Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power

[tripsis]

Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power

Japan's disaster would weigh more heavily if there were less harmful alternatives. Atomic power is part of the mix

George Monbiot

guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 March 2011 19.43 GMT

Illustration: Daniel Pudles

You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.

If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn't work.

Like most greens, I favour a major expansion of renewables. I can also sympathise with the complaints of their opponents. It's not just the onshore windfarms that bother people, but also the new grid connections (pylons and power lines). As the proportion of renewable electricity on the grid rises, more pumped storage will be needed to keep the lights on. That means reservoirs on mountains: they aren't popular, either.

The impacts and costs of renewables rise with the proportion of power they supply, as the need for storage and redundancy increases. It may well be the case (I have yet to see a comparative study) that up to a certain grid penetration – 50% or 70%, perhaps? – renewables have smaller carbon impacts than nuclear, while beyond that point, nuclear has smaller impacts than renewables.

Like others, I have called for renewable power to be used both to replace the electricity produced by fossil fuel and to expand the total supply, displacing the oil used for transport and the gas used for heating fuel. Are we also to demand that it replaces current nuclear capacity? The more work we expect renewables to do, the greater the impact on the landscape will be, and the tougher the task of public persuasion.

But expanding the grid to connect people and industry to rich, distant sources of ambient energy is also rejected by most of the greens who complained about the blog post I wrote last week in which I argued that nuclear remains safer than coal. What they want, they tell me, is something quite different: we should power down and produce our energy locally. Some have even called for the abandonment of the grid. Their bucolic vision sounds lovely, until you read the small print.

At high latitudes like ours, most small-scale ambient power production is a dead loss. Generating solar power in the UK involves a spectacular waste of scarce resources. It's hopelessly inefficient and poorly matched to the pattern of demand. Wind power in populated areas is largely worthless. This is partly because we have built our settlements in sheltered places; partly because turbulence caused by the buildings interferes with the airflow and chews up the mechanism. Micro-hydropower might work for a farmhouse in Wales, but it's not much use in Birmingham.

And how do we drive our textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces and electric railways – not to mention advanced industrial processes? Rooftop solar panels? The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment at which you fall out of love with local energy production. A national (or, better still, international) grid is the essential prerequisite for a largely renewable energy supply.

Some greens go even further: why waste renewable resources by turning them into electricity? Why not use them to provide energy directly? To answer this question, look at what happened in Britain before the industrial revolution.

The damming and weiring of British rivers for watermills was small-scale, renewable, picturesque and devastating. By blocking the rivers and silting up the spawning beds, they helped bring to an end the gigantic runs of migratory fish that were once among our great natural spectacles and which fed much of Britain – wiping out sturgeon, lampreys and shad, as well as most sea trout and salmon.

Traction was intimately linked with starvation. The more land that was set aside for feeding draft animals for industry and transport, the less was available for feeding humans. It was the 17th-century equivalent of today's biofuels crisis. The same applied to heating fuel. As EA Wrigley points out in his book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, the 11m tonnes of coal mined in England in 1800 produced as much energy as 11m acres of woodland (one third of the land surface) would have generated.

Before coal became widely available, wood was used not just for heating homes but also for industrial processes: if half the land surface of Britain had been covered with woodland, Wrigley shows, we could have made 1.25m tonnes of bar iron a year (a fraction of current consumption) and nothing else. Even with a much lower population than today's, manufactured goods in the land-based economy were the preserve of the elite. Deep green energy production – decentralised, based on the products of the land – is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown.

But the energy source to which most economies will revert if they shut down their nuclear plants is not wood, water, wind or sun, but fossil fuel. On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power. Thanks to the expansion of shale gas production, the impacts of natural gas are catching up fast.

Yes, I still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry. Yes, I would prefer to see the entire sector shut down, if there were harmless alternatives. But there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.

Source.

[mac]

I still think it a a bit early to tell the outcome of this one

was looking at a friends solar panels today imo thats the way to go

[Magicdirt]

`

Edited May 8, 2011 by Magicdirt

[tripsis]

We're still fucking the oceans. It's not stopped.

I agree, many new ideas for alternative energy sources have had their patents bought and tossed in a vault, lest they actually become competition for the current means of energy production. That said, there's still the question of energy transfer with many of the renewable sources. Often, wind farms and solar farms have to be in remote places, making the transfer of the energy harnessed to areas where people actually live, a significant challenge. As that article pints out too, every energy source will have its costs. Solar panels take huge amounts of energy to create (I've read as much energy to make as their total output over their lifespan) and require rare metal to make them.

Any thoughts on thorium?

I think geothermal is one method which should be explored much more fully.

[planthelper]

well, i would prefere to have my head smashed in, by a fallen solar panel anyday, than being radiated.

[bℓσωηG]

A nuclear accident releases strontium-90 and caesium-137 in the air, it settles on the grass where it is ingested by cows and so it ends up in the milk which Japan has already found contaminated as-well as Tokyo's water supply .The Japanese government is saying DO -NOT use tap water to bottle feed your child.

This is just bullshit man there is no need for using this crap ass technology, other than furthering the expansion of fascist regimes of the worlds nuclear weapons stockpiles under the guise of energy creation.

[fydesvindico]

this is pretty old, but pretty interesting nonetheless

 

 

[synchromesh]

60 minutes had a little piece at the end that was worded very similar, this is all a big PR whitewash and the media is leading the sheeple where they want them to go. Baaaaa

The logic is nuclear is great because of no viable alternatives, what a crock of shit. Send that journo to Japan and make him do an onsite report from Fukishima.

Yeah, I saw that. What a dildo!

Nuclear filth just doesn't go away, on a human scale it stays here almost forever.

As for the alternatives General Electric and Westinghouse among others have been buying all the patents for alternative & free energy machines for over a century and anything that doesn't fit their greedy ideals gets stowed away never to see the light of day. Many alternatives to nuclear energy exist, only they won't let humanity have them. If a free energy device was released the stockmarket and world banking systems would collapse (until a new gestalt was established) and the world would not be in the grip of multinational corporations.

 

Amen.

[Torsten]

I love the fact that this wave of pro nuclear propaganda was released so early in the confidence that there would be no exposure casualties in japan. They maybe have miscalculated and if so then it is likey to backfire.

probably the most interesting of these pieces was one that claimed that cancer incidence among nuclear power station workers is lower than in the general population. Interesting concept. I'd love to hear more if anyone knows.

[tripsis]

probably the most interesting of these pieces was one that claimed that cancer incidence among nuclear power station workers is lower than in the general population. Interesting concept. I'd love to hear more if anyone knows.

I don't know more, but Randall, the author of xkcd, is unlikely to get his facts wrong. I have no idea where he got his facts from, but I assume he would have done his research properly.

[Magicdirt]

`

Edited May 8, 2011 by Magicdirt

[hutch]

Please be honest here guys.....how many of you are hoping in some way for a meltdown to prove a point? I'm not a lover of nuclear power, we have way cheaper and safer alternatives so please don't attack....but, how many people have died because of nuclear power? How many people have died because they have no power at all? Thinking as a layman who hears daily of the need to reduce our carbon output I wonder why all the fear? I am also told that nuclear exceeds all the objectives of a carbon free world...Who do I believe? They had a massive earthquake and tsunami that exceeded all expectation....Mother nature does throw shit at us at times...More people have died because a wave of water meters high smashed into seaside Japanese villages....I think considering that they have done well...the proof will be when they finally have this under control and the final outcome is known...should you not wait till then to cast your judgment? How much clean power has this technology provided?

What do you want to produce your base load power...What can produce the base load power we require at this stage other than coal or nuclear? Is it okay for us to run out of power in those times when we really need it?

solutions that meet all our objectives other than idealistic dreams thanks...

[Undergrounder]

Please be honest here guys.....how many of you are hoping in some way for a meltdown to prove a point? I'm not a lover of nuclear power, we have way cheaper and safer alternatives so please don't attack....but, how many people have died because of nuclear power? How many people have died because they have no power at all? Thinking as a layman who hears daily of the need to reduce our carbon output I wonder why all the fear? I am also told that nuclear exceeds all the objectives of a carbon free world...Who do I believe? They had a massive earthquake and tsunami that exceeded all expectation....Mother nature does throw shit at us at times...More people have died because a wave of water meters high smashed into seaside Japanese villages....I think considering that they have done well...the proof will be when they finally have this under control and the final outcome is known...should you not wait till then to cast your judgment? How much clean power has this technology provided?

What do you want to produce your base load power...What can produce the base load power we require at this stage other than coal or nuclear? Is it okay for us to run out of power in those times when we really need it?

solutions that meet all our objectives other than idealistic dreams thanks...

 

I certainly don't want further meltdown (the reactors have already started to meltdown), or worse, further damage to the containment vessels, but i'll admit to a little bit of relief that people are talking about nuclear dangers again. Sometimes it takes something horrible like this to remind us of what can go wrong, because when it goes wrong, it really goes wrong. I think nuclear disarmament is still the most pressing need for humanity right now, not climate change or anything else.

The problem with nuclear (anything) isn't that it kills, but that it can continue to kill for centuries, even thousands of years after the stuff is created. Plutonium 239, which is amongst the stuff leaking out of the damaged 3 reactor this very minute, continues to cause radiation for something like 40,000 years. Just one infintesimally small spec of the stuff accidentally ingested into the bloodstream will almost certainly cause cancer. Mother nature throws us all kinds of shit... but even she didn't give us Plutonium 239. That shit's manmade.

If just a small puff of the stuff were to find its way into a cloud of steam coming out of the plant, and if this steam were to drift over farmland in Japan, it would likely make that land untenable for hundreds of years. Imagine Japan cut completely in two by a massive swathe of radioactive land and what that would mean for the people, the economy, transport infrastructure, tourism, the culture, health, the costs.. Okay it's unlikely, but it's possible.

And the mere fact that it's possible means that it's not good enough. I don't want to bring these possibilities to this country, no matter how remote they are.

Not when Australia has such a vast array of renewable options open to us.

Renewable energy sources can provide baseload power. It would take at least a decade or two to get nuclear power running in Australia, by which time we could be putting the same energy into developing methods of adapting renewable sources to baseload demands. ie: http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/rp/2008-09/09rp09.htm

At the end of the day for Australia it comes down to cost. The initial expense of setting up and developing renewable infrastructure would be huge. But nothing we haven't done before, with the Snowy-hydro scheme, the NBN, two world wars, etc. And of course once it's setup and maintained, the energy is free. Putting a price on carbon would also make renewables more commercially viable to get over this up-front cost. Personally i'm prepared to pay more (or cut back on use) for a completely renewable future in this country.

Edited March 27, 2011 by Undergrounder

[ThunderIdeal]

jesus has returned from the dead, i haven't seen you here in ages

[Undergrounder]

Lol i know.. must be mushroom season again or something.. i get itchy this time of year

[kadakuda]

cancers will take time. 30 years from now we may be hearing "oh shit sorry, maybe we were wrong...what now?" always after the fact, never before.

Scientific america put out an article talking about supplying the worlds energy (world*) with only solar and wind. there are plenty of alternatives to nuclear, they just require some common sense.

like plant helper said...i'll take risking a few people getting crushed by solar panels or some birds getting messed up in wind turbines over everything with XXX square kilometers getting soaked in radiation for however long it poses a threat.

some countries are doing more "safe" energy though. but certainly not wasteful rich asian nations!

[bℓσωηG]

[Xenodimensional]

Fusion not fission.

[Halcyon Daze]

The Fukushima Nightmare Gets Worse

http://pacific.scoop.co.nz/2013/08/the-fukushima-nightmare-gets-worse/

Just when it seemed things might be under control at Fukushima, we find they are worse than ever.

Immeasurably worse.

Massive quantities of radioactive liquids are now flowing through the shattered reactor site into the Pacific Ocean. And their make-up is far more lethal than the “mere” tritium that has dominated the headlines to date.

Tepco, the owner/operator–and one of the world’s biggest and most technologically advanced electric utilities–has all but admitted it cannot control the situation. Its shoddy performance has prompted former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Dale Klein to charge: “You don’t what you are doing.”

The Japanese government is stepping in. But there is no guarantee–or even likelihood–it will do any better.

In fact, there is no certainty as to what’s causing this out-of-control flow of death and destruction.

Some 28 months after three of the six reactors exploded at the Fukushima Daichi site, nobody can offer a definitive explanation of what is happening there or how to deal with it.

The most cogent speculation now centers on the reality that, simply enough, water flows downhill.

Aside from its location in an earthquake-prone tsunami zone, Fukushima Daichi was sited above a major aquifer. That critical reality has been missing from nearly all discussion of the accident since it occurred.

There can be little doubt at this point that the water in that underground lake has been thoroughly contaminated.

In the wake of the March 11, 2011, disaster, Tepco led the public to believe that it had largely contained the flow of contaminated water into the Pacific. But now it admits that not only was that a lie, but that the quantities of water involved–apparently some 400,000 gallons per day–are very large.

Some of that water may be flowing from the aquifer. Much of it also, simply enough, flows down Japan’s steep hillsides, through the site and into the sea.

Until now, the utility and regulatory authorities have assured an anxious planet that the contaminants in the water have been primarily tritium. Tritium is a relatively simple isotope with an 8-day half-life. Its health effects can be substantial, but its short half-life has been used to proliferate the illusion that it’s not much to worry about.

Reports now indicate the outflow at Fukushima also includes substantial quantities of radioactive iodine, cesium, and strontium. That, in turn, indicates there is probably more we haven’t yet heard about.

This is very bad news.

Iodine-131, for example, can be ingested into the thyroid, where it emits beta particles (electrons) that damage tissue. A plague of damaged thyroids has already been reported among as many as 40 percent of the children in the Fukushima area. That percentage can only go higher. In developing youngsters, it can stunt both physical and mental growth. Among adults it causes a very wide range of ancillary ailments, including cancer.

Cesium-137 from Fukushima has been found in fish caught as far away as California. It spreads throughout the body, but tends to accumulate in the muscles.

Strontium-90’s half-life is around 29 years. It mimics calcium and goes to our bones.

That these are among the isotopes being dumped into the Pacific is the worst news to come from Japan since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose bombings occurred 68 years ago this week, and whose fallout has been vastly exceeded at Fukushima.

Indeed, Japanese experts have already estimated Fukushima’s fallout at 20-30 times as high as the 1945 bombings.

This latest revelation will send that number soaring.

The dominant reality is this: There is absolutely no indication how or when this lethal outflow will stop.

Thus far, Tepco has built scores of tanks on the site to contain whatever contaminated water it can capture. But the company is by no means getting all of it, and it is running out of space.

Some of the tanks, of course, have already sprung leaks.

There is no clear idea whether this outflow is accelerating. Tepco has injected chemicals into the ground meant to harden and form a wall between the reactors and the sea.

There’s also a surreal discussion of super-cooling a part of the site to conjure up a wall of ice.

But water has a way of flowing around such feeble devices.

We may yet hear that this massive outflow is a temporary phenomenon, but that’s not likely.

The site is still unpredictably radioactive. It remains unclear what has happened to the melted cores of the three exploded reactors.

The recent appearance of a steam plume has raised the specter that fission may still be occurring somewhere in the area.

It is also unclear what will happen to the hundreds of tons of spent fuel perched precariously in a pool 100 feet in the air above Unit Four.

Sustaining that cooling system until the rods can be removed–and it’s unclear when that will happen–is a major challenge.

Should an earthquake come before that’s done, and should those rods go crashing to the ground where they and their zirconium cladding could ignite in the open air, the consequences could only be described as apocalyptic.

Through it all, Japan’s new pro-nuclear administration has been talking of restarting the 48 reactors that remain shut since Fukushima.

Tepco has been among the utilities pushing to resume operations at its other plants.

In the U.S., there is talk of atomic reactors somehow solving the global warming crisis.

But what we now know all too well at Fukushima is that the world’s worst atomic catastrophe is very far from over.

The only thing predictable is that worse news will come.

And when it does, our increasingly fragile planet will be further irradiated, at immeasurable cost to us all.

Edited August 10, 2013 by Halcyon Daze

[Auxin]

One of the most common mindsets I encounter which will assure a repeat of this horror scenario is typified by the opinion "well we have to have power, you wouldnt want to burn more coal would you!?!"

As long as nations mindlessly grasp to their infantile obsession with flagrantly excessive power consumption things like fukushima, hanford, and chernobyl will continue to happen. And happen more often as the universally unsound nuclear infrastructure ages.

Its bad enough, as a westerner, constantly watching people cheeseburger themselves and their children to death but this nuclear power fixation is murdering children thousands of miles distant from the mindlessly self destructive cultures wallowing in their own degenerate pleasure seeking.

Your grandchildren are being knowingly maimed and killed so the japanese can be momentarily amused by pretty colors.

More rational and moral nations should band together and force the affluent nations to stop throwing away their lives for a mere orgasmic flash of sparkly lights.

[bℓσωηG]

Japan’s Ministry of Industry has recently estimated that some 300 tons of contaminated groundwater have been flowing into the ocean daily ever since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that triggered the disaster.

http://rt.com/news/fukushima-water-overrun-barrier-335/

I may give up fishing...

[IndianDreaming]

In the early 1900's The technology was invented to transmit power from anywhere on the earth to anywhere else on the earth, efficiently. The problem is two fold: It's hard to meter the power usage to make peopke pay for it, and there's nothing stopping someone from using as much as they want, to the detriment of others. There're enough waterfalls, geothermal energy, wave power, wind power etc to cover the worlds needs - The energy is generated at the site of a natural occurance, pumped into the earth and drawn out where it's required. No conspiracies, no mumbo jumbo, just facts, this is possible and has been possible for over 100 years - why isn't it happening? Because the patents for the inventions are in the hands of those that charge $ for electricity. The reason nuclear power is here is because they get a nice cheap source of power, and still charge you an arm and a leg for it. The devices that use electricity these days could be made much more efficiently too, which would cut down on the demand for electricity a bit. It's pretty easy to see who's best interest it is to make power hungry devices too.

I find it all very frustrating. I don't really know enough about nuclear power to make a comment about if it's good or not, but considering there are viable alternatives to both coal and nuclear power, it's a lose-lose argument.

[Leaves]

I have heard the real reason Nuclear power is a threat to the Earth is the concentrating of the waste. This is the wrong way to store nuclear waste and it will have to be de-concentrated (spread evenly over the Earth) in the near future.

[Auxin]

That wont help.

Relative to the quantities of waste being produced, chernobyl was a miniscule release into the environment that spread broadly across the globe and is established as causing birth defects in far off places like sweden.

And, really, nuclear waste is being sprayed broadly across the planet already. Its called depleted uranium munitions and it causes birth defects and cancer by contamination of water supplies and air.

Thing is we're exploiting technology to make the existing immobile radioactive materials (uranium ore) into vastly more dangerous materials. Not just through concentration but by changing them subatomically in a modern sort of alchemy. And no one wants to change them back. It takes manipulation of the books that would make enron envious to even pose nuclear power as cheaper than other power sources, actual neutralization of the waste would increase the costs radically.

[weedRampage]

Cars kill hundreds of thousands every year and maim millions more but nobody would contemplate trying to eradicate them.

Nuclear technology has much to offer for the future. Almost every country except Australia has dozens of these things. Australia

just supplies the fuel. Now there's hypocrisy in motion.

We are not going back to the caves any time soon so we better just close the gap between theoretical safety and actual fact.