7 ms·

A 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 nex

A 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 ago
The planet is a big place.
cjslep 12y ago
The 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 ago
  That'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 ago
    Hang 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 ago
      I 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 ago
        Please 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
        Well I appreciate you putting these numbers and links together. I certainly have some reading to do.
        brazzy 12y ago
        Only 217 Mt of tests has been from fission bombs; fusion bombs contain a much smaller amount of radioactive material relative to their yield.
        NamTaf 12y ago
        That's a very fair point.
        mtviewdave 12y ago
        >Please don't use 'common sense' and talk about how they design bombs and core reactors when you have no physics education. If I can step back from mrschwabe's immediate questions, I'd like to point out how problematic your attitude is, NamTaf. Nuclear power generation in the West is a political question. Which means its future is going to be decided by the average voter. The average voter is not going to have a "physics education". Maybe they took high-school physics[1], and maybe that class touched on radiation and nuclear power generation. But odds are, even in that case, the average voter doesn't really remember it. I just checked my alma mater's undergraduate physics course catalog, and nuclear physics is an upper-division topic. It is unacceptable, in a democratic society, to suggest that voters have the right to an opinion on a topic of importance to society only if they've taken upper-division university classes on the topic in question. The real failure isn't that mrschwabe doesn't have a physics education. The failure is that, 66 years after nuclear criticality was first used to power a light bulb, the physics/nuclear power advocate community hasn't figured out how to incorporate the basics of nuclear power generation into the average person's "common sense". [1]Obligatory disclaimer about this being a U.S.-centric post. I'll let others comment on the quality of secondary-level physics instruction in other countries.
  - cjslep 12y ago
    > That's like comparing a lit-match to a gas pipeline fire. That's a terrible analogy. Radioactivity, a nuclear reaction, deals with totally different physics and phenomena than combustion, a chemical reaction. A more proper analogy would be: Would you rather me shoot you with a cannonball once right now, or would you rather me split it up into a million little BB pellets and shoot one at you a day? I'd choose the million little BB pellets a day because my body can recover from that in between. Likewise, your body constantly repairs DNA damaged by the sun or from other radiation sources. Radiation, activity, and dosages are extremely difficult to keep straight. Especially when coming from the media. Not even units can help you (ex: Equivalent vs Effective Dose), and it is hard to keep straight (ICRP vs NRC). > Only the fire doesn't end - because we don't have the technology to stop it, and perhaps will not ever. I am not quite sure what you're referring to -- stick yourself in a heavily-lined lead chamber and I'm sure you will measure far less gamma radiation inside of it than outside. > 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. Then we can agree to disagree -- it seems you have already made your mind on how many plants are close to "disaster mode" (unsure what that really means in an engineering sense).
  - pdkl95 12y ago
    A meltdown doesn't necessarily put any radioative particles into the air. If it did, that would be a very unusual event (such as Chernobyl). On the other hand, a bomb has a tendency to put an ultra-fine dust of uranium, various transuranics, and quite a few fission products into the atmosphere. I suspect that you may be confusing a radioactive isotope (such as U235) with the particles associated with nuclear radiation (such as alpha and beta particles). A meltdown will generally involve a lot of radioactive material. It will usually be localized and only very rarely pulverized into a dust. Chernobyl's steam explosion did this. The meltdown will probably also emit a lot of radiation, but that never "contaminates" the atmosphere, unless you consider electrons or helium "contamination". Unfortunately, conflating radioactive isotopes with the radiation those isotopes emit when they decay is very common misunderstanding.
    - mrschwabe 12y ago
      Sure, thank-you for clarifying. And I agree, it certainly is easy to mix-up the types of radiation. But yes, I do consider particles like Iodine-129 and Cesium-137 "contamination".
nitrogen 12y ago
Are 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 ago
  I'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 ago
    Yeah. The planet's naturally occurring radiation is a hell of a lot stronger and more dangerous.
    - iSnow 12y ago
      Yeah and a hell of a lot better shielded. Come on, no need to pull the discussion to a moron's level.
      - vidarh 12y ago
        I 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 ago
      What 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 ago
  Good catch, "un-inhabitable" was the term I was looking for, thanks :)
ori_b 12y ago
The 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 ago
  they say the same about almost any waste... but at the end the oceans are clogged with waste.
  - ori_b 12y ago
    The 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.
    - 12y ago
muuh-gnu 12y ago
Please spread your religious propaganda elsewhere. HN is a place to discuss, not to proselytize. Thanks.
- mrschwabe 12y ago
  How fitting that the lone voice of dissent in this thread would eventually be charged with spreading religious propaganda. Guess we should have saw that one coming!
  - dang 12y ago
    This discussion is becoming increasingly uncivil, and that violates the HN guidelines. Please stop.
vidarh 12y ago
The radioactivity released by coal plants still dwarf the sum output of all recorded nuclear incidents many times over.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  This makes Germany's switching from nuclear to coal quite ironic.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    Well, 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.

ams6110 12y ago

The planet is a big place.

cjslep 12y ago

The 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 ago
That'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 ago
  Hang 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      Please 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
        Well I appreciate you putting these numbers and links together. I certainly have some reading to do.
      - brazzy 12y ago
        Only 217 Mt of tests has been from fission bombs; fusion bombs contain a much smaller amount of radioactive material relative to their yield.
        NamTaf 12y ago
        That's a very fair point.
      - mtviewdave 12y ago
        >Please don't use 'common sense' and talk about how they design bombs and core reactors when you have no physics education. If I can step back from mrschwabe's immediate questions, I'd like to point out how problematic your attitude is, NamTaf. Nuclear power generation in the West is a political question. Which means its future is going to be decided by the average voter. The average voter is not going to have a "physics education". Maybe they took high-school physics[1], and maybe that class touched on radiation and nuclear power generation. But odds are, even in that case, the average voter doesn't really remember it. I just checked my alma mater's undergraduate physics course catalog, and nuclear physics is an upper-division topic. It is unacceptable, in a democratic society, to suggest that voters have the right to an opinion on a topic of importance to society only if they've taken upper-division university classes on the topic in question. The real failure isn't that mrschwabe doesn't have a physics education. The failure is that, 66 years after nuclear criticality was first used to power a light bulb, the physics/nuclear power advocate community hasn't figured out how to incorporate the basics of nuclear power generation into the average person's "common sense". [1]Obligatory disclaimer about this being a U.S.-centric post. I'll let others comment on the quality of secondary-level physics instruction in other countries.
- cjslep 12y ago
  > That's like comparing a lit-match to a gas pipeline fire. That's a terrible analogy. Radioactivity, a nuclear reaction, deals with totally different physics and phenomena than combustion, a chemical reaction. A more proper analogy would be: Would you rather me shoot you with a cannonball once right now, or would you rather me split it up into a million little BB pellets and shoot one at you a day? I'd choose the million little BB pellets a day because my body can recover from that in between. Likewise, your body constantly repairs DNA damaged by the sun or from other radiation sources. Radiation, activity, and dosages are extremely difficult to keep straight. Especially when coming from the media. Not even units can help you (ex: Equivalent vs Effective Dose), and it is hard to keep straight (ICRP vs NRC). > Only the fire doesn't end - because we don't have the technology to stop it, and perhaps will not ever. I am not quite sure what you're referring to -- stick yourself in a heavily-lined lead chamber and I'm sure you will measure far less gamma radiation inside of it than outside. > 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. Then we can agree to disagree -- it seems you have already made your mind on how many plants are close to "disaster mode" (unsure what that really means in an engineering sense).
- pdkl95 12y ago
  A meltdown doesn't necessarily put any radioative particles into the air. If it did, that would be a very unusual event (such as Chernobyl). On the other hand, a bomb has a tendency to put an ultra-fine dust of uranium, various transuranics, and quite a few fission products into the atmosphere. I suspect that you may be confusing a radioactive isotope (such as U235) with the particles associated with nuclear radiation (such as alpha and beta particles). A meltdown will generally involve a lot of radioactive material. It will usually be localized and only very rarely pulverized into a dust. Chernobyl's steam explosion did this. The meltdown will probably also emit a lot of radiation, but that never "contaminates" the atmosphere, unless you consider electrons or helium "contamination". Unfortunately, conflating radioactive isotopes with the radiation those isotopes emit when they decay is very common misunderstanding.
  - mrschwabe 12y ago
    Sure, thank-you for clarifying. And I agree, it certainly is easy to mix-up the types of radiation. But yes, I do consider particles like Iodine-129 and Cesium-137 "contamination".

nitrogen 12y ago

Are 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 ago
I'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 ago
  Yeah. The planet's naturally occurring radiation is a hell of a lot stronger and more dangerous.
  - iSnow 12y ago
    Yeah and a hell of a lot better shielded. Come on, no need to pull the discussion to a moron's level.
    - vidarh 12y ago
      I 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 ago
    What 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 ago
Good catch, "un-inhabitable" was the term I was looking for, thanks :)

ori_b 12y ago

The 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 ago
they say the same about almost any waste... but at the end the oceans are clogged with waste.
- ori_b 12y ago
  The 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.
  - 12y ago

muuh-gnu 12y ago

Please spread your religious propaganda elsewhere. HN is a place to discuss, not to proselytize. Thanks.

mrschwabe 12y ago
How fitting that the lone voice of dissent in this thread would eventually be charged with spreading religious propaganda. Guess we should have saw that one coming!
- dang 12y ago
  This discussion is becoming increasingly uncivil, and that violates the HN guidelines. Please stop.

vidarh 12y ago

The radioactivity released by coal plants still dwarf the sum output of all recorded nuclear incidents many times over.

happyscrappy 12y ago
This makes Germany's switching from nuclear to coal quite ironic.
- vidarh 12y ago
  Well, 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.