Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now

... I'm not one of the "OMFG LOOK AT THE NUCLEAR ANGEL OF DEATH" people, but can we wait for this crisis to reach some resolution before we make loud proclamations either way?<p>The main information that concerns me right now is that there appears to be a consistent radiation leak of 400 mSv/h at the plant. While not Chernobyl by any measure, this is quite a bit of radiation, considering one's yearly dose limit is 1 mSv total.<p>This seems to contradict the extremely optimisitc reports that all is well, under control, and that no significant radiation leak has occurred.<p>[edit] One thing that optimistic reports consistently fail to address is the situation with the spent fuel pools. While not capable of melting down, from what I've read the pools are rapidly boiling dry and plant workers are struggling to maintain cooling on them. Left to its own devices the fuel will boil out the pool, light on fire, and then you have burning nuclear waste drifting directly into the atmosphere (after all, the buildings no longer have roofs). There is some speculation that the current radiation spike at the plant is <i>not</i> from any reactor but rather its spent fuel containment.

Enough articles "everything is fine" for my tastes circulating onto Hacker News, while instead the facts created more and more concerns. I think it's better to just wait, and hope, instead of blabling about things that even the top experts of the world are having an hard time to figure. There will be a time, in a few weeks, and hopefully after a disaster was avoided, to speculate about the real security of nuke power.

<i>At Chernobyl, this actually happened inside the containment vessel and the resulting explosion ruptured the vessel, leading to a serious release of core radioactives – though this has had basically zero effect on the world in general nor even much impact on the area around Chernobyl.</i><p>Even just as a matter of rhetoric and persuasion, I think trying to argue that Chernobyl wasn't all <i>that</i> bad isn't the route you want to go in reassuring people.

Pretty jaw-dropping journalism, even by Register standards. Anyone trying to suggest that the situation at Fukushima is "under control" and is somehow a nuclear industry safety success story hasn't been paying close enough attention.

Looking in awe at the fact that the plants are still standing after an earthquake "five times stronger than the older Fukushima plants had been designed to cope with" isn't the right way to look at this situation. Why were these plants built in a massively earthquake prone zone and not designed to avoid what is happening right now? If an earthquake this powerful was possible, the most sensitive pieces of infrastructure should have been designed to handle it. They clearly were not.<p>I'm no nuclear opponent... I believe that nuclear could very well be the only safe and scalable answer to the world's energy needs - but if we can't make the economics of building safer plants work, then nuclear is a nonstarter.<p>Proclamations like this that everything is and will be fine are really reckless at this point. Every day it seems like we are finding out that things are much worse than we had previously been told they are, and it looks as though they are still in the process of losing - not gaining - control at Fukushima.

I got as far as the second paragraph before I knew that this was article was of dubious accuracy:<p><i>"As the hot cores ceased to be cooled by the water which is used to extract power from them, control rods would have remained withdrawn and a runaway chain reaction could have ensued"</i><p>This is rubbish. The control rods in every nuclear reactor, going right back to the Chicago Pile, are fail-safe: if the power fails, they drop into the core, stopping fission. (In the case of a BWR like the Fukushima reactors, stored hydraulic pressure forces the control rods upward into the core).<p>Even without fission occuring though, the fuel rods continue to produce a great deal of heat through beta decay of the fission products (immediately after shutdown, heat is produced at around 7% of the operating power). This is why a meltdown can still occur, if this prodigious quantity of heat cannot be removed quickly enough.

I hope the pro-nuclear power people are right when they claim everything went according to plan. But forgive me if I am not used to "everything is under control" looking like this on TV (explosions, people in protection suits and gas masks, mass exodus).

The article dates back from yesterday, 1pm GMT. More evidence that there should be no conclusion drawn (one way or another for that matter) on nuclear energy safety or lack thereof before this whole catastrophe has fully unfolded.<p>Though the more recent developments would seem to point out that <i>Quake + tsunami &#62;&#62; 1 minor radiation dose</i>.

Regardless of whether or not the situation is under control, I think the triumph is more for the Japanese. I'm sure that if the plant were in Greece the fallout would have been much greater because everyone would have cut corners and not followed the safety procedures.

Think the article is slightly old, with new events happening to the reactors every hour. I get my updates from here<p><a href="http://mitnse.com/" rel="nofollow">http://mitnse.com/</a><p>Lets just hope it does not get any worse.

This article dramatically misses the point! Uranium is peaking. Oil has already peaked. If we intend to use reprocessing to conserve uranium, then we need to come up with new reactor designs that require less fossil fuel energy and less money to build.<p>The problem isn't that reactors are inherently unsafe, but that building new reactors without dramatically improving the underlying designs is inherently inefficient. This means that nuclear energy, when all insurance and other costs are included, does not present ANY savings over any other form of newly-built power plant.<p>The main cost argument in favor of nuclear power is that existing thirty-year old plants cost so little per year. This is an obvious diversionary trick. We paid off the bonds ages ago. My house is also the cheapest on the street if you don't include the mortgage.<p>The main argument in favor of nuclear power is that it provides reliable baseload energy, which must only be shut down once every fourteen months or so for refueling. This disaster is the proof that nuclear baseload energy is only as reliable as its safety investments and contigency planning. Fukushima is not the first plant to go silent forever.<p>The Fukushima disaster reminds me of what really happened to our I-35W bridge locally. Over thirty years ago, someone built bridge with gussets too thin. Over a decade ago, our state replaced its government bridge inspectors with a for-profit firm that promised it would "save money" through efficiency savings on labor. Seven years before the disaster, HNTB Corp. of Kansas City performed a bridge analysis to try to win the contract from URS. They found the under-sized gussets and demonstrated how the Minnesota Department of Transportation could use "supplemental plates" and a new "oversize gusset" to strengthen the bridge. HNTB never got the contract and improvements were never made. Later, URS had the option to either re-inspect the bridge or to brace the bridge as HNTB had suggested. They chose to re-inspect.<p>During court filings in the victims lawsuit, a URS bridge contractor stated in an internal e-mail that they chose not to determine the stresses on all the components in the bridge because "it was too much work."<p>The moral of the story is that saving money on engineering does not always save money. I could cite numerous similar examples, like the infamous Boeing 787 project that I was involved in as a Cray Inc. contractor.

First of all, recent studies show Chernobyl killed nearly one million people. Don't trivialize Chernobyl!<p><a href="http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2010/2010-04-26-01.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2010/2010-04-26-01.html</a><p>Secondly, the real tragedies here are the high human health costs in cancer and birth defects, the economic cost of losing twenty percent of Japan's power indefinitely, and the outrageous modern day cost of building new reactors. Given those high costs and the ten year construction times, it is unlikely that these plants will be replaced by nuclear reactors even if we wiped Japan's collective memory.<p>Many geeks are easily swayed by scientific talk that ignores social variables and whole cost accounting. Remember Google's early motto, "Don't be evil!"<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_...</a>

To those who insist that the Chernobyl accident was not a big deal, please feel free to go build a home in Pripyat, live there for a few years, and let us know how that works out for you.

I think it might be time for those who don't have a clue to stop talking about this. People are and will be diing because of what is happening now. Calling this "ok" and "safe" is borderline obscene.<p>Plus, as told in other comments, this article dates back to yesterday and recent news are less and less reassuring (e.g. the containment vessel is now broken in one reactor).<p>Thank you.

The central problem is still ignorance, unfamiliarity, and fear. People are more afraid of death and injury related to radiation exposure because it's not something they're familiar with. That causes people to incorrectly weigh the risks and tradeoffs involved.

If it is all designed for that, and they had to give up the reactors anyway, why don't they just wait and let the cores melt? Something doesn't add up in this optimistic scenario, it seems to me.

The worst case scenario of a nuclear reactor going wrong is much worse than any other alternative, however slim the chances of that happening may be. This fact is enough to be concerned about the safety of nuclear reactors.

While the mainstream media is busy selling the global nuclear angel of death scare to people, the techies are just as busy to convince everyone of the other extreme: absolutely everything is fine!!!<p>While there are certainly quite a few engineering victories to be claimed here, I would not call several explosions at a nuclear plant "nothing happened". Also, the earthquake did damage at least reactor 4, there are two approx. 8m² holes.