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Ever heard of Jeffrey Immelt, Chump?
Yes
No
sort of (explain)
..........Randomguy created a slight breach of etiquette by skipping the triple dare and going right for the throat!
Ever heard of Jeffrey Immelt, Chump?
I've heard of you and your golf carts.
Ever heard of Jeffrey Immelt, Chump?
Let me rephrase that. There are new designs that cannot blow up.
Yes
So does the natural material they started with
It can be diluted back to natural levels. What I don't understand is why they don't dilute it at least a substantial amount for storage.
there are other issues. Under forced fission, other radioactive isotopes are made outside their natural decay pattern. Still, waste storage shouldn't be the problem it is.
Fair enough, they can't blow up.
Can they meltdown?
That seems to be the case in Fukushima.
What would happen should a large glob of molten radioactive goo at 4,000C hit an underground body of water?
If anything, this points out the need for a good safe disposal/storage site for the spent fuel rods. The bulk of the radiation vented to the atmosphere has come from the spent rods in the storage pool that were still stored at the site...
Uranium-238 takes about 45 billion years to decay to background. The longest lived isotope in nuclear waste is Cesium-137, which takes 307 years to decay to background. I heard that one of the reactors is using MOX fuel which is a Plutonium blend. PU 239 is found in about 7% quan y...this has a decay of 240k years to background.
No, you begin with a set amount and the decay chains proceed accordingly (ie the amount of radioactivity on this planet is not increasing).
All elements above lead (82) are radioactive. All elements heavier than lead strive to become lead (mostly in the form of Pb208), and given sufficient time, they do. Pb 208 is stable.
This shouldn't affect the food chain to a significant extent.
Indeed. There isn't yet even one long-term storage facility for high-level nuclear waste in the entire world. The Swedish and Norweigans are building sites for themselves, and the US was going to use Yucca mountain until it was abandoned. This is a great example of poor regulation - any rational government would require the waste storage facility to be built concurrent with the first reactors. Instead, govts ignored the need for waste storage (at industry's request, no doubt), and now no-one is willing to pay to get it built.
I'm utterly opposed to the proliferation of III gen nuclear reactors which can melt down, and are not "0 emission" as suggested by Obama and others (mining and processing Uranium uses a lot of fossil fuels - EREOI for the entire nuclear life-cycle averages about 15:1). However, I am supportive of IV gen nuclear using the thorium cycle - it can't melt down, and it runs on spent fuel rods from III gen! It also produces a much lower volume of radioactive waste, although the waste produced is more dangerous than III gen waste.
You say some really ignorant things. The above is internally contradictory - more radioactive elements have been added to the environment by humans through this disaster, so where are they magically disappearing to so that they're "diluted back to natural levels"? They NOT. By definition, there are now more radioactive atoms in the environment, many of which are extremely long-lived. The only way they will be removed from the local environment is by decay or geosequestration (ie. being buried inside new-forming rocks, a process that takes thousands-millions of years). Also, you've got to consider bioac ulation through the food chain (see below).It can be diluted back to natural levels. What I don't understand is why they don't dilute it at least a substantial amount for storage.
Um, no. Only someone not actually trained in biology/ecology would say that. This will affect food chains through bioac ulation - as smaller organisms are eaten by larger ones, the radioactive elements become more concentrated. We see exactly the same thing with heavy metals, organchlorines and other long-lived dangerous chemicals. It is the reason polar bears have ridiculously high levels of DDT and other organochlorines (over 500x US EPA 'safe' levels) even though DDT is only used in the tropics.
This disaster will affect generations to come over a widespread area in the form of birth defects and increased cancer rates. Everything in the world is interconnected, and all of the toxic and radioactive pollution we are saturating the planet in comes back to hurt us at a population level, not to mention the damage it does to ecosystem sustainability.
I'd advise you all not to fall into the trap of wishing this kind of thing away. This disaster, just like the Gulf oil spill, is directly related to the way we all live and it will affect us all. You can't rationalise away the effects of a disaster like this - they are what they are. Learn from it for the future.
Last edited by RuffnReadyOzStyle; 03-15-2011 at 06:46 PM.
I think you're being a bit melodramatic about this, not to mention the fact that you're making assumptions about the ultimate radiation burden this event will ultimately pose to the environment. I based my prior statement on what we know now (or at least what the authorities are letting us get). 400 mrem/hr over the course of this event won't cause significant issues with our food chain. To say otherwise is pure speculation on your part and is the type of mindset that invites the hysteria we commonly see when the word "nuclear" is used.
I know this wasn't aimed at me directly, but I need to ask you if you understand that the red part means. And please don't tell me that it automatically equates to increased radiation dose/exposure......because it doesn't.
No. they are completely safe.
I'm pretty sure you'll find there has been significantly more radioaction released to the environment than is currently being disclosed. Two reactor fires and 3 (or is it 4?) explosions already? This is not an insignificant event, and I have little doubt that we will find out well after the fact that at least one of the container cores have been breached.
My main point was something you're continuing to ignore - bioac ulation through food webs will mean that significantly more than background levels end up in middle and top predators.
I was making a rhetorical point - if you release more radioactive particles into the environment than were there before, by definition you will have more a more radioactive environment until those particles and their decay products have decayed to a negligible level. By definition, the level of background radiation will be higher than it was before until sufficient decay has occurred. I made no other claims based on this.
And, no, I am not being melodramatic at all. To suggest that a disaster of this magnitude will have little effect on the surrounding environment (and probably more subtle widespread effects as well due to the interconnectivity of the planet's systems) is naive at best.
People want to rationalise away the effect of events like this, usually with something along the lines of "it doesn't affect me, so what do I care?" Well, sure as it will affect people living in that area with higher cancer rates, and through the food web will affect us all, so I think that's a dangerous way of thinking. The only way to prevent future such disasters is to change the way we think and behave.
Last edited by RuffnReadyOzStyle; 03-15-2011 at 08:45 PM.
Really? Who's telling you this? The people selling the product?
I think this comment goes against WC's world-famous (tm) skepticism.
Completely safe in the aspect that there cannot be thermal runaway, meltdowns, etc.
What he's not telling you is that IV gen nuclear is still years or decades away from commercialisation, less if we properly invested in R&D right now. However, he is right in that thorium cycle reactors won't melt down or explode like uranium reactors.
As for "completely safe", thorium reactors still produce radioactive waste that must be stored for thousands of years (although they produce far less of it than uranium reactors), so "completely safe" is an overstatement. Certainly "safer" is reasonable though.
I don't know the details, but they are smaller reactors of a few megawatts rather than hundreds or gigawatts. There are newer variations of the TRIGA reactor. Know little detail otherwise, except that as the core increases in temperature, the reaction decreases. It becomes self regulating that way.
I wasn't thinking of thorium, and these reactors I heard of use low enriched uranium.
We should go balls out developing thorium-based reactors.
I can't and won't make those assumptions. If you feel the need to in order to make a hypothetical point, go right ahead. Explosions? They mean nothing without context, again showing that you really don't understand the nature of the goings on, at least not in a manner that qualifies you to make these wild assertions about a major impact on the food chain or any other part of Japans ecosystem.
Give it some time Ruff, your stance may well bear out. All I'm saying is that given what we know, you can't make the claim of a "Chernobyl-like disaster scenario yet.
I ignored it because, again, the dose rates currently present at the reactor don't leand any sort of weight to this argument. How much bio-ac ulation in a fish would cause a problem for humans? Assume said human ate 2 fish per day.
And the claim you made is patently false. Sure you have more radioactive atoms by number, but that doesn't translate to higher dose or exposure rates. In your line of thinking, you completely neglect the modes of decay of various isotopes, their half lives, as well as the contribution to the dose rate from each isotope. You've swung around the term "long lived isotopes" as well without considering the relative biological effect of each. It's a much deeper puzzle than simply having "more radioactive atoms" in the area. To borrow a line from you: "Only a person not trained in radiologic/nuclear physics would say that"
Of what magnitude? Again, I put it to you to produce something substantive that indicates that a major radiologic event is taking place which will harm the ecosystem for years to come. As I said earlier, you may come to be correct here but I certainly pray that you're wrong.
Understand that as a person who works with radiation for a living I think your argument is compelling. Unfortunately the information we are getting just doesn't bear your doomsday scenario out. I no way am I approaching this with a cavalier at ude. Radiation and nuclear safety are always agendas high on my list. I don't happen to agree that a knee jerk reaction is necessary though. Let's get all of the facts first, then proceed from there.
It hasn't changed my mind in that I want nuclear power but not the uranium-plutonium kind, which unfortunately is the mainstream type of reactors nowadays. They produce incredible amounts of waste, they're super expensive, but at the time they also produced enriched uranium which was 'needed' during the nuclear arms race.
We were discussing Thorium not long ago, a much safer type of reactor. I rather invest in more R&D on that as a viable energy source than wind/solar, which we already know are severely limited in capacity.
What kind of waste is that? AFAIK, the beauty of thorium reactors is that they don't produce such a thing.
Go and read about the thorium cycle then - plenty of websites will explain it to you. It still produces long-lived radioactive waste, but a lot less than the current uranium reactors.
BTW, apologies because I've also been conflating LFTRs (liquid fluoride thorium reactors: http://celticshub.com/2011/03/15/nat...e-association/) with IV gen IFRs (integral fast reactors), although both are definitely preferable to what's in use today for a variety of reasons. Complex topic though - if you really want to learn about this stuff put aside a lot of time!
Last edited by RuffnReadyOzStyle; 03-16-2011 at 01:10 AM.
I never claimed that it is a "doomsday scenario" - my point was simply that we shouldn't trivialise the short or long-term effects of nuclear accidents of any scale.
I could tell you work with radiation because it's clear that you know what you are talking about. I'm definitely making some assumptions based on what I've seen (significant explosions, reports of increased radiation levels further afield, reports of materials that could only come from fuel rods in the air, new reports of greatly elevated radiation levels around the plant), and also the Japanese propensity to downplay things (which they have done all throughout this crisis, only to backflip the next day). You are correct though, we don't have enough information to predict anything concrete at this point.
I never said this was a Chernobyl-level disaster (although it still has the potential to be if the rods in either the cooling ponds or reactors become exposed), but any significant release of radioactive isotopes (depending on type, half-life, etc.) is going to have effects on human health and ecosystems, in the localised area at the very least. The question you pose regarding human health and fish is impossible to answer without more information (as you have ably pointed out), as would be the effect on soils and surface/groundwater of any radioactive particle being blown inland.
Point taken. Let's wait until the true extent of this disaster comes out and then discuss it again, but given the dribs and drabs of unfortunate evidence coming out I bet it's a lot worse than is currently being reported.
By the way, do you work in nuclear energy, nuclear medicine, or do you use radioisotopes in your work? I ask not to have a go at you but because I'm curious. It's always good to learn from an expert.
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