thousands of years

It's nuclear radiation folks.

go there with a meter to detect the level of radiation. Tony Bourdain went there about 10 years ago and you are limited where you can go, where you can walk and what you can touch. Even the lichen growing in the cracks in the sidewalk have to be avoided. It looks really creepy too. Sort of like Wash DC in Logan's Run. It is a ghost town with ivy and radioactive vegetation growing over everything. The residents had to leave in such a hurry that their food was still on their plates. Since Russia is so secretive no one knows how bad it really was and still is.
http://www.travelchannel.com/videos/tony-and-zamir-visit-chernobyl-0195628

Technically Chernobyl isn't in Russia, it's in Ukraine. It was the secretive Soviet system you are thinking of.

It happened in 1986, before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990-91.
Watch the video. It is only 4 min long and it is typical Bourdain (informative and entertaining).

Technically Ukraine and other SSR's were independent nations that had joined the Soviet Union. Russia certainly was the dominant state, I agree. But technically each was separate, more independent than our US states I think, at least on paper. In reality it was all controlled by Russia.

The corporation that screwed up to begin with is still in charge of the cleanup.
This is fine?

Tepco should be responsible for the cleanup, but not in charge of it. They've already demonstrated they are incompetent.

Last edited Sun Feb 4, 2018, 02:22 AM - Edit history (1)

Sacred Hindu text from the Bhagavad-Gita quoted by Robert Oppenheimer upon witnessing the first atomic bomb test at Los Alamos.

It's um, "lethal?"

How lethal is the inside of a gas plant near the combustion chamber?

How lethal is the smoke being dumped indiscriminately from coal smokestacks.

Seven million people die every year from air pollution, and more people have undoubtedly died from such pollution from the burning of fossil fuels to run computers about how terrible Fukushima is than have died from radiation.

At the Fukushima event, more than 20,000 people died from living in a low lying city. Zero people died from radiation.

How come we never hear about the danger of people living near seawater?

The mentality of anti-nukes is absurd. Seventy million people died in the last ten years from air pollution; 49 million of them since the Fukushima reactors melted down.

Guess which gets more coverage and comment from scientifically illiterate journalists?

Which killed more people instantly, the explosion of the Mitsubishi trichlorosilane plant or the failure of the Tepco reactors?

Nuclear power does not need to be perfect, does not to be without risk to be vastly superior to everything else.

The problem is - and this is a big reason that we now are going to see a carbon dioxide concentration of over 410 in May of 2018 - is that the general public, lead by nearly insane journalists discussing nuclear power, has selective attention.

Of course it is quite tregrettable that there are trivializing fools who imagine that the reactors at Fukushima are comparable to air pollution deaths and climate change.

One runs into a set of these people who are purely Trumpian in the high regard for their own sanity without having ever displayed an ounce of sense,

The Sendai earthquake killed more than 20,000 people, everyone by the action of seawater. Yet these shots don't care about climate change,

Fukashima is not a "Zero death" event. The excess cancers can be measured. I'm not an expert but I'm sure that the data exists. Further, the evacuation has mitigated the worst from happening but evacuation is essentially permanent.

Fukashima stands a warning against 60's generation nuclear technology. The antinuke people were right. Fukashima kinda proved that in spades.

But, the most unfortunate result is that Fukashima and Chernobyl are likely to poison the general population from consent needed for developing legitimate modern safe nuclear power. I am convinced that it can be done safely. As a subscriber to the Bulletin of atomic scientists I know safe reactor technology now exists, but the nuclear technology from the 50's and 60's which is Fukashima's generation is blatantly unsafe and should be shutdown.

Er eh I also guess you don't realize how much radiation 8 sieverts per hour actually is. Basically no one can ever stay there. Fukashima was a major disaster, the true burden in excess cancer deaths will haunt Japan for decades.

I regard "safe nuclear" in the same category as "clean coal". Nice objectives, but there will always be danger from nuclear fission power, just as there will always be pollution from burning coal or most other fossil fuels.

You can't always predict what nature will throw at a power plant. The main problem at Fukushima is that it was not equipped or designed to handle a seismic event/tsunami of the scale of 3/11. Had something of that size been built for, the generators would have been above flood level, and a lot of the ensuing problems might have been avoided. I'm not arguing that the 60's technology was safe, obviously it wasn't. I'm just not sure 21st century technology would have been safe either if a natural event like 3/11 was not anticipated and built for.

And then there is the no small matter of the dangers inherent in the nuclear waste stream. A target for terrorists, maybe, but more likely another area where operator incompetence can have dire results.

Life evolved on earth with nuclear power tucked safely away in the earth's core, and in the sun millions of miles away. We have brought it to the surface and into our immediate environment. What could go wrong?

I know damned well what a Sievert is.

While it may be true that no one can stand inside the reactor where 8 seiverts , it is also true that there are lots of places one couldn't stand in the industrial world, for example, inside a coal smokestack while its discharging smoke.

The difference between the materials in a coal stack of course, is that they are there when the plant is operating normally.

You are right about one thing, you are not an expert.

The anti-nuke people were and are, um, morons, since, as pointed out in the primary scientific literature in one of the most read papers in the scientific journal Energy and the Environment, a from which I have read articles for every issue for the last ten years, nuclear energy saves lives.

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

As it happens, I used to be a dumb ass anti-nuke myself, and then Chernobyl blew up, and at first in fear, in working to understand the disaster and its consequences, I began to apply my scientific training to evaluate the issue, because being a dumb shit anti-nuke, I assumed that the death toll would be vast.

However, if it had wiped out Kiev - it didn't - it would still not have approached the death toll from, um, smokestacks.

Now you make the incredible statement that, "the excess cancers can be measured." If you're so certain of this, why don't you report the number. And after you've done so - and the literature is rich with epidemiological studies of radiation and in fact the external costs of all form of energy, please present evidence with the same certainty that air pollution does not cause excess cancers.

I point to this article, a comprehensive international survey of the causes of all mortality on this planet, to explain to people who excuse the idiocy of anti-nukes, what the death toll is because we don't build nukes:

A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)

The paper is the work of hundreds of medical professionals and researchers, epidemiologists from some of the world's most prestigious research institutions.

I own the full text, having traveled to scientific libraries to collect it and quite literally hundreds of thousands of papers on energy and the environment.

Fukushima was a trivial disaster, and the people who sit around on their asses worrying about it clearly lack the training, the knowledge and the moral depth to appreciate the disaster that fossil fuels are, killing continuously without stop, millions upon millions upon millions of people while destabilizing the planetary climate.

Opposing nuclear energy is simply a crime against all future generations, not because nuclear power is without risk, or because it is always harmless, but because it has lower risk, causes less harm than any other form of energy. And since this is true, it saves lives.

I would also note for the bourgeois people who are too lazy to figure out what is going on, who have never read a text on nuclear physics, nuclear engineering, or for that matter an introductory physics book or a book on thermodynamics or chemistry, that a lack of energy also kills people.

In this post elsewhere, containing approximately 50 references, most to the primary scientific literature, I pointed this out:

Current Energy Demand; Ethical Energy Demand; Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come

The 1960's reactors, designed by some of the best minds of the 20th century, saved, according to Jim Hansen, about 1.8 million human lives that would have been lost to associated diseases around air pollution.

Millions upon millions more might have been saved were it not for the asinine rhetoric of people who couldn't care less about how many millions of people die from the shit to which they pay no attention as long as no one ever dies ever from radiation.

Have a nice weekend, and please don't ever talk to me again.

Actually I kind of am an expert. I have a Ph.D. in heavy ion physics which we used to call nuclear physics but don't anymore because people are just irrationally scared of "nuclear"

The best minds of the 20th century. No, I would agree that some good engineers were involved but certainly not the "best minds".

I'll respond to more of your post when I feel like torturing myself by reading it carefully which might be never.

I take your point about the greater lethality of fossil fuel-based energy plants.

But let's look at the case you're making for the non-lethality of Fukushima. I have but a single question. We know the nuclear cores at the plant have sunk down miles into the earth.

How would that NOT mean that water sources in Japan are going to be contaminated around the site? Wouldn't that increase the likelihood of cancers among those drinking that water?

It's pure science fiction to think they're miles underground.

The melted cores are why radiation levels are still so high in the first place.

http://www.iflscience.com/technology/melted-fuel-has-been-found-in-a-second-fukushima-reactor/

they're coming out of the wood work again.

As in, 4-5 sieverts acutely kills 50% within 30 days, 36 sieverts killed Cecil Kelley within 35 hours of exposure.

Lethal enough they still can't send people in to try to clean the major shit up, and indicative that there's still a lot more to be cleaned up.

And unless the Lieutenant who got the most exposure during the Soviet nuclear submarine meltdown spent less than an hour and a half exposed, potentially more radiation than working on a reactor with no shielding. He got 54 sieverts and sadly his heroic efforts didn't save the 21 others who died from radiation over the next two years from being on that sub that day. Everyone known to have who been exposed to 7.5 sieverts or more died within 30 days.

----

So you think nuclear power is still safer when you account for biomass-burning caused deaths now. And that's probably true, now.

The trouble is, we still haven't figured out a place to put plastic, and it's now swirling away in the ocean gyres.

We still haven't figured out a place to put radioactive waste, and hopefully we'll be a little more responsible than that. But have we come up with any kind of way to ensure whoever loses the NIMBY game on that issue in 10,000 years knows what the fuck IS in their back yard so they don't go digging? No. Fuck, everyone is still arguing so much about NIMBY concerns now we haven't been able to establish a site, let alone start planning or constructing one.

So for now, that shite is in everyone's back yards, at least if you live near a plant. Most spent fuel is stored onsite. And I lived in the town next to one for quite awhile, within the evacuation zone if there's a problem. Can't say the plant brought a ton of jobs, but it's likely far enough away from/slightly shielded by geography from the New Madrid that even though buildings in LR would be damaged if that sucker goes, and eastern Arkansas would have problems because of soil liquefaction, Russellville has some foothills hopefully shielding it. We just have to hope if more of Unit One falls apart it continues to happen while it's down for refueling. Loss of cooling to the spent fuel was quickly fixed and generators came on properly, and Unit Two shut down correctly as well despite not losing all power.

Still, knowing humans, we will argue about how to deal with the waste while it continues to accumulate on-site, and instead of society potentially deciding our warnings about the shit down there were superstitious nonsense like we did Egyptian curses only once, they'll have a lot more chances to come across places that say "STAY OUT" and say "Who are you to tell me what to do, old people?"