The Robots Sent Into Fukushima Have 'Died'

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Oh come on, how bad can the radiation at Fukushima be? What's that you say? All the robots we sent in are dead now? Oh crap, does anyone know how they died? Maybe all the nuclear radiation has brought back Godzilla. :eek:

The robots sent in to find highly radioactive fuel at Fukushima's nuclear reactors have “died”: a subterranean "ice wall" around the crippled plant meant to stop groundwater from becoming contaminated has yet to be finished. And authorities still don’t how to dispose of highly radioactive water stored in an ever mounting number of tanks around the site.
 
It's bad. I don't even feel like crackin' a joke about this. The coastal waters and much of Miyagi prefecture's arable lands have taken a massive dump (in a country that doesn't have much arable land to begin with) and we ain't at the point that we can even say that recovery's under way.
 
This topic will be a fun one.

/In before industry "experts" arrive and tell everyone that they don't know jack shit about what they're talking about.

I knew that ice wall was a bunch of bullshit designed to placate the masses the second I heard about it.
 
Ice wall? WTF. The handling of this disaster is looking worse than Chernobyl.
 
These robots were dying in 2012 when they first tried, nothing has changed, because it's clearly 'under control'.

The real elephant in the room is the utter inability of man, to control multiple 5000degree lumps of corium. Can't get the genie back in the bottle, once it's out!
 
I read this part of the article:
Radiation levels in many places at the site are now as low as those in Tokyo.
Click to expand...
Soooo, warm and only slightly glowing?
 
Crazy to think that the radiation is powerful enough to melt copper. Imagine what it does to a person who goes there. Did not know radiation could do this tbh... I guess it makes sense, sorta like microwaves can cook food, just a different type of energy.
 
How can anyone miss the miracle of the intense radiation giving life to these once lifeless robots, so that they may die a martyr for our catharses?
 
Seriously what are they going to do with all that irradiated water? Freeze it and launch it into space? Not like they can just throw it into the ocean (but I bet you $1 this is exactly what happens)

Even more curious... Newsweek still exists?
 
Burticus said:
Seriously what are they going to do with all that irradiated water? Freeze it and launch it into space? Not like they can just throw it into the ocean (but I bet you $1 this is exactly what happens)

Even more curious... Newsweek still exists?
Click to expand...

This is the situation. Fukushima was built next to the ocean so they could use the ocean as a heat sink for their reactors. The entire Fukushima site was literally a "bluff landform" (cliff). Engineers literally excavated and removed the hillside in order to obtain a elevation just a few meters above sea level. Groundwater from higher elevations and the neighboring countryside has always traveled a subsurface path under the site, making it's way to the pacific (even before any excavation took place there).

After the reactors were damaged many people suspect that several conditions now exist. 1) The molten cores melted down through the floor of the reactor vessels into the base of the containment structures. 2) The "Torus" of some of the reactors are thought to be damaged. 3)There is concern that some of the concrete containment structures may have been damaged by the quake, or perhaps even damaged by molten corium. 4)There are engineered "holes" in the containment structure that are placed there by design in order to accommodate the routing of piping and various components.

Tepco's bullshit plan was to excavate a slurry perimeter around the entire Fukushima site, down to bedrock, and install refrigeration equipment to freeze that slurry into an ice wall, thus preventing or limiting flow of water through the site, and contamination into the Pacific.

What did they do with all that water? They run it through filters and evaporative processes in order to condense or reduce the liquid volume, and they built a tank farm to hold the super concentrate.

What did they do when the tanks were filled to capacity? They built more tanks. But when they couldn't keep up anymore, they decided to empty the contents of those tanks into the Pacific.

And the tanks themselves are a problem. Initially the tanks they constructed were seamless, welded, stainless steel. But Tepco couldn't' build or source them fast enough. So they sourced ferrous steel tanks that are bolted together rather than welded. They have seams that leak, and the ferrous steel they are constructed of is subject to rust.

From time to time they resorted to lined open pits.
 
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"...don’t how to dispose of highly radioactive water stored in an ever mounting number of tanks around the site"

Wasn't one of the claims about Yucca Mountain that the natural local zeolite would filter the radioisotopes and clean any escaping water?

(google shows lots of results for zeolite and radiation)

Do these guys know what they're doing?
 
uh, just to be accurate, water cannot become radioactive. It it particles in the water that are the problem.
 
The fuel rods melted through their containment vessels in the reactors, and no one knows exactly where they are now.

I have heard so many people defending Nuclear power and minimizing Fukushima.
Their entire "strategy" for dealing with this has been doomed from the start.

ICE WALL? Seriously?! And that is just fro the ground water problem.

WHEN, I say WHEN the next earthquake hits all those talks are going to rupture, the ice wall will collapse and everything will be for naught.

This is why I don't give a flying shit about the environment. The entire world can't stop or fix this or even give a shit so why the hell should I care about my carbon footprint?

Fukushima is a great example of the world powers complete hypocrisy. Rwanda is another one. THEY DON'T CARE ABUOT YOU, our Gov. doesn't care about us, like George Carlin said in his epic rant.
 
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Red Squirrel said:
Crazy to think that the radiation is powerful enough to melt copper. Imagine what it does to a person who goes there. Did not know radiation could do this tbh... I guess it makes sense, sorta like microwaves can cook food, just a different type of energy.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure, I'm one of the pseudo experts Lithium mentioned, but CPUs used in space missions have to be hardened against radiation as well. I'd guess it's the robots' memory (it has to have some kind of firmware) becomes corrupted beyond use. Bit flips.

If they have so much wasted radiating heat available, why not create a turbine and use it to initiate electrolysis of the water in those tanks. The obtained hydrogen could then be used as fuel to supplement the electrolysis process, making it cheap.
So at least that waste would become more 'compact'.
 
Oh it's the cpus having issues? That makes more sense, so like EMI sorta. Article makes it sound like it's the actual wiring within the robots melting.

As far as the dangers of nuclear, people like to suddenly forget the dangers of oil. Gulf oil spill anyone? That's one of MANY disasters. Nuclear is still safer. The nuclear industry learns from these mistakes and tends not to repeat them. We need to move away from non renewable energy though but nuclear is still better than fossil fuel based. (gas, coal etc)
 
Radiation itself cannot melt copper. In reactors such as Fukushima it's the processes of sustained fission which produces the extreme heat which can melt most substances.

It's not the heat which is killing the robots, the ionizing radiation is.

The extreme levels can cause signal degradation.


Radiation hardening - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Environments with high levels of ionizing radiation create special design challenges. A single charged particle can knock thousands of electrons loose, causing electronic noise and signal spikes. In the case of digital circuits, this can cause results which are inaccurate or unintelligible. This is a particularly serious problem in the design of satellites, spacecraft, military aircraft, nuclear power stations, and nuclear weapons. In order to ensure the proper operation of such systems, manufacturers of integrated circuits and sensors intended for the military or aerospace markets employ various methods of radiation hardening. The resulting systems are said to be rad(iation)-hardened, rad-hard, or (within context) hardened.
Click to expand...

It can cause physical damage to the semi conductors, it can also alter the digital state of semi conductor circuits.

Fundamental mechanisms[edit]
Two fundamental damage mechanisms take place:

  • Lattice displacement, caused by neutrons, protons, alpha particles, heavy ions, and very high energy gamma photons. They change the arrangement of the atoms in the crystal lattice, creating lasting damage, and increasing the number of recombination centers, depleting the minority carriers and worsening the analog properties of the affected semiconductor junctions. Counterintuitively, higher doses over short time cause partial annealing ("healing") of the damaged lattice, leading to a lower degree of damage than with the same doses delivered in low intensity over a long time. This type of problem is particularly significant in bipolar transistors, which are dependent on minority carriers in their base regions; increased losses caused by recombination cause loss of the transistor gain (see neutron effects).
  • Ionization effects are caused by charged particles, including the ones with energy too low to cause lattice effects. The ionization effects are usually transient, creating glitches and soft errors, but can lead to destruction of the device if they trigger other damage mechanisms (e.g. a latchup). Photocurrent caused by ultraviolet and x-ray radiation may belong to this category as well. Gradual accumulation of holes in the oxide layer in MOSFET transistors leads to worsening of their performance, up to device failure when the dose is high enough (see total ionizing dose effects).
The effects can vary wildly depending on all the parameters - type of radiation, total dose and radiation flux, combination of types of radiation, and even the kind of device load (operating frequency, operating voltage, actual state of the transistor during the instant it is struck by the particle), which makes thorough testing difficult, time consuming, and requiring a lot of test samples.

Resultant effects[edit]
The "end-user" effects can be characterized in several groups:

  • Neutron effects: A neutron interacting with the semiconductor lattice will displace its atoms. This leads to an increase in the count of recombination centers and deep-level defects, reducing the lifetime of minority carriers, thus affecting bipolar devices more than CMOS ones. Bipolar devices on silicon tend to show changes in electrical parameters at levels of 1010 to 1011 neutrons/cm², CMOS devices aren't affected until 1015 neutrons/cm². The sensitivity of the devices may increase together with increasing level of integration and decreasing size of individual structures. There is also a risk of induced radioactivity caused by neutron activation, which is a major source of noise in high energy astrophysics instruments. Induced radiation, together with residual radiation from impurities in used materials, can cause all sorts of single-event problems during the device's lifetime. GaAs LEDs, common in optocouplers, are very sensitive to neutrons. The lattice damage influences the frequency of crystal oscillators. Kinetic energy effects (namely lattice displacement) of charged particles belong here too.
  • Total ionizing dose effects: The cumulative damage of the semiconductor lattice (lattice displacement damage) caused by ionizing radiation over the exposition time. It is measured in rads and causes slow gradual degradation of the device's performance. A total dose greater than 5000 rads delivered to silicon-based devices in seconds to minutes will cause long-term degradation. In CMOS devices, the radiation creates electron–hole pairs in the gate insulation layers, which cause photocurrents during their recombination, and the holes trapped in the lattice defects in the insulator create a persistent gate biasing and influence the transistors' threshold voltage, making the N-type MOSFET transistors easier and the P-type ones more difficult to switch on. The accumulated charge can be high enough to keep the transistors permanently open (or closed), leading to device failure. Some self-healing takes place over time, but this effect is not too significant. This effect is the same as hot carrier degradation in high-integration high-speed electronics. Crystal oscillators are somewhat sensitive to radiation doses, which alter their frequency. The sensitivity can be greatly reduced by using swept quartz. Natural quartz crystals are especially sensitive. Radiation performance curves for TID testing may be generated for all resultant effects testing procedures. These curves show performance trends throughout the TID test process and are included in the radiation test report.
  • Transient dose effects: The short-time high-intensity pulse of radiation, typically occurring during a nuclear explosion. The high radiation flux creates photocurrents in the entire body of the semiconductor, causing transistors to randomly open, changing logical states of flip-flops and memory cells. Permanent damage may occur if the duration of the pulse is too long, or if the pulse causes junction damage or a latchup. Latchups are commonly caused by the x-rays and gamma radiation flash of a nuclear explosion. Crystal oscillators may stop oscillating for the duration of the flash due to prompt photoconductivity induced in quartz.
  • Systems-generated EMP effects (SGEMP) are caused by the radiation flash traveling through the equipment and causing local ionization and electric currents in the material of the chips, circuit boards, cables and cases.
  • Single-event effects (SEE) are phenomena affecting mostly digital devices (see the following section for an overview of the various types of SEE).
Digital damage: SEE[edit]
Single-event effects (SEE), mostly affecting only digital devices, were not studied extensively until relatively recently. When a high-energy particle travels through a semiconductor, it leaves an ionized track behind. This ionization may cause a highly localized effect similar to the transient dose one - a benign glitch in output, a less benign bit flip in memory or a register or, especially in high-power transistors, a destructive latchup and burnout. Single event effects have importance for electronics in satellites, aircraft, and other civilian and military aerospace applications. Sometimes, in circuits not involving latches, it is helpful to introduce RC time constant circuits that slow down the circuit's reaction time beyond the duration of an SEE.

  • Single-event upsets (SEU) or transient radiation effects in electronics are state changes of memory or register bits caused by a single ion interacting with the chip. They do not cause lasting damage to the device, but may cause lasting problems to a system which cannot recover from such an error. In very sensitive devices, a single ion can cause a multiple-bit upset (MBU) in several adjacent memory cells. SEUs can become Single-event functional interrupts (SEFI) when they upset control circuits, such as state machines, placing the device into an undefined state, a test mode, or a halt, which would then need a reset or a power cycle to recover.
  • Single-event latchup (SEL) can occur in any chip with a parasitic PNPN structure. A heavy ion or a high-energy proton passing through one of the two inner-transistor junctions can turn on the thyristor-like structure, which then stays "shorted" (an effect known as latchup) until the device is power-cycled. As the effect can happen between the power source and substrate, destructively high current can be involved and the part may fail. Bulk CMOS devices are most susceptible.
  • Single-event transient (SET) happens when the charge collected from an ionization event discharges in the form of a spurious signal traveling through the circuit. This is de facto the effect of an electrostatic discharge.
  • Single-event snapback, similar to SEL but not requiring the PNPN structure, can be induced in N-channel MOS transistors switching large currents, when an ion hits near the drain junction and causes avalanche multiplication of the charge carriers. The transistor then opens and stays opened.
  • Single-event induced burnout (SEB) may occur in power MOSFETs when the substrate right under the source region gets forward-biased and the drain-source voltage is higher than the breakdown voltage of the parasitic structures. The resulting high current and local overheating then may destroy the device.
  • Single-event gate rupture (SEGR) was observed in power MOSFETs when a heavy ion hits the gate region while a high voltage is applied to the gate. A local breakdown then happens in the insulating layer of silicon dioxide, causing local overheat and destruction (looking like a microscopic explosion) of the gate region. It can occur even in EEPROM cells during write or erase, when the cells are subjected to a comparatively high voltage.
Click to expand...
 
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In case anyone is interested, there is a pretty damn good introductory physics course taught at UC Berkeley by Professor Richard Muller. It's called "Physics For Future Presidents", and it "teaches the most interesting and important topics in physics, stressing conceptual understanding rather than math, with applications to current events".

There are approximately 26 lectures, they are roughly 60 minutes in length, they are hosted on YT by UC Berkeley, and there is a download link in each segment's YT description panel.

Muller is a great teacher, he leaves you with a pretty damn good idea of how the physical universe works. They are a great way to give young kids a big head start.



Lecture 1,


The entire playlist -https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNYKh_zBk1ESQJOJqBLeSUHgJaph6pCKO
 
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HardUp4HardWare said:
The fuel rods melted through their containment vessels in the reactors, and no one knows exactly where they are now.

I have heard so many people defending Nuclear power and minimizing Fukushima.
Their entire "strategy" for dealing with this has been doomed from the start.

ICE WALL? Seriously?! And that is just fro the ground water problem.

WHEN, I say WHEN the next earthquake hits all those talks are going to rupture, the ice wall will collapse and everything will be for naught.

This is why I don't give a flying shit about the environment. The entire world can't stop or fix this or even give a shit so why the hell should I care about my carbon footprint?

Fukushima is a great example of the world powers complete hypocrisy. Rwanda is another one. THEY DON'T CARE ABUOT YOU, our Gov. doesn't care about us, like George Carlin said in his epic rant.
Click to expand...

There is nothing wrong with nuclear power when everything is done right. There is a risk, but there are always risk.

An airplane could crash on you as you drive home. That mean we should shut down all roads and remove all air traffic from the sky? You could die from eating any food and choking so should we outlaw eating?
 
Exavior said:
There is nothing wrong with nuclear power when everything is done right. There is a risk, but there are always risk.

An airplane could crash on you as you drive home. That mean we should shut down all roads and remove all air traffic from the sky? You could die from eating any food and choking so should we outlaw eating?
Click to expand...

That is a common argument. I feel that the extreme half life of some radioactive waste is a variable that derails that argument. I am not an environmentalist and in principal I agree with you. However, I think in very practical terms. An example would be near me the Yankee plant was leaking Tritium into the Connecticut river. Let's say that I take my kid fishing downstream from there and 5 years later my kid is dying of Leukemia. Is that fair? Noone knew about this, how long it was going on, and noone who actually gets sick will ever be compensated.

I am not talking about some idealized fantasy, I am talking about what is real in today's world. I realize no form of energy is without risk but those risks are different. Air cleans itself, even water contaminated by coal mining is not the same because you can just not drink the water. Exposure to radioactive materials, depending on the ISOTOPE can kill someone in extremely small amounts, a speck of dust.

You say "if it is done right". Fair enough. But Yankee did it right and things went wrong. Fukushima did things right and an earthquake happened. Chernobyl did things right and human error caused it. Between imperfect men, corrupt corporations, corrupt government, natural disasters, bad luck and simply TIME, Nuke power is unsafe. Even if the reactors themselves are made 100% foolproof then the WASTE issue needs to be addressed and human nature always has this "out of sight out of mind" behavior. Look at Fukushima for God's sake, an ICE WALL and tons of tanks and tanks and tanks with no plan to dispose of the contaminated water. This should show you that we as a RACE are not capable of using this power.

If Nuke power can be made with 100% safety and No waste I would be all for it.
 
Exavior said:
There is nothing wrong with nuclear power when everything is done right. There is a risk, but there are always risk.

An airplane could crash on you as you drive home. That mean we should shut down all roads and remove all air traffic from the sky? You could die from eating any food and choking so should we outlaw eating?
Click to expand...

There are a couple of nuclear plants near NYC. A meltdown with unfavorable winds could cause an evacuation of the city (impossible to do, really) and / or make it unlivable for like 50 years. So the consequences can be large.

There have been five reactor meltdowns in 35 years now so it isn't very rare.
 
The psychological aspect makes the entire prefecture's agricultural products unmarketable to the general population. It is so bad that the Japanese have opened up to Taiwanese rice import (and that's talking about a country being notoriously picky with the rice that they eat) to cope with the supply side slump. I know that agricultural land contamination isn't something that is seriously impacting the prefecture with respect to the site, but the triple whammy is in that radioactive contamination has become a fear factor.

And yes, the handling of the water that goes into the 'freezer' has become a bit of a don't show, don't tell...
 
Lith1um said:
This is the situation. Fukushima was built next to the ocean so they could use the ocean as a heat sink for their reactors.
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100% bang on. Researched Fukushima since day one, even saw all the weird Japanese reports and information that was released in the beginning.

They actually drilled under R2 and have corium samples, which prove a full melt-through containment breach.. Can dig this up if you want but it was on Fukushima Diary in late 2012, from memory. Showed yellow samples, extremely radioactive (500mSv+ - over limit of meters...).
 
leeleatherwood said:
lol.

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fukushima. Poor Japan.
Click to expand...
On the other hand,no country should know the horrors of nuclear radiation better than Japan,yet they not only decided to build a nuclear power plant,but also picked the worst possible place to build it. And it's clear they have no idea how to handle the situation.
 
Exavior said:
There is nothing wrong with nuclear power when everything is done right. There is a risk, but there are always risk.

An airplane could crash on you as you drive home. That mean we should shut down all roads and remove all air traffic from the sky? You could die from eating any food and choking so should we outlaw eating?
Click to expand...
Worst comparison ever. When a plane crashes,it doesn't contaminate large areas of land for thousands of years. Or cause increases in cancer,birth defects,and other health issues far beyond the site of the original incident.
 
Im surprised they haven't brought in huge tanker ships to pump the water into..
and then have the contaminated water sent to evaporators to get the radioactive
material out and let the pure water back in ocean. Take the 'solid waste' and go
bury it some where.....

tanker ships can hold from 8-80million gallons of liquid depending on size of ship.


So, 100,000 galons a day of contaminated water , every day... just using the smallest ship
would take 80 days to fill, the largest tankers would take 800 days to fill...,
You'd think in 5 years they could've built some large enclosed evaporator that would've worked
 
Uvaman2 said:
Ice wall? WTF. The handling of this disaster is looking worse than Chernobyl.
Click to expand...

If you know anything about Chernobyl beyond the name....you'd know that ground hard-freezing was employed there to (hopefully) prevent the core melt from reaching the groundwater table and a possible steam explosion. There too, the idea was scrapped, shortly after efforts began. That was AFTER they had drained the sub-reactor bubbler pool filled with radioactive water that was hotter than hell, because if the core-melt had reached the pool before draining it too could have made for a steam explosion.

What they were talking about wasn't madness really, it had been used for a different reason (Chernobyl was about more explosions, Fukushima it was about more contamination) in completely different conditions (river front at Chernobyl versus ocean cost)...and ofc it still didn't work at Chernobyl.
 
michael.pa2 said:
Worst comparison ever. When a plane crashes,it doesn't contaminate large areas of land for thousands of years. Or cause increases in cancer,birth defects,and other health issues far beyond the site of the original incident.
Click to expand...

Learn about Thorium reactors.

If you judged all airliners by the De Havilland Comet, you'd think airline travel was insane too. All nuclear plants built in the last 60 years are repurposed and/or neutered weapons plants using uranium....Thorium plants have been known of for just as long and have far lower risk factors across the boards. We didn't use Thorium for civilian power because General Electric wouldn't have made tons of money doing that.
 
Skripka said:
Learn about Thorium reactors.

If you judged all airliners by the De Havilland Comet, you'd think airline travel was insane too. All nuclear plants built in the last 60 years are repurposed and/or neutered weapons plants using uranium....Thorium plants have been known of for just as long and have far lower risk factors across the boards. We didn't use Thorium for civilian power because General Electric wouldn't have made tons of money doing that.
Click to expand...
Fuck yes! When I found out about thorium salt reactors years and years ago I was like WTF don't we have these...
And then I remember the breeder type are needed for NUKES....
 
naib said:
Fuck yes! When I found out about thorium salt reactors years and years ago I was like WTF don't we have these...
And then I remember the breeder type are needed for NUKES....
Click to expand...

Yup...The Iranians want nuclear power for "peaceful" purposes, we should team up and prototype/build Thorium plants for them. Then there'd be no way in hell for them to get U or Pu out of them.

We in the USA are facing a period of rolling brownouts in our lives, as 20% of USA power comes from nuclear reactor plants...and all those cores are near, at, or past their design lifetimes. The Germans were facing a similar problem and were going to re-up their plants, but Merkle lost the political will/backing to do so-because right as the bill was debated was when Fukushima occurred.
 
It's a common belief that radioactive elements with long half life's are more dangerous than elements with short half life's. That is a bit of a false belief. I am no expert.

"Half-life and the radioactive decay rate constant λ are inversely proportional which means the shorter the half-life, the larger and the faster the decay." - Radioactive Decay Rates - Chemwiki

The rate of radioactive decay of a specific element or isotope remains relatively constant over the entire length of that element or isotope's life span, until it reaches the end of it's decay chain and transitions to become another element, or a different isotope of the same element. The energy level of the decay particles or waves emitted will remain constant over the entire length of that specific element or isotope's life span, until it reaches the end of it's decay chain and transitions to become another element, or a different isotope of the same element.

Would you rather hold an element that releases all of it's energy in a constant rate over the course of billions of years, or one which releases all of it's energy in seconds or even milliseconds?

U-238 is the most common isotope of Uranium found on earth. Uranium-238 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If you look at it's decay chain, it will have to transition and become 25 other elements or isotopes of the same element before it finally becomes stable, non radioactive lead. All radioactive elements will eventually become stable lead, lead is the end of all radioactive decay chains. (which is why it's so dense that it's excellent radiation shielding and why it's heavy as fuck.)

Look at the half life's of the elements in the 238 decay chain. 238 itself has a half life of 4.468 billion years. Take a specific quantity of U235, let it decay for 4.468 billion years, 50% of that original quantity will still be U235 and 50% will be will have transitioned. It will take 10 half life's before there is no U235 remaining. If you look lower down in the 238 decay chain at Polonium 214, it has a half life of 164.3 micro seconds. I'd rather hold the 238.

Contaminated water at the site or passing through the site will contain Tritium. Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen.

According to Wikipedia these are some of the elements released by Fukushima, shown with their half-life.

Tritium: Half life 12.32 years
Iodine 131: 8.0197 days
Tellurium 129m: 33.6 days
Cesium 137: 30.17 years
Strontium 90: 28.79 years
Plutonium 241: 14.4 years

One top of that, the decay of various elements and isotopes emit various types of ionizing radiation.



Strontium 90 is a chemical analog for Calcium. In other words, to a chemist and to the human body it shares similar chemical properties with Calcium. It accumulates in bone and bone marrow.

Cesium 137 and 134 are a chemical analogs for Potassium. Cesium bio accumulates in plants and humans in place of potassium.

The human Thyroid gland cannot tell the difference between stable or radioactive iodine, it will absorb both. This is why Iodine tablets are issued during radiation accidents or disasters.
 
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HardUp4HardWare said:
That is a common argument. I feel that the extreme half life of some radioactive waste is a variable that derails that argument. I am not an environmentalist and in principal I agree with you. However, I think in very practical terms. An example would be near me the Yankee plant was leaking Tritium into the Connecticut river. Let's say that I take my kid fishing downstream from there and 5 years later my kid is dying of Leukemia. Is that fair? Noone knew about this, how long it was going on, and noone who actually gets sick will ever be compensated.

I am not talking about some idealized fantasy, I am talking about what is real in today's world. I realize no form of energy is without risk but those risks are different. Air cleans itself, even water contaminated by coal mining is not the same because you can just not drink the water. Exposure to radioactive materials, depending on the ISOTOPE can kill someone in extremely small amounts, a speck of dust.

You say "if it is done right". Fair enough. But Yankee did it right and things went wrong. Fukushima did things right and an earthquake happened. Chernobyl did things right and human error caused it. Between imperfect men, corrupt corporations, corrupt government, natural disasters, bad luck and simply TIME, Nuke power is unsafe. Even if the reactors themselves are made 100% foolproof then the WASTE issue needs to be addressed and human nature always has this "out of sight out of mind" behavior. Look at Fukushima for God's sake, an ICE WALL and tons of tanks and tanks and tanks with no plan to dispose of the contaminated water. This should show you that we as a RACE are not capable of using this power.

If Nuke power can be made with 100% safety and No waste I would be all for it.
Click to expand...
If you don't try it, how can it evolve to be safe? There's going to be casualties no matter what endeavor human's attempt. Every single argument you mentioned you can remove nuclear and insert fire, horseback riding, exploration, planes, etc. ad nauseum. Do you think the Wright Brother's said "oh shit, look at all these guys that died trying this, this can't be made to be safe." 100 years later, multiple wars, thousands of accidents, human error, hubris, flight is still the safest way to travel.

michael.pa2 said:
Worst comparison ever. When a plane crashes,it doesn't contaminate large areas of land for thousands of years. Or cause increases in cancer,birth defects,and other health issues far beyond the site of the original incident.
Click to expand...
Planes are used in war, planes dropped nukes, thousands die in plane accidents every year. Plane accidents do fuck up huge areas of land when they crash either through fire, chemical leaks, chemical foams used to douse their fires, or simply crashing into another object that is full of hazardous material (see Twin Towers).


You nuclear power detractors always crack me up. You can't learn without fuckups. Accidents are horrible, but not one advancement in human society ever came without accident. Not one. Think about that for a second. Let's all just give up on the biggest potential source of energy ever conceived because there are accidents. No one here denies how bad the Fukashima situation is, but it shouldn't deter us from evolving this technology so that it can be made safe.
 
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jiminator said:
uh, just to be accurate, water cannot become radioactive. It it particles in the water that are the problem.
Click to expand...

Actually it can, if enough of the hydrogen in the water is replaced with Tritium, but the chances are slim, as Deuterium is a poor neutron absorber.

Lith1um said:
Would you rather hold an element that releases all of it's energy in a constant rate over the course of billions of years, or one which releases all of it's energy in seconds or even milliseconds?
Click to expand...

Actually both would be preferable if it came to radioactivity. The former would ensure that the radioactivity would be low enough to not be that damaging, where as the latter would ensure it decays into something inert rapidly.

Fission waste is the worst of both worlds, not short enough to be rid of it quick, not long enough to ignore its radioactivity.

(This is partly the reason why I find films/TV which use Uranium as a radiation source laughable, U-238 has half life of billions of years, effectively making its radioactivity to be negligible. Even U-235's millions of years wouldn't be damaging enough)
 
naib said:
Just to be more accurate deuterium and tritium oxide says hi
Click to expand...

To be even more accurate, Deuterium is launching a protest for being grouped together as the unstable Tritium.

Deuterium is not radioactive, it however, is more chemically harmful than being radioactively harmful
 
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