From Stark
This report from Bloomberg notes that two key features of President Barack Obama’s proposed new energy policy have been rather badly jinxed: First, increased offshore oil drilling, and now, the ongoing struggle to regain control of Japanese nuclear reactors in the wake of last week’s quake and tsunami.
As of a few minutes ago, that struggle was not going well.
Close to 30 years ago, back when the late Tom Glenn was port director, the Port of Bellingham was in preliminary talks to build a coal export terminal at Cherry Point, in cooperation with Burlington Northern and Mitsui Corp. In those days, the potential market was Japan. (Those talks ultimately went nowhere.)
Even if the threat of serious radiation bursts from the Japanese reactors can be contained, it appears that at least some of these reactors will never generate power again. One wonders if Japan would, or could, make up its power deficit with coal imports. Coal is a local issue once again, as you probably recall.
They’ve flooded three reactors with seawater ending their lives as reactors.
They’re about 40 years old and at the end of their life span anyway
but now they’re entombed forever right where they are.
Why an island with a history of earthquakes and especially huge tsunamis would site reactors on their most vulnerable coastline is a lesson in property rights and industrial negligence.
What may come out of the nuclear reactor meltdown, is how well man has managed to ensure the safety of a nuclear reactor when it gets hit with the largest earthquake in 1200 years and a 30 foot Tsunami.
If the worst that happens in this situation, is that the reactor can no longer be used, I would say that man’s ingenuity, has been vindicated.
Time will tell the story, and I would not want to write this one prematurely.
In the midst of Mother Nature destroying everything in its path, these nuclear reactors have not killed anyone, but in the surrounding cities bodies are stacked up everywhere.
Everything is relative. This is definitely a worst case scenario being played out right before the critics eyes. The critics are chirping, but they always have and always will.
Let’s see what calmer minds have to think, in a couple of months.
The Japanese sited these plats there, because they wished to have electricity, and if they were to have the dream of electricity, they did not have many realistic choices.
The Japanese are not stupid, they just did not have many choices.
Lights and heat, or a cave.
It is an island nation, completely surrounded by fault lines.
Where else could they have put a reactor.
Japanese Officials insist there was no significant radioactive leak after the explosion.
Gotta love the pics of civilians being scanned with geiger counters by emergency rescue teams wearing Hazmat suits.
Grace, they have only begun to deal with radiation levels that are rising and some people have been admitted to the hospital with high levels who were not in the plants or empoloyees of….so it’s a little early to cluck about how well this is all working….
Plus, and I’ll give you this one for ignorance based on my own ability to calculate such things as you might notice on the other post, but this is not the biggest in 1200 years. A 9.0 or better occurs about every 20 years and the Chilean 9.5 of 1960, the largest ever recorded, was of course bigger than this 9.0. Plus at 10 meters, the wave was closer to 40 feet.
And have you never inquired what the Chernobyl area is like today or how many were killed there? Hindsight doesn’t always vindicate the rosy picture you’re trying to paint…as for the ingenuity of man, we have many new sources and hydroelectric hasn’
t been tapped anywhere near it’s potelntial. Of course neither has solar, wind, tidal or a slew of other possiblities that will hopefully someday give us what we need…assuming we’re still here to need it. So put down that ridiculous trumpet your blowing and admit know one knows WTF will be the final word on Nuclear..or how fooliosh and shortsighted history will view us to have been…..
Oh and I forgot that the used fuel question has never been solved and will be aroiund for milenniums giving us all 6 eys, eight apppendages and a pretty gnarly appearance…..
See just being born in E. Washington has already affected my ability to detect typos with my still only two eyes….
Perhaps Japan can now lead the world in the power that surrounds their island…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power
Of course the ingenuity of man is also hampered by another invention…
Capitalism. And the greed engendered in Capitalism is fueled by keeping control of resources, like electrical production, concentrated in the hands of a few large corporations that have done their best to hinder efforts to allow more people to live off the grid. That’s why we seem to think nuclear or coal is the answer when really conservation and getting the costs down for most folks to produce their own will go much further. Why doesn’t every home. especially in the Southwest or E. Washington have solar on their roof’s. Why don’t we have low head generators in every stream or river pumping the power into pulicly owned utilities that produce power and profits for the users rather than the coporate giants?
Some site the costs of solar as prohibitive, but that is ridiculous. A passive solar system in a home costs about what most Americans pay for a flatscreen gotta have it cuz it’s new and gimmicky TV.
“Along with reliable sources such as the IAEA and WNN updates, there is an incredible amount of misinformation and hyperbole flying around the internet and media right now about the Fukushima nuclear reactor situation. In the BNC post Discussion Thread – Japanese nuclear reactors and the 11 March 2011 earthquake (and in the many comments that attend the top post), a lot of technical detail is provided, as well as regular updates. But what about a layman’s summary? How do most people get a grasp on what is happening, why, and what the consequences will be?
Below I reproduce a summary on the situation prepared by Dr Josef Oehmen, a research scientist at MIT, in Boston. He is a PhD Scientist, whose father has extensive experience in Germany’s nuclear industry. This was first posted by Jason Morgan earlier this evening, and he has kindly allowed me to reproduce it here. I think it is very important that this information be widely understood….
There was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity.
By “significant” I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on – say – a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation
I have been reading every news release on the incident since the earthquake. There has not been one single (!) report that was accurate and free of errors (and part of that problem is also a weakness in the Japanese crisis communication). By “not free of errors” I do not refer to tendentious anti-nuclear journalism – that is quite normal these days. By “not free of errors” I mean blatant errors regarding physics and natural law, as well as gross misinterpretation of facts, due to an obvious lack of fundamental and basic understanding of the way nuclear reactors are build and operated. I have read a 3 page report on CNN where every single paragraph contained an error….
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Where would I have sited them?
High enough to clear a tsunami,
at least the auxiliary power parts anyway.
And the on West coast too.
The Billion dollar buildings survived,
the Thousand dollar generators didn’t.
Another hydrogen explosion has rocked the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, this time at the third reactor unit. Initial analysis is that the containment structure remains intact.
The blast that occurred at 11.01am today was much larger than the one seen at unit 1 two days ago. An orange flash came before a large column of brown and grey smoke. A large section of the relatively lightweight roof was seen to fly upwards before landing back on other power plant buildings.
Chief cabinet secretary Yukiyo Edamo appeared on television shortly afterwards to identify the blast was a hydrogen explosion. He said contact had been made with the plant manager whose belief is that the containment structure, important to nuclear safety, remains intact….
Radiation readings on site remained low after the blast, albeit elevated from normal operation….
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Explosion_rocks_third_Fukushima_reactor_1402111.html
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
If I leave Shaun alone long enough, he will surely begin to post answers to his own questions and we are assured that successive posts will alsays agee with twhatver his opinion of the moment is.
I never said that hsi was a good situation, but only that we will have the chance of studying the situation better once we get the facts.
This reactor model has been mothballed worldwide due to it has become obsolete. All the new reactors are functioning just fine, which illustrates to us the utility of continuing at the very least progressing to make reactors safer. Unfortunately, in an anti-nuclear fervor, we quit making better reactors because of the political environment. Maybe these nuclear reactors will be replaced with coal plants. I doubt that anyone there is going without electricity any time soon. Not likely here either.
The day the anti-everything and “no answer” crowd turns out people’s lights and heat, will be the end of the environmental movement.
Having said this though this is not a Cherynobl. Cherynobl was a graphite reactor. It was not water cooled and the problem was that when the reactor got out of control the graphite actually caught fire. It was a bad design from the git go.
If you look at the shear numbers of nuclear reactors in Japan that survived this once in 1,000 year quake, I’d say the engineers must have gotten something right, and whatever mistakes they made on these three that are struggling, will be studied and rectified for good.
Building structures fro a once every 1,000 year event is a nice theory, but not practical.
Go ahead you can argue now, Shaun.
I suggest that everyone read the quite detailed explanation of these reactor problems published by Dr. Josef Oehmen of MIT. His lengthy and comprehensive/comprehensible article can be found here: http://mitnse.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors/
From your life on what planet are you getting the once every 1,000 years figure that makes you sound so ridiculous?
Repeating BS over and over again only makes it BS and you sound less than intelligent oh Princess of a Bygone Era.
Also, not a problem for whom? Maybe we will not be affected by a cloud of radiation causing spikes in cancer as was tracked around the globe for two years after Chernobyl, but certainly the toll on Japan will be huge. Unfortunately fools like this can only lie because they have staked their credibility on an industry that can only lie and obfuscate because bottom line, it is about the bottom line and the panic caused by truth is just too much for us to consider…. “we can’t handle the truth.”
Now go ahead princess and make my day..
sahun,
“Also, not a problem for whom? Maybe we will not be affected by a cloud of radiation causing spikes in cancer as was tracked around the globe for two years after Chernobyl, but certainly the toll …”
I’m not certain that there is independent support for your assertion.
Oh no!
It’s “shaun” of course.
Grace Kelley,
Why do you use so many different pseudonyms? Just curious…
btw,m they all show your age
Not saying there are any implications but for the record I only use one pseudonym here, except for the other day after I watched ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ and I just couldn’t help myself.
How does The Honorable Mayor know who Grace is and
does that explain why they’re so grumpy?
Who played Camille in the Dragon Tattoo movie?
Conoboy’s post is subtitled, An Engineer’s Opinion of Physics.
Finally,
I’m an E.Wash. baby native myself,
where was Shaun hatched?
Lol.
Citizen,
Some people leave pretty good fingerprints. Could give you reasons he’s grumpy, but that might give it away too much. Not trying to out him. Will confess a bias against multiple aliases, though.
Have no clue who you are, though I suspect we may have met at some point. Btw, my father is an eastern Wa native, was born in Yakima and went to HS in Spokane–Rogers High, lived on the wrong side of the tracks back in the day…
Shaun was hatched? That’s news to me, too. Had perception e was born in these parts; know he’s in NZ at this point.
And I just saw the Dragon Tatoo for the first time–great movie, though mabe not best right before bedtime…
The reason for the aliases is simple.
It frustrates ad hominum attacks.
Which is the favorite attack of some posters upon this site.
If you don’t know who someone is,
then you might just have to address their comments instead.
I have to agree with the Princess on this one!
Even Wikipedia can direchttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disastert you to the ongoing problems from Chernobyl….
Sorry, when I try to beat the metered internet I sometimes screw up
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
You also asked for independent confirmation that seawater was not used at Chernobyl or Three Mile Island….well both were on rivers far inland from any seawater….don’t mean to get so technical on you…Google a map of Pennsylvania and a Map of the Ukraine….
Alsdo Grace of a bygone era, still waiting to hear how you came up with that absurd once every 1,000 years assertion., since a 9.0 or above occurs every 20 years at least…and though the Fukushima plant is old, we haven’t been using Nuclear for 1,000 years….and Chernoby and Three Mile island were in the last 30…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale
Although, Gracie, now we have Banda Aceh at 9.0, Japan at 9.0 in the past few years so once every twenty as noted in the link is not exactly correct.
http://www.geologie.ens.fr/~vigny/aceh-e.html
I apologize Shaun, what I should have said that this was the largest earthquake in Japan in the last 1,100 years.
The larger point is, that this was a abnormally large event, and it is only the oldest reactors, which have not been made in the last 30 years where the problems lie.
Frankly, it was not just the largest earthquake, but you also had to have a very large Tsunami too.
What are the odds of that.
If we built every structure to withstand a once very 1,000 year earthquake and a once very 1,000 year Tsunami, we would all be living in steel cylinders.
Less than 10 years ago, the world lost 250,000 people, and none of them died from a nuclear event.
Life is a risk, and we will never change that.
Maybe my tolerance for risk is simply higher than yours.
By the way, we probably ought to move Bellingham back to around Deming, if we are to survive an earthquake like this one.
Good article but I think that your language can’t be understood by noobs… Maybe make notes more understandable?