ago
  When an editorial is so desperate to take a contrarian view to what everyone else is saying it starts claiming Chernobyl didn't affect the area much (linking as supposed evidence to an article whose second page is entirely devoted to observed negative effects of the radiation on the wild animal population two decades later...) it's ill-researched sensationalism itself. I realise The Register may have published the story before the relevant Japanese authorities abandoned their face-saving pretence that there weren't going to be any further problems, but that doesn't mean this kind of denialism masquerading as scientific counterargument deserves any more credence than the doomsday prophecies spreading elsewhere. Particularly when it's written by a layman masquerading as an authority whose last article was entitled "Balanced, neutral journalism is RUBBISH and that's a FACT" :-)
  - motters 16y ago
    It is a curious social phenomena that people often want to believe the best possible interpretation even when the evidence shows that things are not going well at all. In this case denialism is probably a strategy to avoid panic, which could have even greater negative consequences.
BvS 16y ago
I watched a documentary about Chernobyl yesterday (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiCXb1Nhd1o 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...
- dublinclontarf 16y ago
  Chernobyl wasn't as bad as has been made out to be. In total around 50 deaths are directly attributable to radiation exposure(firemen and resue workers). 4'000 children contracted thyroid cancer as a result but with nearly a 99% recovery rate. In terms of cancers or birth defects there have been no increases over the average in effected areas. Seriously, study after study by various international organisations have come to the same conclusion. See these links for the reports. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326129 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326129 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326672 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326672
  - Tichy 16y ago
    And for years strawberries, mushrooms and deer were off limits on the food table. Sure maybe that pales compared to actual deaths, but it didn't help to endear nuclear power to my heart. Of course other power sources pollute the environment, too, but they can be improved as well, for example by installing better filters.
    - chokma 16y ago
      > And for years strawberries, mushrooms and deer were off limits on the food table. There are still areas in Germany were wild pigs have to be tested for radioactivity, as some of them are too fond of radioactive mushrooms. (lang=de: http://www.zeit.de/2010/46/U-Strahlende-Wildschweine?page=all http://www.zeit.de/2010/46/U-Strahlende-Wildschweine?page=al... )
knuton 16y ago
The National Geographic article, the author links to, states that The effects of the Chernobyl catastrophe are still being felt today—whole towns lie abandoned, and cancer rates in people living close to the affected areas are abnormally high then goes on to say that But it turns out that the radioactive cloud may have a silver lining. Recent studies suggest that the 19-mile (30-kilometer) "exclusion zone" set up around the reactor has turned into a wildlife haven. So basically, the accident at Chernobyl turned the area into a wildlife haven, because it was left to wild animals. If this were to mean that Chernobyl had a net positive effect, it would still contradict the author’s claim that there hasn’t been “much impact on the area around Chernobyl”.
- marshray 16y ago
  The author must be one of those people who believes the Earth is better off without people in general.
zalew 16y ago
It wasn't that bad at all. In every discussion about Charnobyl I link this (translation from Polish) http://goo.gl/Djbag http://goo.gl/Djbag > So what Chernobyl has taught us? > That nuclear energy is the safest source of energy currently available. The Chernobyl disaster was the worst we can imagine a nuclear power plant. In addition, Chernobyl defied every rule of safety. This property was one big scandal. But that's not all. Following the outbreak of the reactor were released into the atmosphere huge amounts of radioactive substances, which reached even to Antarctica. And what? And nothing. Killed 31 people - less cluttered than in January hall in Chorzow. Dangerously contaminated was less than a square kilometer of land.That's it!
- bluedanieru 16y ago
  It killed 31 people more or less immediately. Thousands of cancers are linked to it.
  - lukeschlather 16y ago
    How many cancers would you wager could be linked to emissions from a coal plant of comparable energy output? What if there was a tsunami and it blew up? What if we took the average number of fatalities per gigawatt-hour generated for coal and compared that to the worst-case ever scenario for nuclear, Chernobyl? Does anyone have these figures? I think we could all really use them to put this whole thing in proper perspective.
    - beefman 16y ago
      Coal mining killed more than 6,000 people in China in 2004 (a typical year). Early deaths due to air pollution from coal combustion are measured in the tens of thousands per year in the United States. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe0809178 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe0809178 Chernobyl was the worst possible nuclear accident. It caused between 50 and 5000 early deaths. As a major industrial accident, it was only average. It pales in comparison to the 1984 Bhopal disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster It took a long time to convince myself of this, but it really is quite obvious: because of the energy density difference of ~ 1,000,000 between fission and everything else, just about everything you'd care to measure about fission is going to be at least an order of magnitude better. That's because the amount of energy we're interested in is roughly constant, so the upper bound on destruction is roughly the same, but the material flows for fission are a million times smaller. Actually, appropriate use of fission should increase the demand for energy somewhat, and this would be a very good thing.

motters 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  > 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 16y ago
    Pretty much every other energy source is more dangerous than nuclear. http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...
    - paganel 16y ago
      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.
      - jbri 16y ago

antirez 16y ago

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 16y ago
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".
- hartror 16y ago
  I consider myself a leftie greenie politically, and I am pro nuclear (with some small reservations). It pisses me off no end to see the same people campaigning for action on climate change campaigning against the one proven at scale technology that can help us out of the climate change mess.
  - billybob 16y ago
    I'm not an environmentalist, but as a technology person, I'm extremely skeptical of claims that nuclear power can be safe, however well-designed the reactors are today. It's hard enough to tell whether my web server will be able to handle next year's traffic. Nuclear power produces waste that is dangerous for thousands of years. How can anyone say, with a straight face, that they have a plan for that? All of us will be dead and every government in the world will have changed. Our current languages won't be spoken anymore. The location of the waste deposits will likely be forgotten. There is absolutely no way to predict what will happen to the waste, and it seems awfully selfish to foist that kind of problem on people in the future to solve our very short-term energy needs. If there is a form of nuclear power that completely expends its fuel to the point where its demonstrably not dangerous TODAY, or if we can launch the waste into the sun, I'm all for it. But lets not pretend we can control the damage from things that will persist for thousands of years after we're dead.

potatolicious 16y ago

... 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 16y ago
"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?
- StavrosK 16y ago
  Well, it's prudent to low-ball the dosages in safety guidelines.
- potatolicious 16y ago
  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.

othello 16y ago

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.

bron 16y ago

Think the article is slightly old, with new events happening to the reactors every hour. I get my updates from here http://mitnse.com/ http://mitnse.com/ Lets just hope it does not get any worse.

kahawe 16y ago

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 16y ago
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.

david_p 16y ago

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 16y ago
'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/ 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 16y ago
  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.

StavrosK 16y ago

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.

jeffreyrusso 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.

deepGem 16y ago

Finally an article that puts the right perspective to the reports from world nuclear news and the MIT NSE blog. India is planning to go ahead with Thorium based reactors and some dickheads in the Indian media are writing reports that India's reactor plans will be put on hold owing to the latest accidents in Fukushima. Are journalists really this jobless in India. I don't mean to be a hater of my own countrymen but such juvenile reporting deserves nothing better than hatred.

Tichy 16y ago

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).

schintan 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    Driving a car doesn't produce large, economical quantities of electricity either, it's about managed risk and cost-benefit considerations.
- OpieCunningham 16y ago
  Quantitatively, cars are extremely safe based on the number of drivers and the frequency with which they drive. If you put a billion people around Chernobyl during the accident the number of people dead would greatly outnumber the number dead from all car accidents throughout history. Put another way, on average driving 100 million miles is safer than flying 100 million miles (contrary to popular belief that flying is safer than driving). http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/planecrash/risk-01.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/planecrash/risk-01.html You can see the fallacy of "cars are dangerous" when you compare cars to motorcycles on that chart, because most people don't ride motorcycles so the probability of death for most people is lower than for a car. Fukushima is extraordinarily safe for everyone living in Iceland. It is far less safe for everyone living in Japan.
16y ago

9ec4c12949a4f3 16y ago

Before we jump up and down shouting the slogan of the mass un-informed... can we please qualify that standard nuclear reactors are our best option? http://gigaom.com/cleantech/terrapower-how-the-travelling-wave-nuclear-reactor-works/ http://gigaom.com/cleantech/terrapower-how-the-travelling-wa...

caf 16y ago

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.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

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 16y ago

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 16y ago
Cleaning up a molten core is quite a bit more complicated than dismantling a functional reactor.

mncolinlee 16y ago

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 16y ago

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 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_plants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_...

blahblahblah 16y ago

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.