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Subscribe to RSSJournalists have been given a rare glimpse inside Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which was crippled in the 9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that hit the country two years ago. NBC News' Arata Yamamoto reports.
TOKYO — Journalists have been given a rare glimpse inside Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which was crippled in the 9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that hit the country two years ago.
The tour of the plant ahead of the March 11 anniversary of the disaster — which killed nearly 19,000 people and forced about 160,000 from their homes — sheds light on the colossal effort to decommission the nuclear reactors. The process is expected to take up to 40 years.
Richard Engel goes to Japan a year after the devastating earthquake and subsequent tsunami to see how people live just miles away from the Fukushima nuclear plant.
Inside the facility, rows of large tanks store contaminated water used to cool the reactors. Temperatures in the plant have been kept stable — between 59 to 95 Fahrenheit — by continuously injecting cooling water.
According to a briefing by plant operator TEPCO, each container holds up to 1,100 tons of water and fills up in two-and-a-half days. There are 930 of these tanks, and already 75 percent have been filled, according to officials. Although TEPCO plans to increase capacity by an additional 771,600 tons, they are running out of space.
The process is also yielding roughly 440 tons of water every day, raising the issue of what to do with the contaminated liquid. Officials hope that this water purification system will remove nuclear particles when completed.
TEPCO expects the water’s contamination levels to be reduced to low enough levels to release it into the ocean. It is not clear how they will be able to overcome the public discontent over this plan, however. For example, local fishing cooperatives are adamantly against the proposal. In February, a fish with a record level of cesium, 5,100 times the government safety standard, was found near the plant's port.
Japanese researchers unveil robots along with a robotic suit to assist workers going inside the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. NBCNews.com's Dara Brown reports.
But the most important task in decommissioning the reactors is the removal of the fuel rods, a process that will begin in November. Work is already under way to build a protective cover for the rods.
There is still no plan to remove fuel rods for the other reactor units, which are much more damaged.
Although the government's aim is to finish decommissioning the plant in 30 to 40 years, the plan also relies on technological advances, an assumption that presents a profound challenge as Japan struggles to contain this daunting nuclear crisis.
Related:
'Nuclear refugees' visit their home near Fukushima
Only slight risk of cancer after Japan tsunami, WHO says
More coverage of Fukushima disaster from NBC News
Leave a Comment:
Shut them down!
I like the part where they're going to dump the water into the ocean when thet think it's safe.
gm mary
Apparently, they've never seen "Godzilla."
Shut them down and then what? Burn more fossil fuels to make up the difference, thereby worsening global warming and dooming the whole world to destruction? Get real.
The only long term option for power going forward is Nuclear augmented by Solar, where appropriate. We should be strategically decommissioning the older LWR and BWR type reactors and replacing them with the cleaner, safer, more efficient Gen IV reactor designs.
@Scubasteve58001-somewhat agree. This is possibly a safer alternative: molten salt thorium reactor. Cheaper too.
The Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor is actually my favorite design out of all the Gen IV. Passive safety, excellent efficiency, and, as a bonus, you can use them to burn up existing stockpiles of nuclear waste.
We should be replacing the old nukes here in the US with newer, safer designs...and moving ones that are located in poorly located locations.
In the end...there will be nukes, solar, hydro and wind...coal/nat gas/oil will run out or become so expensive it won't be worth burning to make electricity...
This is very disturbing all around.When the disaster first happened, Japan denied the level of damage. Forcing workers to mislabel their tags, so they wouldn't go off, showing the high level of deadly radiation. They wouldn't move the people living nearby to a safe distance from the power plant,resulting in almost 20,000 deaths. Japanese leaders hid from world leaders, knowledge of damaged water flowing into the ocean, from the first day of the earthquake.Covering it up, and when finally caught, were deeply embarrassed.
From the start Japan continued to down play the severity of this event what has happened to the ocean, and only when wild life was discovered highly contaminated did they finally acknowledge how badly the pollution has affected fishing areas. Forcing fisherman to get their food for the common people in bad areas, while food for the rich is outlawed and must be caught in far distant areas. Forcing the poor to suffer even more from the effects.
Now with plans to remove radiation, which CANNOT be done, they look to dump the radioactive water into the ocean. Potentially causing mutation and terrible consequences to ocean life not just locally, but that which also migrates across large spans of the ocean. It will take International efforts to keep Japan from causing more severe ramifications of its damaged nuclear power plants to fragile ocean life the whole world depends on for its survival.
"They wouldn't move the people living nearby to a safe distance from the power plant,resulting in almost 20,000 deaths."
Sorry... maybe you've forgotten what happened in the two years since the disaster - but the "almost 20,000 deaths" were people washed out to sea, killed when their houses collapsed around them, drowned in the raging currents running through city streets, etc.
As bad as the cleanup effort around the power plant is, don't for a second try to imply that more than a few hundred of the dead had ANYTHING to do with the power plant meltdown. Almost all of those killed by the reactors and/or the radiation from them were the emergency workers who tried to manage the meltdowns in the first few weeks after the tsunami and a few immediate neighbors of the power plant.
The rest got killed by the tsunami itself.
"Now with plans to remove radiation, which CANNOT be done,"
There have been a variety of plasma based radiation abatement systems that have worked in a lab setting over the years, including one I first remember reading about over 20 years ago. It's time that they took another look at those technologies - which allowed them to concentrate the radioisotopes leaving the remaining water pure. If they can do that, then dumping the water into the ocean is fine - but if you can't the idea of dumping millions of gallons of polluted water into the ocean is indeed very scary.
There have been no deaths and no sicknesses among humans (emergency workers or otherwise) because of radiation. There have been reports of increased mutation rates in some insects in the area.
"There have been no deaths and no sicknesses among humans (emergency workers or otherwise) because of radiation."
Actually a number of the immediate response team did in fact die of radiation sickness - they were the ones trying to keep the emergency water pumping going on and were walking through the partially flooded tunnels near the reactors that were filled with very high levels of radiation. You don't hear them mentioned very often but there were at least a few dozen plant workers who for sure did die of radiation sickness. Of course not the 20,000 mentioned above, but much more than the zero that you claim.
TEPCO has been very hush hush, so it may be many years before we know the real number.
Its 99% likely there will be zero deaths and very few (if any) cancers associated with this accident. A handful of workers have received more than 30 REM total exposure (a couple are around 45 REM....mostly internal dose from not wearing respirators due to vision issues in the control room) While this is indeed a good amount of exposure, its not even enough to cause temporary changes in blood chemistry, which is seen in >100 REM acute exposures.
Chouse,
There have ZERO deaths associated with Radiation....a couple workers at the plant were crushed from falling debris during the earthquake. No worker has been exposed to lethal levels of Radiation....not even close actually.
Chouse,
My bad, you are correct, I should not try to post when I haven't slept for a few days. The deaths mentioned were from the Tsunami, Don't know how my brain missed that one! On the radiation you mentioned. The plasma based radiation abatement systems you read about in labs were looking at designs works with reducing volatile organic compounds,CHF3,4, PFCs, by single or two stage catalysts. Including chemically active and inert gases that react with infrared radiation.These have been pursued mostly in the use of preventing air pollution and reducing damage to our atmosphere through various methods as applied by different companies over the years. Although some has been geared towards medical wastes, including radioactive, in incinerator fly ash with reducing pollution with plasma abatement technology as well.
However, when it comes to removing radiation from spent fuel water, it is a matter of eliminating the various sized particles.Some being larger,easier, while others much more difficult, such as alpha, which one can breathe in, beta which goes through paper. The recommended treatment,for large volumes of material like water, by the science community, is burial. But that is unfeasible in this case obviously.
WhenceOneWonders-yes there are deformed insects, butterflies, but more you have missed it seems.
Concerning any claim there are no cases of ill individuals or worse, for those workers who entered the stricken nuclear plant immediately after the earthquake, is simply uninformed. As a former emergency medical worker, trained in biological,chemical and nuclear disaster, and technologies in military background, I can promise you, those workers who went in and dealt with the conditions they had to, did not walk out healthy as the day before quake hit.
It is best to keep in mind, disclosure is not the stock and trade mark of the Japanese. As the firing of three high level officials, to take the fall for what the world found out, revealed. In the weeks following this event, some of those workers spoke of the fear they felt, the heat coming through their boots. One worker spoke of being terrified to enter a room others did because he feared for his life. Saying most of them knew they would probably die within a few weeks or months.But they were all forbidden to talk about how they were feeling. And no one would admit his illness was from this accident.
Also, radioactive food was found in Tokyo and other cities. As was radioactive iodine found in the tap water of Fukushima, Tochigi, Gunma, Tokyo, Chiba, Saitama, and Niigata.Radioactive cesium in the tap water in Fukushima, Tochigi and Gunma. Many radioactive hotspots were found outside the evacuation zone, including in Tokyo. While the longer term effects remain uncertain, it is clear, the effects of this nuclear disaster certainly are not over. Check the link for more information about these brave workers story
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/03/31/japans-nuclear-rescuers-inevitable-die-weeks/
That's an understatement if I've ever seen one...
Yep, they screwed the pooch on this one. The Japanese also suffer from an overabundence of arrogance which has rarely served them well. Unless they curb some of these cultural traits, this could prove to be a bigger disaster than the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There's a cautionary tale in this for the rest of us too, and I'm not talking about nuclear power. This is a prime example of the 'corporatization' of government, with the needs of the corporations outweighing the needs of the country or it's citizens. Until their power is curbed, expect more disasters; they could be obvious ones like this, less obvious like fracking or other types of environmental pollution that may not show up for years, or financial disasters like the meltdown of 2008.
The radiation can be removed.
You see when people say radiation and fallout and such, they are talking about small particles of radioactive material that has been scattered over an area, or in this case, in the water.
To decontaminate the water, they'd have to use a filter to catch all the small radioactive particles or use a chemical that would bond with those particles and precipitate them out of solution. It's certainly not easy but it is possible.
Sorry Wind, but the recommended disposal of large quantities of contaminated water is not burial! We treat, remove radioactive particulates, and release water back into the environment in the USA all the time, and we have been doing this for at least half a century. And you are getting radioactive materials confused with the products of decay. We don't remove "alpha particles" or "beta particles" from the waste water, we remove the radioactive material particulates that release these particles when they decay.
You don't get it, here is their own statement:
TEPCO expects the water's contamination levels to be reduced to low enough levels to release it into the ocean.
They even admit it themselves, they can't remove all of it, and YOU say it can be removed. Go figure!
We are talking about water from reactor rods, not particulates that got into the water folks. Hello?
They can get most of it out though. To the point where the radiation is so low that it is similar to background radiation.
Natural sea water has a certain level of Uranium in it. There are actually designs to "mine" it for reactor fuel. Only problem is it would be about $300/Kg which is more expensive (currently) than mining it from rocks.
You'all have a couple ofr numbers crossed up. There were an estimates 21,400+ deaths from the tsunami, but there were also an estimated 14,000-20,000 deaths that will result from radiation effects in the next 75 years. These include miscarriages, birth defects, cancer deaths, and various other "genetic damage" illnesses with only a handful cause by direct radiation exposure.
The Japanese are the most radiation-aware people on the planet because of the use of atomic bombs during WWII. They have a long track record with studying radiation's long-term effects up close. One thing that they are doing is monitoring mutations and other genetic damage in insects and in farm animals and pets left behind. They are able to correlate this data with the exposures that people got before leaving the contaminated areas. The predictions of radiation-related deaths started at around 12,000 and have been slowly increasing as more data becomes available.
Can you link to that information Chris?
Chernobyl had estimates of around 4,000-9,000 deaths (Estimates vary widely but that's the IAEA/WHO estimate). I have a hard time believing that Fukushima would have a larger impact than Chernobyl.
Sorry Wind, they can remove most of the particulates through simple evaporation, and then the majority of the rest through reverse osmosis, ion exchange, etc. The only thing that give significant trouble is tritium or deuterium, which chemically acts like regular old hydrogen.
Although no one has yet died from radiation exposure at Fukushima, the only comprehensive study done to date calculates 130 deaths.
Compare that to an estimated 1 million premature deaths every year from burning coal (WHO), and you can see why I agree with Jim about nuclear power.
When 20 children were killed at Newtown in one day, it got national attention - but nearly twice that number die every day from guns. It's scattered, so we don't see it. It doesn't make headline news.
The same principle applies to nuclear power.
But the fact is that nuclear power is the safest energy source we have. Per TerraWatt generated, coal kills 161 people, oil kills 36, solar kills 0.44, wind kills 0.15, and nuclear kills 0.04.
Source.
It's very, very hard to argue against nuclear power with those numbers. And I haven't even included the effects of a warming climate - which is already taking a considerable toll.
The solution to pollution is dilution ... They are probably planning on dumping it in international waters. It's not like oil ... it's not a big deal.
In this case, the solution to pollution is either sequestration (for the shorter lived fission products) or transmutation (for the longer lived transuranics).
Bonds said:
"Chouse,
There have ZERO deaths associated with Radiation....a couple workers at the plant were crushed from falling debris during the earthquake. No worker has been exposed to lethal levels of Radiation....not even close actually."
You're completely wrong!
chouse,
Can you find a source on deaths caused by radiation from Fukushima? Everything I can find is showing 2 deaths at the plant but not from radiation.
I forget if it was 20/20, Nightline, NPR, or what - but I clearly remember hearing (from a REAL news source) that several dozen of the workers at the plant who were wading through the tunnels filled with extremely radioactive water, who were working to fill the cooling tanks filled with hot rods (that had been removed from the reactors in the previous refueling cycle but were still giving off lethal levels of radiation), etc - died of radiation sickness.
TEPCO of course has tried to pretend that nobody died, but that's just not the case. Just like how they initially claimed to have had only a minor problem with the reactors, when in reality by that point they were fully aware that several of the reactors had experienced meltdown and that a huge amount of radiation was released.
It was, of course, minor compared to Chernobyl - but far more significant than 3 Mile Island.
chouse: If you cannot find a source, perhaps you are simply misremembering.
"If you cannot find a source, perhaps you are simply misremembering."
I didn't even bother LOOKING for a source. I told you that it was on a reputable news source, but that was two years ago - your reply is to imply that I should jump when you say jump and go find a citation for you?
GFY!!! That's all I can say to that.
Why don't YOU do some research.
chouse,
'Hot' rods removed from the reactor cores were indeed still releasing large amounts of radioactivity - but they were in cooling pools on the third floor of each 4-story reactor building.
Workers wouldn't have been in tunnels if they were trying to get to the third floor. And no one was attempting to carry buckets of water up 2 flights of stairs to fill the cooling pools, because radiation levels in those buildings were off the charts. Literally. TEPCO rad sensors maxed out, and they couldn't get any data other than rad levels were higher than what the sensors could measure.
I think you might be remembering this:
Fukushima men stood in radioactive water without boots
More at the link. They all survived.
I spent more than three months providing daily, detailed coverage of the events at Fukushima here on the Vine (for which I was awarded a RAV). See examples of that daily coverage here, here, and here.
I tell you honestly that if anyone has died from radiation due to Fukushima, it's the best kept secret in the world. There simply haven't been any reported deaths.
"I spent more than three months providing daily, detailed coverage of the events at Fukushima here on the Vine"
As if that is supposed to mean anything. The point here is that TEPCO has been withholding information - but it WAS reported that there were several dozen deaths.
"There simply haven't been any reported deaths."
You feel free to tell 20/20 or NPR or whoever it was to issue a retraction then.
I see you learned a great deal from a careful (7 minute) examination of my in-depth Fukushima coverage links, chouse. So glad I took the time to explain it to you, and even provide you with an easy 'out' via the New Scientist article.
That's not a mistake I ever make twice.
To recap, then:
TEPCO workers were filling buckets with seawater that they scooped out of the ocean 300 feet away (seawater was the only available water source at the site after the tsunami), and then walked back 300 feet with full buckets, and carried those buckets up two flights of stairs to fill cooling pools inside reactor buildings that were undergoing a nuclear meltdown.
Dozens died, and there's no record of the (reported) event anywhere on the internet. TEPCO removed all NPR and 20/20 reports from everywhere.
Got it.
chouse: My comment at #2.21 ("chouse: If you cannot find a source, perhaps you are simply misremembering.") was not meant to be taken as an order or request to provide sources but simply as a reminder that one can make mistakes in remembering (as I, for one, have often done, even, at times, in public).
You cannot recall your source(s), I, like Physicist-retired, would venture, because there are no sources, there having been no deaths. Covering up deaths would have meant not only evading or misleading intense professional and amateur media and governmental scrutiny for just about two years, but also quashing for two years all rumor and gossip. There has not been a hint of deaths from radiation.
Physicist-retired: In #2.15 you provided a link to http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2012/ee/c2ee22019a, but the link leads only to an abstract. Have you read the actual article? Are the projected additional moralities and morbidities calculated for the entire world, for areas in the plume(?) showed in the accompanying graph, or for Japan or some other area only?
Whence,
Just running out to dinner (hot date!) so I'll leave this link as a marker - it's the complete paper.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/TenHoeveEES12.pdf
Leave a reply and I'll find it in the morning. You might also like this:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/FukushimaCommentary.pdf
Physicist-retired: Thank you.
It's a global perspective, Whence. They considered the entire world.
I think we got very lucky in a number of ways. While Japan has a large number of nuclear plants on both the east and west coasts, the Daiichi facility at Fukushima was on the east coast, and just 300 feet from the ocean. Prevailing winds took most of the airborne radiation out to sea, and away from populated areas (at least for the most part - winds shift occasionally).
It would have been a very different story if Daiichi was on the west coast. Winds would have blown all of that right over the mainland instead of out to sea.
So that was a bit of luck.
And in spite of a series of mistakes by TEPCO, they still acted much, much faster than officials in Chernobyl (for example). Another good thing.
One of the most surprising findings of that study was that the deaths arising from non-radiological causes like the evacuation of nearby areas was so large - nearly 600, as compared to an estimated (eventual) 150 deaths from radiation. Clearly, there's a lot of room for improvement there.
It means a lot to me. It means that PR has spent many MANY hours looking into a huge number of sources.
It means that PR can and does cite those sources.
It means that PR can back up what he says.
chouse - your claims are false.
Physicist-retired: Regarding the paper and comment #2.30, I was surprised, actually, that the number of deaths associated with the evacuation was so low. The median age up there was pretty high and the weather was cold and snowing during much of the month or more after the evacuation began. Toward the beginning, as well, some people in evacuation centers were getting one cold meal per day (fuel and transport systems having been damaged by the earthquake(s) and tsunami). Even six months after the events, when most people had been moved into semi-permanent housing, conditions were not particularly good.
Exactly, Whence.
It seems that improving evacuation plans would be a logical next step - and not all that difficult to do. Whether planning for an unexpected tsunami in Japan, or a violent eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the heavily-populated Naples region, we aren't very good at evacuation planning (that last one, BTW, would be a real disaster - Naples is difficult to evacuate, and totally unprepared for such a thing).
But humans, by nature, focus on events that are happening right now, as opposed to events in the future. If that weren't true, we'd all be using carbon-free energy sources by now.
Not good not good at all. One big mess that is no doubt trying to be down played.
Bottle the water and sell in China as night lights.
Simply filter it. US drinking water standards only require no living organisms. The water would certainly not have any of those. :)
In fact, some people in areas where fraking is going on would appreciate the improvement in their drinking water quality.
Welcome to the reality of nuclear power folks.
When they run out of space for the constant flow of cooling water. (that water is keeping it from melting down, its not over). When they run out of space, what then? Turn off the water? I don't think so, burn baby burn. So the only alternative is to start dumping it. They are hoping they can decon that stuff. But chances are they cant. Not at a rate that keeps up with the flow they are using to cool the reactors.
They need to cool the decontaminated water, and reuse it. That's their only real option beyond dumping it. I don't want them dumping it. That cant be allowed to happen.
I agree with you however, a nuclear power plant doesn't dump its contaminated cooling water, it is recirculated after it goes through a heat exchanger where fresh water takes the heat away and is used to run turbines to produce power. The contaminated water never comes into direct contact with the outside. Ideally it is always completely contained. The only thing that can allow the contaminated water to escape is if it overheats and ruptures the containment structure. If run properly and with strict safety standards, it can be done safely. France hasn't had a significant accident and a large proportion of their power is from nuclear. Unfortunately, when an accident happens, the consequences can be severe.
The technology to clean radioactively contaminated water to the point where it is safe to release to the environment has existed and been used for decades.
Other than filtering out solid particulates what is this technology? Id like to know.As far as I've seen, what is done with contaminated anything, its put somewhere that it can sit for years, decades or millenia till the radioactivity dissipates.
Distill/evaporate the water, separating the other elements out. Simple to do on paper, but difficult to do SAFELY; the concentrated brine remaining is very nasty stuff.
Yes, distill/evaporate, and then use other well known processes such as reverse osmosis, ion exchange, etc. It's been being done very safety at the Hanford reservation for decades. Yes, the remainder is very nasty stuff, but the volume is very small compared to the starting volume, and the cleaned water is safe to release to the environment.
Cesium 137...the biggie that was released in huge amounts, has a half life of 30 years...so they say x number of half lives (5?) and it should be pretty much gone...so in 150+ years, we should be good...for the most part. I think there is some plutonium that got spewed out and that might last a while longer!
Why don't they just invent a compression ray that can compress the atoms as dense as a black hole, so the reactor can sink to the center of Earth? Ask me a harder one.
This is a great example of recovery after catastrophe.
I don’t believe any one else could have done it better. Hats off to Japan.
westchesterbob: The recovery has not progressed much at all. Little has been rebuilt (physically); debris is still not cleaned up in many places; the economy is still depressed; thousands of people are still displaced; and of those thousands a large number are still living in temporary houses in high school playing fields, disused parking lots, and the like. With the second anniversary of the earthquake(s)/tsunami approaching, information about just how little has been done is being republicized in the media. If you understand Japanese, looking at any of the major newspapers' web sites will give an inkling; if not, poking around at the English langauge NHK site (http://www.nhk.or.jp/english/) will give you some leads.
Please ignore this entry. My comment #7.1 ended up being posted twice.
They will desperatly try to cover up any mistakes they make, downplay any level of radiation actually measured, expose workers to high levels of radiation, and probably fumble for years with the problem and still not solve it. Solution? Appear in front of TV cameras and bow effusively when exposed for the fumbling fools they are. And, since their still as xenophobic as they were before WWII, they'll refuse to allow gaijin companies to assist directly and shorten the process by years.
Don-
What if there is no easy solution to the problem? They need to stop spilling it into the ocean and keep it contained as possible...obviously they need to start filtering water and reusing it to cool these things.
Don Boyer: "They" couldn't downplay radiation levels even if they tried: the levels are being measured independently by several organizations; the levels measured accord with those reported by government bodies. A portal to many data sources is here: http://blog.safecast.org/maps/.
Well they sure are doing a better job of cleaning up than the Russians did at Chernobyl/Pripyat.
The Japanese will have this weight over their heads for the next 30 years or longer. Nuclear plants are simply too risky. Nothing happens and that is great. Something happens and you have a multi billionaire forever disaster. Chenobyl will take 20,000 years before it is safe for people to live in the area.
Nuclear power plant designs dating from the 50's and 60's are too risky. Fukushima Dai-ichi was within months of being retired; the facility is a wonderful example of nuclear tech of 50 years ago. There are much safer design options today.
It's also fair to note that if TEPCO had taken better measures to protect the facility from the horrific tsunami we would not be having this issue.
20,000 years? Huh? Tell me the radioactive particles that we are dealing with there and their half lives? For what I know the 2 big ones are Cesium 137 and Strontium 90...both with half lives of 30 years...no way that much time is needed...i'd say more like 200 years and it should be pretty good.. I think we all still have DDT in our bodies and that has been outlawed for a couple decades.
After disasters like this, Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island and other safety issues with nuclear power, I find it impossible to believe people still find this a better solution than fossil fuels. No, I don't think fossil fuels are good for the environment - but they're nothing like the long term, immediately deadly, high levels of polution that come from nuclear power.
Coal power plants kill approximately 1 million people per year from their pollution.
On a deaths per TWh generated basis, Nuclear is by far the safest form of energy available.
NUCLEAR PLANTS: Another "Sociopathic Rush to Profits" where the participants couldn’t see further than their First Dollar of Profit!
Man is in way over his head with Nuclear Plants, INTELLECTUALLY, TECHNOLOGICALLY, SAFETY WISE AND PERSONNEL WISE. Nuclear Plants are, and will remain, "Structural Frankenstein’s" with GREED as the Contractor!
They pose constant Unknown, Unforeseen and Unimaginable dangers to ourselves and our Environment due, among other things, to UNPREDICTABLE and UNCONTROLLABLE WEATHER CONDITIONS. They are not, in my opinion, a reasonable or economical solution to our energy problems. By the time we find this out, it will be too late! We began to see evidence of their potential danger, which we seem to have ignored, at the Three Mile Island Plant and Chernobyl. Fukushima is showing us just how dangerous.
And, may God help us, we haven't seen anything yet! Nor have we yet to see -and hopefully, not experience, the ultimate consequences of the Fukushima Disaster! What Unknown and Unimaginable potential danger do the Tanks at Fukushima holding 50 MILLION GALLONS of Radioactive Waste Water pose when these Tanks ROT -and they will eventually ROT, and release that Radioactive Water? Maybe DUMP it into the Pacific? It occurs to me more and more, that Technology, with its concomitant GREED, will eventually be our undoing! WHERE are we going to store OUR Continuing and Growing volumes of Nuclear Waste? This is already posing an questionable Question. As IT CAN’T BE REUSED AND IT CAN’T BE RECLAIMED, what are we going to store it in? Have we found any Containers yet that won’t ROT? ROTTING CONTAINERS put, not only or our Environment, but our Ground Water Supply as well, at an Unrecoverable Risk. And once gone, Neither are Recoverable. If we’re still around, and continuing our Visionless, Sociopathic, "Screw Ups", we are also going to run out of Waste storage space at some point in time! GREED is not only taking this Country down, but it is going to Wipe Us all the hell Out! If we continue to Sow as we have, there will be nothing left to Reap. Let alone anyone around to do the Reaping!
And I am an optimist!
Radioactive water can be filtered and purified within safe levels, as mentioned in comments above.
Existing nuclear waste can actually be destroyed by the newer breed of Gen.IV thorium reactors. The problem is that those Gen.IV types won't ever be built, because paranoiacs like you end up making policy.
yeahbuhwha, may I suggest a slight change to your post?
"...because of paranoiacs who over-use bold font and ALL CAPS like you end up making policy."
Hydro power is so much safer, like the Banqiao Dam failure that killed 171,000 people and made 11 million homeless.
And how many coal miners have died trapped in the dark? how many mountaintops have been removed? how much mercury has been tossed into the air?
How many wells have been tainted by frackers? have they settled the question of fracking causing earthquakes yet?
And what about the toxic chemical by products of solar cell manufacturing? radioactive material has a half-life, heavy metals last basically forever.
How unbiased can NBC reporting be, when it is owned outright by G.E., who stands to benefit from the continued promotion of nuclear power as a "safe" and efficient source of energy?
G.E., who has been promoting their own failed nuclear plant design, the exact same as the four that melted down in Fukushima? The same plants that are in the USA, btw.
-from the article
A sentence appears to have been removed from this paragraph, detailing some kind of planned or existing water purification system. A rush to deadline by the reporter? An editor trying to play up nuclear paranoia?
Hmm, reminds me of the Hanford site in Washington state. Totally screwed for decades and getting worse all the time. I just read the Governor of WA state was negotiating to send pump out the radioactive sludge from the leaking containers and send it to New Mexico! LOL! What has he been smoking? The New Mexico people will raise such Hell as he's never heard of, just like they did in Nevada and every other place that tried to dump in other states back yards. I"m sure he's just doing this to buy time and let things calm down since people here in WA are getting pretty pissed off and scared about isotopes possibly going into the Columbia River. Once it starts, we're toast, but so far, no action to actually find out where that stuff is that is leaking. I think the only way people will do anything is bring criminal charges for not doing something, for neglect, for the people responsible. But yes, I won't hold my breath, since it is the people who make the laws that also are responsible. So...we're screwed unless there is a near miracle. We have the technology, why are we spending the money to just do it? And yes, I know of the $10billion already wasted on vitrification plants. We need to bring in some really smart people and pay them CEO wages, not use government scientists paid $50,00/yr that go home at 5pm every day and take off 6 weeks of vacation. This is an emergency and we need to treat it as such...oops sorry for the divergence from the article, but it is startlingly similar...
Everyone thinks there is some magical answer to our energy needs...there isn't. Fossil fuels, in the long term (say 50 to 100 years) is dead...they will run out or become so freaken expensive, that only the top 2% will afford to burn them. The other 98% will be walking, riding bikes, or taking public transport that depends on electricity (from wind/solar/hydro/nuclear).....there is a wild card, and that is electric cars, which will be used by a portion of the population, but who knows how large that will be. Obviously our way of life is going to change drastically, if electricity isn't used more. I read about companies pursuing natural gas and propane for transportation fuels..which is fine, buts its just a band aid...those too will run out or become too expensive.
In the end we will need all the nuclear power plants that we can build...and we'll need a system based on electricity...fossil fuels are not going to last... we should be using that fossil energy to build out wind, solar, nukes and hydro (like the Chinese are doing)....