Bye Bye Japan and US West evacuation: Top Scientist

[lovuian]

[rhett o rick]

1. I believe that things are very dangerous in Fukushima, but I would

like to get more specifics on the scenarios of what can happen.

There are spent fuel rods, I believe, at all commercial nuclear plants across our country. They are stored in lots called parking lots in containers. Some of the containers must be getting old and may have corrosion problems. Funny how no one seems worried.

[lovuian]

2. I would love to see the report Suzuki saw

Suzuki is a very popular scientist in Canada
and as part of a defense plan for protecting Americans

we need to know what is going to happen to Western America


and prepare for it

[vrp]

3. Isn't it ironic!

Nuclear power from Japan creating a disaster in the U.S.

[spin]

4. I remember watching news reports on the Fukushima disaster when it was happening ...

and telling my family half jestingly that we could kiss Japan goodbye.

I can only hope and pray that my prediction was wrong.

[wtmusic]

5. No one seems worried, because there's nothing to be worried about. nt

[rhett o rick]

7. Your logic has a problem. Maybe no one is worried because no one knows

about what's going on. Do you think there is no danger here?

[wtmusic]

21. That's possible but unlikely.

I'm not that cynical, or gullible. One of the two.

IMO the danger of the situation in Fukushima compared to global warming is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1:300,000, and nuclear is a risk well worth taking to stop the destruction of most of life on Earth in the next few centuries.

[rhett o rick]

23. But it's not one or the other. Climate change will come but in the meantime we dont

need a nuclear disaster in Japan.

Nuclear power is not the answer to our power needs. If you add up the energy cost of building a plant, maintaining a plant, and disposing of a plant, you will find that the energy you get from that plant isnt so cheap. And the risk of a disaster isnt worth it. Just think of all the horrendous amounts of energy that will have to be expended to clean up the mess.

Besides, we have thousands of tons of spent fuel currently stored in containers in parking lots just waiting for a disaster. The containers wont last for ever. We haven yet spent the energy to clean that mess up.

[wtmusic]

24. You're worrying yourself over nothing.

There is no danger to you from Fukushima, or nuclear waste in dry cask storage.

Turn off fearmongers like Arnie Gundersen, Robert Alvarez, and Helen Caldicott. They've made a cottage industry out of scaring people.

Worry about the things that matter.

[Sirveri]

10. What is happening is histrionics.

Radiation release from this even has had minimal impact on the West Coast of the US. The EPA and FDA continue to monitor the food supply (less radioactive than it was during the 1960's). If contaminants enter the food supply in sufficient quantities to prompt a response, the appropriate agency (likely the FDA) will issue a warning to limit consumption. They have already done this for certain seafood due to mercury contamination from coal fired power plant emissions. If things get really bad they will pull the food from the shelves.

I was going to explain potential scenarios in detail, but that would require bringing you up to speed on a subject that takes the Navy six straight months to teach from scratch of 8 hour a day, 5 day a week class work (plus homework!).

These guys know what's at stake, and they don't want anything bad to happen. Trust them to do their job, it's not like you can do much else.

[DeSwiss]

12. BS. n/t

[Katashi_itto]

14. Total BS

[rhett o rick]

17. Let's see if I follow your logic. Since the past events that occurred at Fukishima didnt

harm us, then there is no reason to be concerned about future events. Not a logical conclusion.

"less radioactive than it was during the 1960's" That may be true by we know that no amount of radiation is safe. Low amounts are just less likely to cause harm (but can).

"If contaminants enter the food supply in sufficient quantities to prompt a response, the appropriate agency (likely the FDA) will issue a warning to limit consumption." First of all this is no reason not to be concerned about what might happen in Japan. And second of all the FDA decides what is the limits and they can change. Thom Hartmann talks about being in Germany after Chernobyl and said that the upper limit on the radioactivity allowed in milk kept increasing as the amount found increased. Dont put it passed the food corporations to pressure the FDA.

"I was going to explain potential scenarios in detail, but that would require bringing you up to speed on a subject that takes the Navy six straight months to teach from scratch of 8 hour a day, 5 day a week class work (plus homework!). " I respect that you have a lot of knowledge in this area and I know that a lot of reaction is "histrionics", but it stems from the lack of knowledge. Both sides, pro and con are blowing a lot of smoke. I dont want all the possible scenarios, I just want the worst cases and the odds of that happening. What happens when the spent fuel rods overheat?

The best way of eliminating "histrionics" is knowledge. I am having a hard time getting unbiased information.

"These guys know what's at stake, and they don't want anything bad to happen. Trust them to do their job," Yeah, just because they have failed miserably so far is no reason to believe that they dont have a clue as to what to do. By the way, we were supposed to trust the engineers and GE for this horrible design that stores spent fuel OVER THE REACTOR. And we have similar plants in the good ole USofA. Forgive me if I dont trust them. Their primary concern is profit.

[Sirveri]

18. No. Just no.

Is there reason to be concerned about future events? What good would it do. They have to empty that pool and move the spent fuel cells elsewhere. Could something bad happen during that operation, yes, can you do ANYTHING about that, no. So don't worry about it because that won't help.

You're totally wrong about radiation, because we know that there are safe dosages of radiation, and that statement is the bullshit hysterical type of crap that gets tossed around this site regularly. It's completely false, basic common sense can debunk that statement. Life could not evolve anywhere without resistance to radiation, the idea that we did not evolve without being able to safely absorb the output of our own sun and the variations from the soil around the earth tosses that out the window.

Thom Hartman has a financial interest in anti-nuke hysteria since he runs a company that specializes in decommissioning nuclear plants. The more that get shut down, the more work his company has and the more money he makes. As for industry leaning on the regulatory agencies, why hasn't the coal lobby done so already? They're bigger than the nuclear industry in this country by far, yet all those warning about mercury contamination are still out there.

Realistically, that's hard to say. The entire process is handled underwater. What will most likely happen is that they will withdraw the oldest rods that are the least damaged first and install them in the removal device, then once that device is full, remove it and restart the process. This will continue and they'll find out which, if any, fuel cells have such mechanical damage that they can't be properly loaded into the container. Most of these operations take place underwater, including sealing and unsealing. The most probable problems have primarily localized effects. One of the fuel cell assemblies might be so corroded that it breaks open inside the pool, at which point they would have to figure out how to proceed based on developed casualty procedures. Even that won't really do much. It will be a pile of sand sitting on the bottom of the pool until they vacuum it out. They have assembled a brand new crane system to remove the fuel from the pool, so there isn't much worry about equipment failure there. It's not going to magically go critical the second it leaves the pool in the container. Worst probable occurrence is contaminated radiation worker. Worst improbable, the brand new crane cable snaps (despite them going over it with a fine tooth comb and testing it) while lifting a full container out of the pool and it drops and they crack the pool and have to patch it while flooding before all the water flows out the crack. Or there is a 9.0 earthquake that makes the pool fall down (which is why they're doing this now and why we should support it in the first place).

When the spent rods overheat, is highly unlikely to happen at this point in time. My boat was in the shipyard for over a year, at the end of the first year our core made so little heat that we had to run pumps just to heat the water up. If these rods overheat... they will get hot. How hot is a power balance equation, those rods make X amount of thermal energy, losses to ambient are Y. After 1 year heat production is reduced by a factor of ten. After five it's another factor of ten. We're two and a half years out. So we're probably producing 8kW/tHM compared to 100+kW/tHM when the pool water levels dropped after the accident (since those rods had just been removed for maintenance). So while they might potentially get hot enough to boil water, they won't get hot enough to melt concrete and steel. Also, they're being transferred to another on site storage facility, so they aren't going very far.

I would agree with your statement about getting unbiased knowledge.

Fair enough for not trusting people with a profit motive in mind, that said, I was referring more to the workers who live there. They have no interest in seeing this go belly up. In addition, neither do the manufacturers, because if this does go belly up, they will never make a sale again. Three mile island destroyed the industry for new construction, they have a huge financial incentive to see that not be repeated here.

I would advise you to pay attention and watch what happens, and then when nothing happens, see what the people claiming we're going to be forced to evacuate the west coast have to say. I am willing to bet that they will drop the doom and gloom rhetoric about this, and move on to something else to have doom and gloom rhetoric about. That's basically what I did, I remember directly after the accident, oh don't drink milk, the entire west coast is going to be irradiated, mass migrations, blah blah blah. 2 and a half years later, radiation levels are lower now than they were during the 1960's, we haven't seen a spike in cancer cases, we don't see mass warnings about consumption of dairy and fish, everyone goes about their daily lives like normal. I just bought my first house in the SF bay area, pretty sure we're going to be fine.

[rhett o rick]

19. There are two extremes, both are misleading. If you were a nuc you should recognize that there

is no safe dose of radiation. Radiation can pass thru a body and not damage any critical cells, but then it just might also. If a lot of radiation goes thru a body then the odds increase that cells of your internal organs might be damaged. So the best we can say is that small doses have a greatly reduced risk of causing cell damage. In fact I think that in your training they said that there are "no known effects" from small doses of radiation. No one know what small doses do. How much cell damage leads to cancer. We dont know. Also, your training taught you that it takes very little internal dosage to cause significant cell damage. If there is radioactive particles in our food, it can cause damage to our organs.

I dont believe we need to run around with our hair on fire, but if it is remotely possible that the wrong actions taken by Tepco could endanger our lives, even to the extent of low doses of radiation, then I believe we have a right to see that doesnt happen.

By the way, if spent fuel wasnt hot or cant get hot, why do we go to such lengths to keep it cool?

[Sirveri]

20. There is a safe dose, the science is clear on that.

When an individual encounters radiation and it interacts with their cell, it can do one of four things. The cell can self repair and continue functioning normally. The cell can die. The cell can be injured, and when it undergoes mitosis create non-viable daughters that die (the cell basically dies). The cell receives damage, improperly repairs, and you end up with a mutation (which may be cancerous, but doesn't have to be). Because our bodies are constantly regenerating (and this process is not perfect, which is why cancer exists in nature), we can safely absorb some dosage of radiation, and our body will repair it and move on. So long as the ability to self repair is not exceeded by the damage from ionizing radiation, damage is not done. Hence the basis for safe dose rates. If you ingest a single 'hot' particle, and it decides to camp out in your stomach for the next five years, you won't notice, because you probably already have several 'hot' particles already there from natural sources. The issue is one of balance, and in the last 70 years we have figured out a lot of the science on that subject and where the tipping point is. That is why there are safe limits for consumption, they are specifically designed to minimize your exposure and to keep those levels below a safe point that is already ten times lower than the point where we start to see problems.

I never said spent fuel can't get hot, just that it won't get hot enough currently. The issue is one of an energy balance equation. Thermal dynamics is a somewhat complicated subject, in that heat transfer rates depend on a variety of factors, including difference of temperatures between objects, type of heat transfer (conductive, convection, radiative), and the ability of the materials to transfer heat (thermal conductivity). In the case of the spent fuel cells, they generate thermal energy via decay radiation processes, they should be generating around 7-8% of the amount of energy they were generating than they were back in March of 2011. They are surrounded by water, which is much more thermally conductive than air, and thus increases the rate of losses to ambient. This water is cooled, creating a temperature difference which causes any heat generated by the fuel cell assemblies to move into the cooling water. I won't go into the difference between forced convection and laminar flow patterns of water. If the water were to heat up to the boiling point, the act of heating up would discharge 1 BTU/lb until it reached the boiling point, at which point the water would require an additional 970.4 BTU/lb in order to turn to steam. The energy output of the cells isn't likely to be capable of reaching that point, and if it did it still wouldn't get hot enough to melt the cladding and expose the fuel medium to the environment. Water has a two fold effect, it's a good cooling medium, but more importantly is that every 2 feet of water is one tenth thickness of radiation shielding. Meaning that for every two feet it reduces radiation dose rates to the workers by a factor of ten. So if you put 10 feet of water on top of the fuel cells, you reduce the radiation emitted by 10^5, or .001% of the expected dose rates.

Long story short, keep the fuel cells covered, and heat isn't an issue, uncovered would require a thermal balance equation that I don't have the time to research and do.

[DeSwiss]

13. All you need:

http://fairewinds.org/tag/fairewinds/

[WhoIsNumberNone]

6. You can make something foolproof

But you can't make it damnfoolproof

-Murphy's Law

[haydukelives]

9. nothing is fool proof

because fools are so ingenious.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. David Suzuki is not a nuclear scientist or even a physicist

but a zoologist.

First of all, it's not "bye-bye Japan." It's a small corner of Japan that is affected. I have contacts in Japan, including one who knows people who go into the contaminated area to rescue animals.

Second, the radiation from Fukushima is insignificant compared with what was in the atmosphere when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were both testing nukes above ground in the late 1950s. Radiation is at normal levels in Tokyo (where I was last month), and areas south and west of Tokyo were completely unaffected.

That "radiation map" that appeared all over the Internet? It was a map of tsunamis and tsunami debris.

That "deformed vegetables" page that you probably saw? It was taken from all over the Internet, and some of those pictures have been around for years.

I'm not a nuke enthusiast, and the situation is bad enough in the contaminated area, but you only discredit yourself if you repeat hysterical or unsubstantiated stuff you hear in the media.

[Katashi_itto]

15. Don't want to listen to Suzuki? Fine here:

And this is two years old

[DeSwiss]

16. Whistling past the graveyard.

http://fairewinds.org/tag/fairewinds/

[wtmusic]

22. Take your reasoned thought elsewhere

It has no place at a nuke hysteripalooza.

[lovuian]

11. David Schindler

David Schindler is Killam Memorial Professor of Ecology at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. From 1968 to 1989, he founded and directed the Experimental Lakes Project of the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans near Kenora, Ontario, conducting interdisciplinary research on the effects of eutrophication, acid rain, radioactive elements and climate change on boreal ecosystems. His work has been widely used in formulating ecologically sound management policy in Canada, the USA and in Europe.

His current research interests include the study of fisheries management in mountain lakes, the biomagnification of organochlorines in food chains, effects of climate change and UV radiation on lakes, and global carbon and nitrogen budgets.

Dr. Schindler teaches limnology, the philosophy, sociology and politics of science/science and public policy in Canada, and environmental decision making.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Schindler

and David Suzuki
David Takayoshi Suzuki, CC OBC (born March 24, 1936) is a Japanese Canadian academic, science broadcaster and environmental activist. Suzuki earned a Ph.D in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961, and was a professor in the genetics department at the University of British Columbia from 1963 until his retirement in 2001. Since the mid-1970s, Suzuki has been known for his TV and radio series and books about nature and the environment. He is best known as host of the popular and long-running CBC Television science magazine, The Nature of Things, seen in over forty nations. He is also well known for criticizing governments for their lack of action to protect the environment.

A long time activist to reverse global climate change, Suzuki co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation in 1990, to work "to find ways for society to live in balance with the natural world that sustains us." The Foundation's priorities are: oceans and sustainable fishing, climate change and clean energy, sustainability, and Suzuki's Nature Challenge. He also served as a director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association from 1982 to 1987.

Suzuki was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 2009. His 2011 book, The Legacy, won the Nautilus Book Award. He is a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 2004, David Suzuki was selected as the greatest living Canadian in a CBC poll.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Suzuki

Suzuki is the recipient of the Order of Canada, first as an Officer (1976), then upgraded to Companion status in (2006),[26] the Order of British Columbia (1995),[27] UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science (1986)[28] and a long list of Canadian and international honours.

In 2004, Suzuki was nominated as one of the top ten "Greatest Canadians" by viewers of the CBC. In the final vote he ranked fifth, making him the greatest living Canadian.[29] Suzuki said that his own vote was for Tommy Douglas who was the eventual winner.

In 2006, Suzuki was the recipient of the Bradford Washburn Award presented at the Museum of Science in Boston, Massachusetts.[30]

In 2007, Suzuki was honoured by Global Exchange, with the International Human Rights Award.

In 2009, Suzuki was awarded the Honorary Right Livelihood Award.[31]

As of 2012, Suzuki had received 16 significant academic awards and over 100 other awards

I think we should listen to what the man says...he sounds like he knows a thing or two