Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumex-US regulator: fukushima cleanup complicated
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_JAPAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-09-13-06-20-47TOKYO (AP) -- A former U.S. nuclear regulator says cleaning up Japan's wrecked Fukushima plant is a bigger challenge than the work he led at Three Mile Island and that ongoing radioactive water leaks are a minor part of that task.
Lake Barrett was appointed this month by plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. as an outside adviser for the decades-long decommissioning process. He led the Three Mile Island accident cleanup for nearly a decade as part of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
He said that the meltdowns in three of the reactors, massive radiation leaks and the volume of contaminated water at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, on Japan's northeast coast, make it a more complicated clean-up.
"In comparison to Three Mile Island, Fukushima is much more challenging, much more complex a job," Barrett told a Tokyo news conference.
chervilant
(8,267 posts)and is already spreading throughout our ecosystem. TEPCO, and all their minions, cannot put Humpty together again.
madokie
(51,076 posts)will see a complete and safe end to this tragedy. The biggest mistake man has ever done is the use of splitting atoms for boiling water. Stupid, stupid, stupid. If the technology was only coming in today we'd not allow it until it was shown that the people who advocate for its use demonstrated the safe disposal of the waste and how to stop a run-a-way nuclear power plant.
I suspect a large section of Japan will become uninhabitable by humans in the near future due to this.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)1. We place far more importance on finding and using energy (food, thermal fuel and electricity) than on what happens to the waste products.
2. We pay far more attention to concrete, immediate threats than to distant, abstract risks.
3. We act immediately on threats that affect our daily lives, we spend very little energy on complex future risks.
4. As our primary evolutionary advantage, the human brain functions mainly as a limit-removal mechanism. As a result we pay far more attention to opportunities than consequences.
All of those behaviors have their origins in adaptations to problems we faced over long periods of time earlier in our species' history. According to evolutionary psychologists, these behaviors are encoded into special-purpose problem solving mental circuitry - i.e. they are physically encoded in our brains. This physical encoding happens because it's far more efficient and faster to have a piece of special-purpose "hardware" to solve a class of recurrent problems than to arrive at a behavioral solution from fresh algorithmic analysis every time. The difficulty that poses in a fast-changing modern environment is obvious.
It's very hard to override the solution-generating circuitry using conscious logic. Most people go with the generated solution because it works most of the time - and that tendency is itself an evolutionary adaptation. Because most of the time the presented solution will be close enough for horseshoes means that the conscious double-checking is generally a waste of time. Even doing the analysis to determine that the "solution" may be wrong is too hard or energy intensive for most people. So we tend not to do it.
The examples of nuclear power and fossil fuels make the operation of these mechanisms very clear once you know to look for them:
1. We place far more importance on finding and using the energy than on what happens to the waste products of CO2 and spent nuclear fuel.
2. We pay far more attention to concrete, immediate threats like the loss of jobs or declining standards of living than to distant, abstract risks like climate change or the possibility of a meltdown.
3. We act on threats that affect our daily lives. Only once the reactor has melted down or droughts and floods threaten the food supply does society at large pay attention and begin to act.
4. Our brains function mainly as a limit-removal mechanism. As a result we pay far more attention to opportunities ("We can power civilization the modern way, by splitting atoms!" than to consequences ("We can deal with the spent fuel later, there's lots of time for that."
We also assume that our intellect is strong enough that it can control our actions, govern the direction of our development and deal with the risks. Unfortunately, the forces that shape our behavior have a very strong genetic or "hardware" component that is difficult to recognize, let alone overcome through reason.
Add to that the fact that similar special-purpose mechanisms have evolved to promote social group cohesion. These mechanisms entrain our personal behavior with that of people around us so that the group can present a united front. Objectors, malcontents and whistle-blowers are subjected to enormous social pressure to get back in the fold or risk ostracism. So people who say things like, "Perhaps we shouldn't use every last source of energy we can, and maybe we should apply the Precautionary Principle once in a while," are about as welcome in broader society as skunks at a picnic. They are ignored, derided or sanctioned through job loss or prison.
We're not stupid, exactly. We are fighting psychological effects that are very old, and are embedded in the physical structure of our brains. This makes it much easier to detect problems than to solve them, especially if they affect society at large.
PamW
(1,825 posts)Scientifically, what to do with nuclear waste is a SOLVED problem. We know what to do with nuclear waste so that it isn't around for a long time and is disposed of safely; we reprocess / recycle the spent fuel.
Here's a description of the process from nuclear physicist Dr. Charles Till, who was Associate Director of Argonne National Lab when the following PBS interview was conducted about 15 years ago:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html
Q: The fission products.
A: Fission products. But none of the long-lived toxic elements like plutonium and americium or curium, the so-called manmade elements. They're the long-lived toxic ones. And they're recycled back into the reactor ... and work every bit as well as plutonium.
Q: So they go in, and then those are broken into fission products, or some of it is. Right?
A: Yes.
Q: And you repeat the process.
A: Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products, that the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. There are a few very long-lived ones that are not very radioactive.
This is what other countries that use nuclear power, eg. France, Sweden.. do. They reprocess the fuel so that they don't have to look for a thousand year repository; the lifetimes of the waste is severely curtailed to the values given by Dr. Till above. There's no reason that nuclear waste has to have lifetimes in thousands of years. That was foisted on the nuclear industry by the 1978 Congress acting at the behest of the anti-nukes.
However, it looks like the USA is going to get its repository anyway:
http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/316797-obama-administration-must-rule-on-yucca-federal-court-says
Court: Obama broke law with nuke delay
A federal court on Tuesday ruled that the Obama administration broke the law by delaying a decision on using the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada as a permanent nuclear waste dump.
In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) violated a 1982 federal law by halting its consideration of the project. It ordered the NRC to deny or approve the Energy Departments application to store nuclear waste at the site.
PamW
madokie
(51,076 posts)Tell the Japanese people that, better yet talk to TEPCO and see what they have to say.
Then go see the people effected by Chernobyl all about how safe the waste of the nuclear fission is and how that problem is solved.
Renewables, Solar, Wind and Geothermal is the way forward.
With a long shot in Fusion if it ever comes in that is.
Oh and I don't buy what you're selling nor will I entertain what you have to say on the subject as you are biased in your beliefs.
Have a good day.