Are you suggesting that because we can measure radiation in small amounts, we should dismiss them as irrelevant. The fact that they are spreading all over is a cause of alarm. It would also tell you that closer ,they are much worse.
And as usual, the company is hiding information and lying to the public.
They do not know the pool is intact. if it were they would not have to endlessly pump it full of water. The level is normally 30 feet over the rods. It has been reported many times that the tank is not holding water. Many experts have been saying the water levels are low or gone . http://www.sovereignindependent.com/?p=16126 Americas expert info.
It’s not just the company. The US is complicit in this, as is the Japanese government, and anyone else in on it.
CNN (turns head and spits) and every other bunch of corporate whores are also either fools or liars, since not one of them ever asked the question, or pointed out the obvious.
They may actually believe what they are saying, or they are just good actors. Or good whores. But none of them ever acted like a reporter or a news agency in all this.
The cores are damaged so there are certainly fission products in the steam now, not just neutron activation. And yes, triage is probably not too strong a term.
Contrary to what some people may think, I don’t want to trivialise what’s happening. I just think the discussion should be reasonably technically informed, rather than rants based on what someone imagines a drone may have filmed and is now being covered up, which itself was based on a paraphrase of one niche news source citing The Manichai Daily news, citing un-named sources.
Perplexed. The radiation that the circulating oil is exposed to is so intense, it renders that very oil a rad-hazard? Such that burned and dispersed, the oil is so radionasty, it raises the measurable radiation to an alarming degree?
That seems out of proportion to me. Surely, they listen to those brothers on Reactor Talk, discussing the importance of changing your oil?
But seriously folks, either the oil is exposed to an amazingly radioactive environment, or the oil is there for a loooooong time. Otherwise, doesn’t seem like a small amount of oil could absorb enough radioactivity such that its sudden release would be so dramatic.
No, just that a small amount of radation IS irrelevant as a health concern.
Agreed.
Lying, being wrong, and being optimistic are different things. They are not pumping the pool full of water, they are spraying a great big arcing jet of water onto the top of the building, which still has a partial roof, and hoping some goes in. Otherwise you are correct - pool 4 is an unknown and the company should say that.
Since you want to play the expert, how much concrete blocks gamma radiation? What happens to the temperature of concrete when exposed to gamma rays? What happens to metal when exposed to gamma radiation.
Does gamma radiation obey the inverse square rule? (yes)
Can you detect gamma radiation by it’s effect on matter?
Is it possible to fly an aircraft through a cloud and sample the air? And then analyze the air sample to tell not only the molecules in it, but the amount of each element in the air sample?
Pretty much agree. The oil itself could not have been the source of radiation during the fire. Some spent fuel pool water might have resided within the pump, or the oil fire might have been started by heat from the exposed ends of fuel rods, but those are both WAGs.
What is less of a WAG is that a zirconium cladding fire is unlikely, especially so in reactor 4 where the rods had been cooling for months. See my post 88.
I have read quite a bit on this subject (albeit from a layman’s understanding).
I would be happy to read the cites in this thread but at 550+ posts I am not willing to trudge through finding the few you mention. If you recall roughly where they were or some key words I can use to zero in on them I’d like to give them a look.
I simply do not believe this. Not that some energy generation can be put online quickly but that you can put up enough to meet the energy needs of the US as well as solve distribution problems and solve the intermittent nature of many of these options. If you are filling the gaps with enough natural gas plants to meet full (or near enough) need then you are back to fossil fuel consumption. Natural gas reserves have shot up but I am sure you have seen the guy who can light his tap water on fire due to fracking. Not to mention CO2 emissions. Natural gas is not without its problems.
Current estimates, at 2008 consumption rates, suggest the US has enough total gas reserves for 90 years. This of course assumes 2008 consumption rates do not rise. The current volume of “economical” gas we can access is a bit more than 10% of that. (cite) So, while there is a lot more to be had it will be more expensive. Do your economic calculations account for that?
Natural gas power generation in the US is about 23% of total electricity generated. Double that and those reserves don’t seem that big any more. Decades sure but only decades…not even close to 100 years. A child born today will likely see it run out well within their lifetime. There is more to be had worldwide of course but you are back to dependence on foreign energy sources. Think of all the fun that has brought us so far with oil (not to mention other countries are having increasing energy needs).
Reactors like the Traveling Wave would be far cheaper to operate. You build it, turn it on and let it run. A great deal of the cost of current reactors is turning them off every two years, taking the fuel out, storing that fuel for a decade and refueling the reactor and starting it again.
I have not seen a financial rundown of that or other designs. But if you monetize the CO2 emissions that makes your natural gas more expensive as well.
I claim no expertise, only enough technical literacy to absorb what Iv’e been reading. Gamma penetrates strongly. It’s mainly a matter of now much mass you can get in the way. IIRC you’d need a couple of yards thickness of concrete. Gamma heats what it passes through, be it concrete or metal, and is ionising as well. Don’t think it’ll have any lasting effect on metal though.
Gamma is ionising so it’ll click a geiger counter or darken an exposure badge or photographic film, so in that sense, yes. However it won’t activate what it irradiates so you can’t tell it’s seen gamma by looking afterwards.
I am very confused how FX goes from a report* that states that
to statements that the site is being monitored by that drone 24/7 , knowledge of what the drone has allegedly recorded, and in direct contradiction to the cite, that only the Japanese have seen this footage.
BTW, Matt, thank you for the detailed explanations. It remains a frightening circumstance and with real risk of becoming a much worse disaster than already exists.
*link to the Japanese newspaper article
I can see why that might be confusing. First, ‘around the clock’ means ‘all the time’, or 24 hours a day.
‘nuclear power experts and others at the California base’ means members of the United States military and government agencies, as well as any outside experts they have included.
‘The Japanese government, however, has yet to disclose the footage’ means the Japanese government hasn’t shown anyone else, or disclosed that they have highly detailed visual and infrared video of the entire site, 24 hours a day. And night. It’s up to them because the US has to respect their wishes in the matter, and can’t show the world footage of another nation with out their permission.
Not disclosing that they have been taking the footage all along, is deception. The Japanese also have repeated over and over they couldn’t see what was going on, which is straight up telling huge lies.
And of course there were the three explosions, and the fires, and the release of material, all of which everyone in the loop was looking at in detail, but not telling anyone about it.
You may agree that it’s in the best interest of the military and government officials to lie and deceive the public. But please, don’t try to say it wasn’t happening.
The questions about gamma radiation, concrete and sampling air, all relate to how somebody can tell what is going on at the disaster site, while not exposing anyone to the radiation. And why it’s possible to see through concrete and know what is going on inside the buildings.
And why the governments involved know exactly what is coming out of each building, and in what amounts.
Of course some might say they don’t have any idea what is going on, which means the world is incompetent and no government and no military has the ability to observe events and radiation at a distance. Which of these ridiculous assumption you choose doesn’t matter.
Using gamma? How exactly do you think you would do that? There’s no way to focus it. When you use radioactive sources to test welds, you use a small source to approximate a point radiator and put a photographic film right up against the weld to inspect, with the source on the other side. You get a density-shadow image off that. No aerial gamma-detector will be able to form an image remotely, using the gamma sources inside the reactor buildings.
Exactly what, I’m sure they do. They don’t even need to sample the plumes: detecting what’s landing on the ground would tell you. Quantities would be something of a estimate though.
If you mean there’s stuff that isn’t being released to the general public, very likely. If you mean there’s stuff being hidden that adversely affects public safety, I personally doubt it but you’re entitled to your opinion.
Nah, you are using now the “logic” of 911 thruters, ignoring what others are reporting about the levels of radiation is just more fun, like thruters forever ignoring about what caused the towers to collapse, talking about conspiracies is more fun.
Post 300, but to save you the effort here is the wind resource link again.
From the same cite is this bit about intermittency:
Note that solar has a complementary set of advantages and disadvantages and similar location of resource density. Using both in the same network substantially decreases the risk of variable resource strength, even in Summer:
Also intermittency is not a significant issue until a particular renewable resource is significant fraction of a regions power supply, something we have a fair ways until we get to. Get up to 10%, retiring maybe the dirtiest 20% of our coal plants, and then we’ll worry about how much higher we can go. There are also other storage solutions for the intermittency issue.
There is a lot of unexploited resource falling on factory rooftops, heating up buildings in Summer instead of producing electricity. Even GM is getting in this act.
And North America has less than 5% of those reserves. So indeed I agree that natural gas is at best a medium term fix, for a few decades. I’ve tried to be clear that I would want it as part of the mix and do not view it as the silver bullet. But we need to retire these oldest dirtiest coal plants NOW. A mix of natural gas generation and renewables can allow for that.
Yes, a natural gas plant still releases CO2, again about 50-70% less than a typical coal plant. We’d be replacing the oldest ones. Even if nuclear could be brought on line as cheaply as gas plants can, the fact remains that getting them online is a very slow process and cost so much that no one wants to do it unless we the people absorb all the risk and much of the cost for them. Again, as it stands we will be lucky if we can build enough of them to replace what ages out.
You may be interested in this article. Besides making the same point I’ve been making, that the poor economics of nuclear was dooming nuclear in America in the near term anyway long before the Japan quake, is some bits on possible future designs:
Maybe those can be ready for prime time in a few decades. Maybe not. But they aren’t right now while natural gas is, and renewables are doing a warm-up lap.
There are nuke plants, and there are nuke plants, just as there are cars and there are cars. If you’d used a minimum of rational thinking and bothered to read the whole of my post, you’d have the answer to your “question”. I’ll repeat the key point here just in case you can’t be bothered to scroll up and re-read my post:
But I guess that that would have ruined your chance for a snark. :rolleyes:
Another nice thing about gas: not only is it lower-carbon per unit of energy thanks to the high hydrogen content, but in a good combined-cycle plant you can burn it at up 60% thermodynamic efficiency.
I’m not entirely convinced renewables are even doing a warm-up lap as yet but I’ll be more than happy if it turns out I’m wrong.
I’m also quite happy that we could develop a fission-based future over the next century or more using uranium, thorium and breeder reactors, with global economic growth, raising the developing and third worlds out of poverty, and stabilising atmospheric CO2 levels. I still think it could be done safely. I haven’t studied the case that it should be done, or that renewables are a viable alternative, to any great degree.
Of course it isn’t. And my first reaction to the pictures from Fukushima was “WTF?? They’ve built those things on the fucking beachfront with a fucking view to the main fault line! :smack: :smack: :smack:”
And still, in spite of that, radiation pollution has been really, really small. The “increased levels” measured in Tokyo spiked below the background radiation level in London. Cite.
sigh I guess a balanced viewpoint, recognizing the other party’s valid arguments, is out of the question. Even here in GD. :rolleyes: