From Stark
Both Dick Conoboy and regular commenter AFY have called our attention to this post from Dr. Josef Oehmen of MIT, who discusses Japan’s troubled nuclear power plants in a very clear and precise way. He argues that even the worst-case scenario at these plants would fall far short of catastrophe, except for the company that owns the plants.
I thought it was worth highlighting and reposting.
Let’s hope Oehmen is as smart as he sounds.
Me too!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Wow, He’s not worried, sorta like Alfred E Neuman.
I’m not so sure that guy has his facts straight.
He dismisses and underestimates the heat of the reaction at the point of fuel pellets in a pile without a structured core,
and also the remaining radioactivity once his ‘core cools to a manageable level’.
In a few hundred years?
Chemical heat isn’t the problem and there’s a good reason you can’t work hot side for more than a few minutes a day.
The tripe about the danger of residual radiation is way off base and fits the standard apologists script.
A melted core also includes melted control rods and that ‘reaction’ you’ve so carefully controlled is not any more – the danger to a melt-down in the first place – it cannot be controlled fission-wise.
It’s only a loss to the power company!
Are you kidding?
That’s coastline ghost town for the next 500 years in a wide radius well beyond power plant property.
Citizen is now smarter than a nuclear physicist.
Not.
MIT is setting up a means of dealing more responsibly with this unexpected publicity. According to an MIT website:
Evidentally, there is more to this meets the eye, as Oehmen is certainly not an expert on nuclear emergencies.
http://lean.mit.edu/about/lai-structure/faculty-researchers-and-staff/oehmen-josef
To date, I have yet to have any one claim that Dr. Oehmne’s analysis is incorrect.
Which I suspect would have happened instantly, if he were substantially off base.
He does a good job of explaining a reactor and how it works, which is helpful in understanding the real risks, rather than listening to those folks standing around hoping for a car crash.
Rather than attack Dr. Oehmne, maybe one of the posters could find another analysis by a qualified individual, to see if there is anther view.
By the way mechanical engineers are engineers to, and most of the containment issues are what a mechanical engineer does for a living.
I spent many years in the atomic energy field and I can spot nonsense right away.
Why doesn’t Grace Kelley refute my points?
There is a good reason why the MIT guy us isn’t worried about reactors thousands of miles away from his house – he doesn’t have to.
You’re nuts if you think engineering includes the affects on solid state matter in high energy fields.
It’s physics that the engineer is mis-citing.
He treats a radioactive pile of melted fuel rods as if it they were charcoal briquettes.
Citizen is full of Nuclear Physics – he was raised by two of them.
Princess of a bygone era, you really need to go easy on that whacky brew you’re drinking deary….it is not making you smarter…then again neither is whatever this fool is imbibing. Sort of makes MIT a laughing stock and how much do you want to bet that in the days to come he will be seen for the fool and cheer leader of a deluded industry he truly is?
If you need justification for the concern, then how about the news the Navy has moved all it’s ships further from the area? How about every expert being interviewed by the BBC and others who are clearly not spreading this whacky BS?
Pull your pretty little head out of that dark and sunless place an grow up….or better yet go to Japan and volunteer to watch the reactors that have now been abandoned because the personnel no longer want to be in the area. Then when you come home we can use you as a night light…
The way things are going, Chernobyl will no longer be the example of a worst case scenario….the waste problem aside, the world is finally coming to see that all this was not really worth the trade off….
Down here, NZ is feeling pretty good that they are in the southern Hemisphere and are Nuclear free and always will be….
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/34350
Actual nuclear experts say the sea water being pumped in as a last ditch effort at cooling is causing high speed corrosion and since this has never been done before at either Chernobyl or Three Mile Islan, no one knows if the containment will hold, espoecially for the tens of thousand s of years that will be necessary…
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fukushima-core
Down here we’re getting news of another explosion in the last half hour that has definitely damaged the containment vessel and will certainly pose a great risk to human health…
shaun,
“Actual nuclear experts say the sea water being pumped in as a last ditch effort at cooling is causing high speed corrosion and since this has never been done before at either Chernobyl or Three Mile…”
Who said that?
Which reactor on the planet was ever cooled by seawater?
What are the effects of seawater on containment vessels,
especially damaged ones?
What are the effects of dumping contaminated seawater back into the Pacific?
Why would anybody think a mechanical engineer’s misconceptions about his own personal safety somehow represent a broader reality of nuclear meltdown?
Especially one they don’t understand themselves.
It’s a syndrome – a person’s opinion that you’d like to agree with is expert,
facts aside,
anyone who might dissent is a fool in the view of the ones with the least understanding of all.
“Japanese officials appeared to have regained some control of northeast Japan’s troubled nuclear power plant Tuesday afternoon, at least for now, after spikes in radiation levels that followed a new explosion at one reactor and a fire at another earlier in the day put the nation on high alert.
..Officials stressed it was too early to say the worst has been averted at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which has suffered serious problems in four of its six reactors since….
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703908304576201643613498376.html?mod=
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
…Japan’s plants were designed to withstand quakes and tsunamis, but not a combination of this magnitude. At the affected facilities, the quake knocked out the primary cooling systems, and the tsunami wiped out the backup diesel generators. Then a valve malfunction thwarted efforts to pump water into one of the reactors. Everything that could go wrong did.
Despite this, the reactor containers have held firm. The explosions around them have blown outward, relieving pressure, as designed. Meanwhile, plant operators, deprived of their primary and secondary power sources for cooling the cores, have tapped batteries and deployed alternate generators. To relieve pressure, they’ve released vapor. And in some cases, they’ve pumped seawater and boric acid into the reactors, destroying them to protect the public. Cooling systems are back online at two previously impaired reactors, and a backup pump has averted cooling problems at a third plant.
The reactor where the crisis began, Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1, is one of Japan’s oldest. It was two weeks from its 40-year expiration date when the quake hit. Similar plants in the United States have been upgraded to ensure that in the event of power failure, water can still be pumped in to cool them. And nuclear plants are indisputably getting safer. Since 1990, worker radiation exposure and automatic reactor shutdowns worldwide have declined by a factor of three. According to an analysis last year by the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, plants being constructed by today’s standards are 1,600 times safer than early nuclear plants, in terms of the predicted frequency of a large radiation leak. Even if a reactor core is damaged, as in Japan, the NEA report notes that today, “the probability of a release to the environment is about ten times less than that of core damage,” thanks to improvements in fuel, circuits, and containment…..
http://www.slate.com/id/2288212/
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Citizen,
Please don’t bother to answer my questions, as at least I admit that I am not a nuclear physicist, or a mechanical engineer. Nuclear reactors take both physicists and mechanical engineers to construct.
Hearing from people with understanding of all the processes involved is informative.
If you would like to argue with someone, then refute Dr. Oehmen’s points, rather than fall into your regular pattern of a personal attack on this scientist, without ever refuting his points.
By the way Citizen, you seem to suggest that you have an advanced degree in nuclear physics. If so, please share with us your views, as I am sure that we would be willing to quietly listen to all views, and we sill not attack you personally.
Don’t attack me, or Dr. Oehmen, just refute their points politely.
Stay indoors,
residents are told,
to prevent radiation sickness!
That’s a 30 km radius.
radiation measurements even as far away as 180km are ten to thirty times their normal levels.
Does a person’s four walls really protect them from radiation sickness?
If they’re lead they do.
Only 499 years 11 months and 26 days to go.
I was careful to point out clearly where I part with the MIT guy,
you turned my objections into a personal contest.
Had a nuclear physicist written that piece,
the explanation of the effects of the damage would have sufficed and no – don’t worry! – would have emerged.
His description of a reactor under duress is my quibble,
especially in light of the Japanese one’s location and seawater emergency treatment.
Fuel rods cannot stand up to even a few seconds of exposure to overheating since even a slight variance in the uranium pellet’s loading density can create a hot spot which destroys the tube and exposes the fuel.
Control rods are designed to work within the array of fuel rods in each bundle,
but they are useless in the face of excess heat or fuel rod damage.
It’s not a fire,
uranium doesn’t care if you dowse it all day with cold water,
it’ll fission as long as there’s the density of mass to allow it.
And a pile of it at the bottom of a reactor vessel is a catastrophe even the coldest sea water won’t cure.
If anything, this discussion demonstrates the extreme difficulty in assessing a crisis, especially in its early hours and days. Further complicating the discussion is the very technical nature of the problem at hand. Even the experts are divided and with good reason, the lack of information or the conflicting information from sources inside Japan itself. No doubt there is a certain protectionism going on with respect to the outfit that runs these nuclear power stations. Does anybody remember the initial information coming from BP?
The risk at this point, citizen, is not direct exposure to radiation like an x-ray machine with no off-switch. It’s contact with radioactive particles on the skin and in the lungs. Staying indoors does provide some level of safety.
Members of the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering have modified and reposted Oehmen’s original post. That, and more background information, is available here:
http://mitnse.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors/
And, the latest information from MIT about the Fukishima reactors is available here:
http://mitnse.com/
“A lie will be half around the world before the truth can put on it’s pants.”
This is a good example.
For a debunking of the Doctor:
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/03/15/josef_oehmen_nuclear_not_worried_viral/
“People are rightfully concerned about the unfolding nuclear crisis in Japan. However, exaggerating the problem and overreacting are not helpful. Here are two examples of how not to act:
…Despite being told by President Obama that nuclear radiation will not drift to the United States, some Americans are buying iodine tablets, which mostly do not work. They are also buying Geiger counters, just in case they need to monitor the neighborhood (or bust a few ghosts).
Reasonable people are reasonably concerned. But, do not let politicians or salespeople exploit and manipulate you. So, for now, please put the credit cards away.
http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2011/03/nuclear-crisis-response-how-not-to-act.html
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
The radiation that will result from a failure of the reactor vessels is gamma radiation – x-rays.
It is dangerous for anyone nearby and will kill workers.
That’s why the MIT guy quickly changed his tune – it’s a disaster that has already killed over 50 workers,
they are doomed.
He’s not worried for himself – what an ass.
When a wholesale disruption of the isotopes like cesium and plutonium are released from the spent and nearly spent destroyed fuel rods,
those particles too emit gamma radiation.
Normal fallout is only dangerous when it contains longer-lived isotopes and,
if you stay indoors with filtered air supplies,
you’ll be safe from the short half-life ones like iodine -131 as long as you don’t track any in,
or drink any in yer water, or eat out of your garden.
The trouble with buying iodine tablets is that adults don’t absorb much anyway
so loading your thyroid with iodine to prevent the absorption of radioactive iodine isotopes isn’t needed unless you’re a child living anywhere in Japan.
A Geiger counter might be a smarter purchase if you do anything outdoors like grow food or raise anumals or let yer kids play,
except there is always some background level and there are also so many things that can set them off.
The tons of seawater that now forms Japan’s last barrier between at least two reactor vessel breaches,
carries all those poisonous isotopes into the ocean outside the plant.
They are heavy, they aren’t going anywhere.
Water vapor and hot exhaust also carry those same isotopes high into the atmosphere,
and you’ll see no sign of smoke.
Remember to not be relieved when seeing those pictures of the containment buildings.
Why are fission reactors such poor choices for mankind?
There’s no way to fix one when they fail – get near enough to repair it, and you’re dead.
Citizen, suggesting that folks here purchase Geiger counters to check their food or their children’s playgrounds is unnecessary fear-mongering.
Unnecessary fear-mongering just to prove the point of how “right” your opinion is, just shows how weak your opinion is.
Nobody here in Whatcom County needs a Geiger counter to eat food or let their kids out of the house.
Get responsible.
You misread my post, as usual.
You could be as right about the Geiger counter being an unnecessary tool for modern West Coast living
as you were right about your nuclear physicist from MIT who’s smarter than me.
Not!
By the way,
how much Cesium isootpe would you want in yer salad?
As an aside to make you feel better,
you can learn as much in a three-week orientation from Exxon Nuclear as you can from an adavanced degree in nuclear physics,
but you didn’t hear that from me.
Please pardon my typos,
its Trumer Pils time.