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Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)
- Zigurd 12y agoIs nuclear energy above or below break-even, as a whole? Or has the cost of the mess created by nuclear industry accidents and other indirect costs swamped the profits?
- mrschwabe 12y agoA disturbing thought is that Fukishima is an even more dire situation. The Pacific ocean will never be the same. Which of the 507 other plants will be the next go into meltdown? I wonder how many of these disasters the planet can handle before it becomes inhabitable to all life.
- ams6110 12y agoThe planet is a big place.
- cjslep 12y agoThe United States of America has detonated over 1,000 nuclear weapons singlehandedly. I imagine it would take much more than 507 commercial nuclear powerplants to render the entire Earth inhospitable.
- mrschwabe 12y agoThat's like comparing a lit-match to a gas pipeline fire. Detonations dissipate quickly - the meltdowns are a constant flood of radioactive particles into our atmosphere. Only the fire doesn't end - because we don't have the technology to stop it, and perhaps will not ever. So no, I don't agree - likely the number is much less than 507 and uncomfortably close to the number of plants already in disaster-mode.
- NamTaf 12y agoHang on, do you think the fissible material from a bomb just vanishes? It is just hurled across a bigger area due to the fact that a bomb explodes. Exactly what level of physics education do you have?
- mrschwabe 12y agoI have no physics education, I'm using common sense. They don't design bombs like they do core reactors. Bombs are intended to explode immediately, reactors are intended to help produce power for a very long time. But hey, I'm listening - show me a chart that compares the total amount of ionizing radiation released into the atmosphere by bombs dropped on Nagasaki & Hiroshima versus the amount produced already by the Fukishima site.
- NamTaf 12y agoPlease don't use 'common sense' and talk about how they design bombs and core reactors when you have no physics education. But hey, I'll humour you with as crude comparison as I can string together in a few minutes. This link [1] roughly compares Chernobyl to a Fat Man equivalent, which had a 21kT yield, or 0.021 MT. That's 0.003% of the total yield of all the atomic tests mankind has conducted (545MT total [2]). So by a first cut of the numbers, we've set of 26,000 Fat Man equivalents. Even considering that Caesium ratio of 890:1 between Chernobyl to Fat Man, that's over 29 Chernobyls worth of the stuff flung out. Pick any of the other ratios and it looks worse for your argument. Oh, and on the note of you freaking out about the amount of radiation that Fukishima is dumping into the Pacific and how it's screwing up all the ocean life, remember that about 10% of all of those explosions were detonated into the ocean half-way between the US and Japan. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Chernobyl_and_other_radioactivity_releases#Chernobyl_compared_with_an_atomic_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Chernobyl_and_ot... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests#Totals_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests#...
- mrschwabe 12y ago
- nitrogen 12y agoAre you aware that our whole planet is warmed by the decay of thorium and other heavy elements below the crust? Geothermal energy is nuclear energy. To respond to your question, Earth would get over it, and humanity would survive even 507 meltdowns. Fukushima was an exceptional case on a 40-year-old design, so we wouldn't have 507 Fukishimas (keep in mind how many people died from the giant tsunami that caused the Fukushima meltdown).
- mrschwabe 12y agoI'm no expert, but I suspect there's a big difference between the planet's naturally occurring radiation and the high volume of unstable particles spewing out from the Fukishima meltdown everyday.
- icelancer 12y agoYeah. The planet's naturally occurring radiation is a hell of a lot stronger and more dangerous.
- iSnow 12y agoYeah and a hell of a lot better shielded. Come on, no need to pull the discussion to a moron's level.
- vidarh 12y agoI suggest you get a geiger counter and walk around with it for a while. Not nearly all of the naturally occurring radiation is occuring in some well shielded location deep underground.
- plikan13 12y agoWhat people never seem to understand is that the proximity of the source matters. Compare a tiny amount of radiation coming from a long distance (say the core of the earth) and a tiny amount of radiation coming from speck of decaying radioactive material released by Fukushima that is floating around in the air of your office room. You measure the radiation in the room and sure enough the radiation is very weak. You conclude "See? Fukushima is no worse than natural radiation". Now what happens if you're so unfortunate to inhale that speck of material and it settles in your lungs? Then the picture changes completely because some cells of your lungs will now be very close to the source of radiation and these cells -- and always the same cells -- will be subjected to a long period of intense radiation.
- seccess 12y ago"inhabitable - suitable to live in; habitable." [0] [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=inhabitable&oq=inhabitable&aqs=chrome..69i57.2437j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=inhabitable&oq=inhabitable&a...
- mrschwabe 12y agoGood catch, "un-inhabitable" was the term I was looking for, thanks :)
- ori_b 12y agoThe pacific ocean isn't really noticing any effects. Water is great at stopping radiation. In fact, open pool reactors like this one (http://www.ansto.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0009/45495/OPAL_pool_ALT_1700.jpg http://www.ansto.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0009/45495/OPAL_...) are serviced by scuba divers. The increase in radiation in the pacific is lost in the noise when compared to naturally occurring background radiation. There are some areas directly around Fukushima where that is not the case, and it is a big mess, but I would happily eat fish from the vast majority of the pacific. A far bigger threat to our ocean is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
- sebastianavina 12y agothey say the same about almost any waste... but at the end the oceans are clogged with waste.
- ori_b 12y agoThe Fukushima accident was a rare event, dumped a small amount of waste compared to ongoing industrial operations, and the most worrying part of the waste that it dumped decays on the timescale of decades, and not millenia. I don't have stats about what gets directly into the oceans, but when we mine gold, copper, and other ores, we create entire ponds called "tailings ponds" full of arsenic, cyanide, mercury, and all sorts of other nasty substances. These ponds leak into the environment on a regular basis. Short of seeping into the environment, many of these substances NEVER GO AWAY. THIS IS A HUGE PROBLEM. Nuclear waste comes in small quantities, in neat, easy to handle packages, and the most dangerous elements in it will decay relatively quickly. Over the entire lifetime of the nuclear industry, less than 80,000 tons of radioactive waste have been produced. Meanwhile, one mine alone produced 237,000 tons of arsenic trioxide over its lifetime. This substance is just sitting in the abandoned mine now. The most worrying part of the nuclear waste story, to me, is that NIMBYism and fear has blocked attempts to produce permanent, safe facilities for permanent sequestration, so it's stored almost as poorly as our super toxic tailings. At least there's less of it, and efforts are made to clean it up when it gets into the environment.
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- muuh-gnu 12y agoPlease spread your religious propaganda elsewhere. HN is a place to discuss, not to proselytize. Thanks.
- vidarh 12y agoThe radioactivity released by coal plants still dwarf the sum output of all recorded nuclear incidents many times over.
- happyscrappy 12y agoThis makes Germany's switching from nuclear to coal quite ironic.
- vidarh 12y agoWell, I think it's stupid of them, though they're of course "not" switching to coal. They're switching off their nuclear, and just haven't been able to replace the coal yet. But it's not a given that their rollout of alternatives will be better/safer than nuclear either.
- cjslep 12y agoI think this article is very well-written overall. However, there are still a point that could use clarification. > During a routine test on April 26, 1986, reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant experienced a power surge that triggered an emergency shutdown. It did not work. Calling the incident a routine test greatly mischaracterizes what they were doing. This wasn't some sort of daily safety checklist test nor a safety margin test, this was a full-blown experiment. Yes, like a science lab experiment, but with a fully fueled commercial RBMK reactor. This is important because the author falsely makes routine nuclear powerplant operation seem unsafe. To properly characterize the experiment on fair grounds it is nice to mention that the experiment they wanted to test is started by carrying out a simulated emergency shutdown. This is huge. You don't call an emergency shutdown of a gigantic plutonium-making-machine "routine" (Note: RBMKs have a thermal power output on the high side). However, the bigger problem was that the authorities running this experiment treated it exactly the same way the author did. If the authorities did care, they would have properly trained the night shift personnel with the experiment (or delayed the experiment altogether). The fact that the experiment continued with the night shift that was poorly trained for the experiment operations points to a "this is routine and should not be a big deal" vibe of whoever was in charge. I dislike how nowadays others (such as the the author) looking into the reactor accident keep espousing this giant red flag.
- erglkjahlkh 12y agoAlso, the experiment's requirement lead into the operators disabling almost every single safety mechanism. The automated systems disallowed the actions they were trying to do, so they disconnected most important security measures. Operating like that you can make even hydroelectric power station extremely deadly, and kill a lot of people.
- dirtyaura 12y agoIs there are a good article or book describing this, i.e. that they disabled safety mechanisms. I'd like to read more about it.
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- theguycalledtom 12y ago> a testament to the potential dangers of nuclear power. A list to remind us of the real dangers of coal power: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal_mining_accidents_in_China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal_mining_accidents_i...
- afterburner 12y agoDitch both.
- chii 12y agoand freeze to death in winter? not cook your food and eat it raw? walk/cycle for 3 hours to commute to work?
- andyjdavis 12y ago>and freeze to death in winter? This is off topic but I always find statements like the above rather bizarre. Why must humans insist on living in places where the environment is hostile to human life? I guess its because I grew up in a place where heating is very rarely necessary, without cooling of any kind and have spent most of the last three years traveling around countries where you could theoretically walk around naked all year if you so desired but I increasingly find it bizarre how attached people are to living in locations that are ill-suited to humans.
- guard-of-terra 12y agoMost of Eurasia is like that with several hundred million people living in regions with harsh winters. Where would you re-settle four hundred million people? Would they want to be unwelcome guests anywhere else? As a species we lack fur, so we are really vulnerable to cold.
- andyjdavis 12y ago>Where would you re-settle four hundred million people? No one is talking about resettling anyone. My question was just about why people individually choose to remain in places that feature temperatures well outside of the range compatible with our species. Others have covered it pretty well. Some combination of habituation, laziness and disliking hot summers basically.
- shmigheghi 12y agoSeems silly to me to just leave it sitting there for decades if its internal heat is being generated by how the isotopes are in close proximity to each other. Or I might be misunderstanding why it's generating its own heat. Could they contain and cool down the waste by slicing off chunks of the mass and containing each chunk in lead-lined boxes? Essentially re-processing the lump into crude 'control rod' sized chunks and storing them in little lead boxes to contain the radiation being thrown off.
- Igglyboo 12y agoI think the main issue is that no one wants to get anywhere remotely near it.
- shmigheghi 12y agoClearly you wouldn't send people in there. Is there too much radiation in the room for robots with radiation-shielded electronics to operate?
- vidarh 12y agoConsider that each passing year reduces the problems of dealing with it. They'll want to wait as long as they can before doing anything.
- brazzy 12y agoYes, you are misunderstanding. There is no more chain reaction; the "close proximity" is irrelevant. The heat is generated by the unstable isotopes decaying. And there is nothing in the universe which can stop them from doing that. It's a misunderstanding I had as well before I read detailed discussions of the Fukushima incident: stopping the chain reaction does not make a nuclear reactor "safe". It just prevents new highly radioactive material from being generated. But the material you already have is still generating massive amounts of radiation and heat, and if you're not able to dissipate that heat (which you want to do without also dissipating any of the material!) then the heat will build up, cause it to melt, and that will usually restart the chain reaction!
- spatten 12y agoSo it's now almost 30 years after Chernobyl, so if I read this naively: > When this photo was taken, 10 years after the disaster, the Elephant’s Foot was only emitting one-tenth of the radiation it once had. the Elephant's foot will currently have 1/1000th of the original radioactivity it had right after the disaster, and 10 years from now it will be down to 1/10,000th. At that rate it would be indistinguishable from background radiation within a century or so (just guesstimating here, but that's a lot of powers of 10 -- I'm probably being pessimistic). I'm guessing that this is wrong, though, and that the radioactivity from longer half-life radionuclides will eventually start to dominate and the "effective half-life" will be much longer. Does anyone have any idea how long it will be until Chernobyl blends into the background radiation?
- cnvogel 12y agoYou are right, in that your guess is wrong ;-). Total activity decrease in realistic "atomic waste" is not at all exponential. Try a simple example: Take a mixture of two isotopes. The one isotope has a half-life of 1 year and there's so much of it, that the activity is 10 decays/second. There's also a second isotope in the mix, with a half-life of 100 years, but there's 100 times as much of it, so that in total, you also get 10 decays/second. After 10 years, the first isotope will be down to 2^-10, so only 1/1000th is left, it will be hardly measurable. But the second one will have decayed only 1/10th of a half-time, almost everything is still there: You are now down to half of the original activity. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxaUhDCUXNJCTjNKNFNxdDhuLTA/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxaUhDCUXNJCTjNKNFNxdDhuLTA...
- InclinedPlane 12y agoIt's more complicated than that. As you point out, you don't have just one isotope, you have a whole grab bag of stuff. Here's the wrench in the works that adds the complexity, when a radioactive isotope decays it doesn't just go away, it decays into another isotope, sometimes one that is also radioactive and with its own half life. What yoU end up with is a system of differential equations, which are actually easy to solve if you know how, but that level of calculus is beyond what most folks have studied. Anyway, a situation that tends to be common is that you have one sort of longer lived isotope which ends up producing another isotope which decays fairly fast along a multi-step chain. This ends up producing a fairly high level of radiation for a significant time in a pseudo steady state. But it depends on the details.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoI guess it is how you look at it. Much of this article has issues but one of the most glaring is this one: "Born of human error, continually generating copious heat, the Elephant’s Foot is still melting into the base of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. If it hits ground water, it could trigger another catastrophic explosion or leach radioactive material into the water nearby residents drink." One of the things this 'foot' proved was that the supposition that a meltdown would have a core melt through the ground and down into the center of the earth, aka the "China Syndrome" was false. The reason was of course that once the core became molten it begins to mix with the materials around it, that causes it to become diluted until it drops below criticality and then it ceases to be a threat. All western reactors (and all of those in Japan) have a pool of borosilicate sand underneath the reactor as just such a final safeguard. Should the core melt through to that, it turns the sand to borosilicate glass which kills neutrons and stops the reaction. Leaving behind a solid, cooling glass chunk. Not contaminating any groundwater and generally not going any further afield. It remains to be seen if any of Fukishima's core material made it as far as the sand underneath those reactors. The 'foot' at Chernobyl isn't going anywhere, and in a couple of decades will be safe enough to chop up and dispose of more permanently. Unlike radioactive dust in the plant which was getting carried out of the containment building. I expect that within my kids lifetime people to be living once again in the surrounding area.
- brc 12y agoI saw a documentary that showed squatter-types already were living in the surrounding area - whatever the exclusion zone area was. They interviewed them, but they were 'meh' about the risk. They had the place to themselves and were pretty happy.
- hobbes78 12y agoI envy the ignorant people, for they are happy...
- delackner 12y agoThat all sounds very nice, but the Fukushima reactor material is still above ground and totally at risk of explosion and entry into the atmosphere if it is not continually water cooled. The cooling water has contaminated the entire nearby water system and the ocean.
- beloch 12y agoWhile the article does contain some interesting details, I fundamentally disapprove of it's anti-nuclear moralizing. It's the constant trickle of articles like this that maintain public paranoia about nuclear power. This matters, because nuclear power allows us to meet today's power demands with today's technology without releasing CO2 into the environment. Alternative power sources are still some ways from meeting humanities power needs on their own, but every megawatt of nuclear power produced keeps carbon in the ground and gives us extra time. Yes, many will point out that several alternative power generation sources could be scaled up to meet all of humanity's demands right now. However, it's not being done because it's economically and technically challenging and would take decades. Meanwhile, fully operational nuclear power plants are being shut down. After the Fukushima incident, Germany and several other countries caved into irrational public fears and have begun to phase out nuclear power, replacing it with much more immediately dangerous power sources such as coal. (It should be noted that there are relatively few reactors in Germany that are likely to be hit by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami.) That's carbon emission free power that's online right now, being destroyed out of irrational fear and replaced with what is possibly our dirtiest source of power. This is what is going on in the world, but the author has published yet another fear-mongering article anyways. It's downright despicable.
- iSnow 12y agoGermany's and other countries' reactors are decades old designs that are fundamentally unsound, often enough built on tectonic faults or (in the case of Japan) at the sea. They are not secured against terrorist attacks or even the crash of a passenger jet. In the case of Germany's reactors, the containment is built to sustain the impact of a Phantom fighter, nothing more. Reactor operators have constantly proven to be unworthy of trust, be it in Chernobyl, Harrisburg or Fukushima. Both their handling of operations as well as their handling of crisis never was up to standards - and every disaster was an exception to the rule. Ridiculing the German outphasing of nukes with the argument that it is not a tsunami-prone country is both childish and irrational - irrational because it turns a blind eye to the risks that endanger nuclear power plants here - and the far more severe consequences of an accident. In Germany, the nukes are located straight in the most densely populated areas.
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- acqq 12y agoRelated video, also workers at Chernobyl, but another piece of the reactor: the roof. https://youtu.be/FfDa8tR25dk https://youtu.be/FfDa8tR25dk "Military people call such places "FRONTLINE", liquidators who worked at the Chornobyl nuclear station called it "ROOF COATING". It was the most contaminated, and therefore the most dangerous, place in the zone. The remains of the roof coating of the 4th reactor. The operation on decontaminating the roof lasted more than five months. We will tell about only two days."
- chairleg 12y agoBit off topic: On the first picture right at the top you can see through the workers. I read that this was caused by radiation, but to me it looks more as if they (or he) was simply moving during a longer exposure?
- JonahBraun 12y agoAgreed. Anyone find an authoritative explanation on the photo? I couldn't.
- JonahBraun 12y ago> Particles emitted from radioactive atoms are a form of ionizing radiation—they have enough energy to scramble atoms and molecules they crash into. (This is different from non-ionizing radiation, like the kind emitted by your cell phone, which does not have enough energy to break bonds.) I think this is a poor explanation. Radiation from your cell phone is electromagnetic radiation. This is far different from a radiated particle, an actual proton or electron flying out. Essentially a particle vs a wave, which is more of a difference than "not enough energy". Is that correct?
- iolsantr 12y agoGamma radiation (i.e. ionizing radiation) is just a highly energetic photons. Alpha and Beta particles are not photons, and are not referred to as ionizing radiation.