I still support nuclear energy, just in geologically stable zones. It is sort of a lose-lose for Japan, they don't have the resources to have coal plants, yet they are probably the most geologically unstable country in the world. The only alternative I can see for them are those wave power generators.
The whole situation just seems like a convoluted mess. Every article I've read about the disaster gives a different description of its severity and how it will be solved. It doesn't help that there is a lot of misinformation out there about how much radiation has been released. I wish I could find an article or website that more clearly explains what has been done, the current situation, and what will need to happen in the future. I think that part of the problem of understanding the effects of the disaster is that we just don't know. We don't know what the short or long term effects may be as this situation has seldom occurred in our history. Who knows what the release of all that radioactive water into the ocean really means? It's hard for anyone to say with any degree of certainty.
^^ Pretty much all the information that is publicly available is here. Anything else is speculation and/or hearsay. It's worth noting that any changes to the "event level" would be based on new modelling of the events of several weeks ago; the levels of radiation on the site and in the surrounding areas have been decreasing steadily since then.
It's official: NUCLEAR CRISIS HITS HIGHEST SEVERITY LEVEL New Assessment Puts Japan's Accident On Par With Chernobyl
Well, my idea for Fukushima (which is about 120 miles from my house) is pretty radical, but it's to do a rush, spare-no-expense job of building a permanent storage facility for the spent-fuel rods a few kilometers to the west and moving what they can there ASAP then entombing what's left of the current facility. I realize that would be a massive and extremely expensive undertaking with difficult legal hurdles, etc., not to mention the difficulty of just getting the rods out and transporting them. Maybe that's been suggested already and dismissed. I don't know. In the meantime, we've already had a 6.3 this morning and several hard shakes yesterday.
One economic consequence is that this whole incident is bringing the price of uranium down. From 2000 to 2007, it's price increased ten fold, which was surely worrying for the nations most dependent on nuclear power (USA/France/Japan). At the beginning of this year, the price was looking like it was going to rise sharply again, but instead it has fallen to 3/4 of what it was two months ago. I'm wondering whether classifying the disaster at level 7 will have any additional effect on that price, and if so, has there been any economic motivation for increasing it to this level?
What about geothermal power as used in Iceland, and wind power as used in Germany? Damn, if only I'd known, I would have shorted Uranium stocks back in January. We still don't hear much about Thorium power plants. I hope India hasn't given up on developing them. I've heard that they would be safer in a seismically active region. Power failure causes the neutron source to shut off and an actively refrigerated ice plug in the reactor to melt. The fluid fuel would then drain into dispersal ponds. Of course, if containment is breached, you might end up with similar problems to Fukushima. However, I don't think hydrogen generation and ignition could happen to further weaken the containment.
There's supposedly been some melting. That could mean - they've melted slightly, creating enough distortion that the rods won't slide out, and are stuck in situ. - they've melted considerably, and there's a pool of molten metal at the bottom of the reactor core / core-catcher (some have speculated that there is) - the exposed isotopes have oxidized and turned into flakes/gravel which will have fallen to the bottom of the reactor core. In all three of these cases, I doubt we could extract any significant fraction of the material without breaking open the reactor core... which we probably should not do.
I read that the radiation has only been 10% of that during Chernobyl so it because the same grade really means nothing.
Homer: It's times like this where I wish I was a religious man. Rev. Lovejoy: It's all over people! We don't have a prayer!
That's actually the plan...sort of. Once the reactors cool down (the decay products reducing in both thermal and radioactive output), the reactors will be de-cored and the fuel will either be reprocessed or buried. The reactors themselves are likely to be dismantled, the parts buried, and the base of the units filled in with concrete. It is unlikely that a Chernobyl-esque "sarcophagus" will need to be constructed, since none of the primary containment structures have been blown apart (Chernobyl, in contrast, had no primary containment, so fuel was literally blown over the site). Pretty much what happened with Three Mile Island, except the US doesn't reprocess spent fuel (except when we extracted the plutonium and put it into warheads). Japan does reprocess (it's where the MOX in Fukushima 1-3 came from), but may not be able to depending on the amount of damage to the fuel. Basically, while this has been raised up to be another Level 7 event, from a practical standpoint, it's still more comparable to TMI than Chernobyl. TMI actually suffered worse core damage (or at least it seems so far), but had better containment, but as a pressurized water reactor it had an extremely thick steel/concrete secondary containment shell that would have had no problem containing a hydrogen explosion like in Japan. Fukushima 1, like many boiling water reactors built by GE, have flimsier secondary containment buildings. I suspect the main regulations coming out of this will be more redundancy in back-up power systems and stronger containment buildings. Even that number is misleading. 1Sv exposure over a month is a vastly different problem than a 1Sv exposure over a minute. However, it should be noted that only 3 individuals have been exposed to a 1 sievert level of radiation (the 3 idiots working in the sublevel that ignored their rad-haz warning device), but fortunately were exposed largely to beta-radiation only, which will only increase their risks of skin cancer. An entire fire brigade was exposed to over 300 sieverts of gamma and neutron radiation over the course of an hour at Chernobyl. 4Sv is a fatal dose, as such all those men died within 10 days.