Man of Honour
Cooling system troubles over the last few days continue:
www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120701a4.html
www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120701a4.html
Fukushima
- Thread starter ennogs
- Start date
It can't really be overstated how much of a non-issue it is, the only reason the was ever a situation at the plant in the first place was because the country had been ransacked by earthquakes/tsunamis and they couldn't get portable generators in to power the cooling systems before the backup battery's died. This will be easily sorted with time to spare.
Man of Honour
[TW]Fox;22222667 said:
Massively agree. People are so stupid.
Man of Honour
[TW]Fox;22222667 said:
On top of that, the nuclear power station itself withstood both the earthquake and the tsunami, despite the earthquake being exceptionally powerful. It was the cooling system that was taken out by the tsunami, right?
Also, it was an obsolete design scheduled for decommissioning.
People read "nuclear" and freak out rather than learning anything. Add media fear-mongering and the damage is done. I'm reminded of the successful experiments in which sizable number of people in the street were talked into signing a petition to ban water. Seriously, that really happened. More than once. They didn't even need to lie or exaggerate, as anti-nuclear people do. They just presented a selective view of the truth in a fear-mongering way. Dihydrogen monoxide - it's FATAL by inhalation and kills thousands of people every year! It's a major component of acid rain! They put it in your food. Your food! Just to increase their profits!
Soldato
Although I'm totally with all those saying that article is a massive load of balls and, in general, ranting about the negative stigma attached to nuclear power and the ridiculous knee-jerk reactions we've seen all over the world, let's get one thing straight that it seems all too easy for us to miss, sitting safely on the other side of the world with news coverage all but ceased months ago and looking at the non-existant fatalities: Fukushima is a damn long way from a 'non-issue' or some sort of shining banner for the safety of nuclear power!
There's the small issue of the 80-odd thousand Japanese evacuated from their homes who still haven't returned and may never do. All living essentially in refugee camps, all their homes and possessions gone, jobs gone, etc etc. It's still a massive human tragedy.
So even when a nuclear plant stands up admirably well to catastrophic natural disaster... it's still frikkin bad news!
There's the small issue of the 80-odd thousand Japanese evacuated from their homes who still haven't returned and may never do. All living essentially in refugee camps, all their homes and possessions gone, jobs gone, etc etc. It's still a massive human tragedy.
So even when a nuclear plant stands up admirably well to catastrophic natural disaster... it's still frikkin bad news!
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Soldato
No it's damn good news, because it proves to us that in England having a nuclear reactor should not be a concern, and in dangerous areas ie fault lines, we just have to take appropriate action.
The bulletin clearly has an agenda, which means any estimates published by them are going to support that agenda.
No 'conclusion' can be formed from that paper. Any kind of logic looks at the word choice used and realises that the entire thing is based on speculation, firstly on the effects of Chernobyl and then transferring that onto Fukushima.
I wouldn't have an issue if you were using the same kind of language yourself when using the information from that paper, but you give a conclusive statement on how many people will die. Don't quote speculative sources as fact, put them forward for discussion.
Lets put it in perspective, Fukushima was a power plant from the 1970's built on designs from the 1960's, the power plant was hit by a massive earthquake followed by a tidal wave that removed all the surrounding buildings, after all that it continued to function with the cooling system running off the backup battery's, the only reason the was ever an issue is because the country was in ruins and emergency power generators couldn't be shipped to the plant to re-energize the cooling system before the battery backups failed.
The accident was nothing major and it is not just unlikely but impossible at a plant built to modern designs, so yes, the whole thing does stand as a shining beacon to the safety of nuclear power. Lets look at it from another point of view, if a category six hurricane rampaged across the north wales coast it would not only destroy all the wind farms but send gigantic death shurikens towards the local seaside resorts, that's on the same level of freak accident of nature as Fukushima was.
NB: A number of people may take exception to my calling Fukushima nothing major, I mean its rated as a 7 on the INES scale right? well let me justify my statement, like most scales its a very subjective, it places Fukushima and Chernobyl at 7 but Kyshtym (the worst nuclear disaster in history, with an exclusion zone 6x greater than Chernobyl's) is only a 6. The reason Fukushima is a 7 is because the plant had four reactors all of which and issues so instead of having four separate accident scores the INES just tallied them up. Three of the reactors suffered level 5 emergency's equal to the three mile island accident in the USA or the Windscale fire in the UK (at no point did any Fukushima reactor ever get as close to catastrophe as Windscale) and the fourth reactor suffered a level three accident (lower on the scale than one involving people exposed to cancer radiotherapy equipment stolen from an abandoned hospital).
Associate
Excellent post.
Associate
- Joined
- 4 Apr 2012
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Doesn't Cornwall have problems with radon gas which actually does raise deaths in the region by quite a bit?
So for all those Cornwall overclockers, radon is not nice.
Yup there is higher levels present there which I think have been linked to lung cancer, I'd have to check numbers however.
The thing that always makes me laugh about these anti nuclear stories is that no one ever talks about France, around 80% of electricity is nuclear made yet in correctly managed plants without natural hazards they work perfectly. Coal fired stations have done more damage than nuclear ever has!