Japan earthquake: A timely reminder of the dangers of nuclear power

It seems like Japan's nuclear reactors were shut down without any major problems. Meanwhile, fires rage at Tokyo's oil refinery.

participating in the nuclear renaissance is totally irresponsible, fucking up our future and poisoning our world so that some pricks can remain rich and in control of the population, well they wont keep you safe from a nuclear disaster and even if there wasn't one where is all the waste gonna go, shall we carry on shooting it at children or just continue to shove it in the earth for future children to be poisoned by??

alarmed at the idea

C4 news was reporting venting of radioactive gas and now we have:

Radiation level rises at Japanese nuclear plant

Radiation levels have reportedly spiked outside a nuclear plant in northeastern Japan that was damaged by the country's strongest-ever earthquake.

 http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20110311/nuclear-tsunami-japan-110311/

Report: Radioactive material may have leaked from Japanese reactor

Citing the Tokyo Electric Power Co., Japan's Kyodo News Agency said that radioactive substances may have seeped out of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, about 160 miles (260 kilometers) north of Tokyo. Earlier, the agency had reported that authorities may purposefully release radioactive vapor to alleviate pressure at the power plant.

Radiation levels measured at a monitoring post near the plant's main gate are more than eight times above normal, Japan's nuclear safety agency said, according to Kyodo.

"If they can't restore power to the plant (and cool the reactor), then there's the possibility of some sort of core meltdown," he said.

 http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/11/japan.nuclear/

...

If people want a revolution and something to fight for, there isn't a better reason out there than the nuclear argument. This doesn't just affect us but every generation to come.

I suggest every faction unite and tear it all down, then the state, then the corperations and anything else were not happy with.

All aboard the skylark!

>> It seems like Japan's nuclear reactors were shut down without any major problems. Meanwhile, fires rage at Tokyo's oil refinery.

But .. The damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor has already been leaking radiation outside the plant, confirms Japan's nuclear safety agency and the operator, the Tokyo Electric Power company.
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/11/japan-tsunami-earthquake-live-coverage#block-42

And ..
The Fukushima Daini plant has now been added to the government's emergency list.
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/11/japan-tsunami-earthquake-live-coverage#block-45

So, I guess it depends on what you mean by 'seems' and 'major problems'

We should not be soft on oil industry. The refinery fires are releasing health affecting toxins.

breaking news, explosion at nuclear plant.

i am putting out a call for an end to all nuclear power forthwith.

stickler, give it up son.

There are plenty of nuclear reactors in the world and they don't suffer any problems. Look at France, they export about 18% of their electricity whereas the UK is likely to suffer a blackout in about 2020 unless we sort something out.

The japan 'accident' is just human error - putting it next to the sea in an earthquake prone area wasn't a good idea and clearly they hadn't thought about the effects of mass flooding.

That is no valid or logically reason to right off nuclear power wholesale. If you completely wrote off a whole technology because of a few reasons then nothing would ever get done.

We still need electricity. Nuclear power (when done right) is a totally valid part of the portfolio of solutions. The fuel comes from politically stable countries like canada and australia so we don't have to sit around waiting for the middle east to stop shooting each other.

I could argue about writing off wind turbines because they are clearly too costly in that the government pay massive subsides to the point that developers are building in places with no wind! But rather than close them all down, I'd argue just to fix the specific problems instead.

"There are plenty of nuclear reactors in the world and they don't suffer any problems. Look at France, they export about 18% of their electricity whereas the UK is likely to suffer a blackout in about 2020 unless we sort something out.

The japan 'accident' is just human error - putting it next to the sea in an earthquake prone area wasn't a good idea and clearly they hadn't thought about the effects of mass flooding.

That is no valid or logically reason to right off nuclear power wholesale. If you completely wrote off a whole technology because of a few reasons then nothing would ever get done."

Not much of an argument.

If one considers Chernobyl, it can easily be argued that nuclear technology is of course not only cost effective but perfectly safe...until a disaster strikes. In which case the nuclear option will cost you absolutely everything you have. The legacy alone will condemn an entire nation to poverty and social problems for decades to come. There never comes a day in which the disaster is over. The Russian people are still paying for the consequences of Chernobyl, decades later. During the heroic effort by the Russian people to get a grip on the problem, almost half of the entire nation was in some way engaged with the disaster. Chernobyl is what knocked Russia out of the cold war, not fanatic deluded intifada Muslims or even the boasting 'must take the credit for eveything' United States...it was Chernobyl.

So the nuclear option is perfectly fine while it works...but if there is a problem, game over. You lose your money, your seat at the table, your cards and every chance to win your money back.

What is happening in Japan right now has stunned much of the nation into nervous silence, they know what nuclear devastation looks like, they experienced it before when the US deliberately bombed it after placing the odds of war into the hands of its mathematicians.

If it goes wrong again, the nuclear industry must prepare for the fight of its life. All bets, and gloves, will be off!

"It seems like Japan's nuclear reactors were shut down without any major problems. Meanwhile, fires rage at Tokyo's oil refinery. "

WHAT!!!!!
for fuck sake is that a real statement????

anti nuke people think oil is bad too - and as shocking as it is - we think coal is shite too.

"anti nuke people think oil is bad too - and as shocking as it is - we think coal is shite too."

Is there anything you actually like? (that is practical)

...it's called the Sun.

There is your practical alternative to fucking up the environment for short-term gain.

It might not be a conveniently storable and transportable as oil, but oil will run out eventually and if it's a choice between convenience and long-term sustainability, I know what I'd choose.

"Is there anything you actually like? (that is practical)"

Depends on what you mean by practical.

Do you mean practical as in just lazily trundle along with the current provision because everything else is just "too hard" in terms of turning a profit, or do you mean practical as in keep sinking billions into the private bank accounts of the shareholders behind corporations like Tepco, thereby wasting billions of investing bucks that could go toward subsidising renewable technology, until it peaks in efficiency.

Or do you mean practical as in maintaining the status quo of international relationships which keep the rich world rich and the poor world poor through inequitable production and distribution of energy resources?

What exactly do you mean by "practical"?

>> What exactly do you mean by "practical"?

I mean something that doesn't cost too much but produces a comparable amount of electricity as nuclear, coal, oil and gas. A solution who's financial cost is about the same as existing solutions so that the the consumer''s bills remain within their living standards.

By impractical, i mean something that costs a fortune and doesn't produce enough electricity so that we have blackouts.

"I mean something that doesn't cost too much but produces a comparable amount of electricity as nuclear, coal, oil and gas. A solution who's financial cost is about the same as existing solutions so that the the consumer''s bills remain within their living standards."

A fair point.

Nuclear is cheap but as we already know, if it goes wrong it is by far and away THE most expensive of all the energy provisions, oil, coal and gas are finite and therefore their price is only going to go up as time progresses.

So, none of these technologies are cost effective over the longer range. That they may still be within the range of the scope of profitability at present is no indication of profitability for the future. No matter how you work your profit and loss out with any of these technologies, it all leads to excessive losses in the longer term, to such a degree that management of these energy resources cannot be maintained within the current economic models that we have.

So the choice is a very simple one, invest in renewable technologies now and maintain subsidies for that renewable resource until it reaches the required efficiency rate. The current economic model has to be adapted in order to ensure that those subsidies can be maintained and any and all "liabilities" need to be minimised in the interim.

Japan has effectively just lost its largest nuclear production facility largely because its assurances that the facility was safely sited were made within the economic environment of the modern "shareholder" business model. Those assurance have been tested and found to be, as expected, fraudulent. It now has problems with its other facilities too. The combined cost of this fraud being exposed will wipe out the profitability of its nuclear industry and that, on top of its combined losses from damage from the earthquake and Tsunami, is going to be felt for decades to come. Not just in Japan, but throughout the world.

Japan is the worlds third largest economy.

The most damaging aspect of all of this, is that so much of Japan's electricity is generated from central sites on which disproportionately large areas of Japan are dependent. One site gets knocked out, and the consequences are national in scale! On top of all its other problems, Japan is now having to cut its energy supply over large areas of the country in order to ease the burden on its remaining facilities...yet this is the time when it needs that energy the most. Lives, businesses and civil infrastructure are now completely dependent on non interruptable power supply.

It will become quite apparent over the coming weeks, that the extra costs involved with the failure of these nuclear facilities will demolish the economic arguments for nuclear being a cost effective solution to energy production in Japan. Not if it goes wrong! If it goes wrong, the economics of nuclear are wiped out in a single instant. No other technology exhibits this terminal flaw in its underlying business logic.

Nuclear is far too "risky".

For us here in a more geologically stable area of the world, nuclear still seems a stable way to generate energy but what is the consequence of an accident here in the UK? I can tell you that despite our size and position in the world economically, and considering we're are one of the most developed countries on earth, a nuclear accident, were it to happen, would be non-manageable. Our civil infrastructure, emergency contingency planning and "just in time" resources models mean that we could not deal with an accident, however caused, involving a nuclear facility and meltdown of a reactor core facility.

A serious nuclear accident in the UK, would finish us off! There would be no way back for us. We are far to heavily developed and concentrated on this island for any serious nuclear accident to be manageable. It would swamp us completely within days.

But here we are, spending billions on a new wave of reactor facility spending and most of those billions will be scheduled to be spent with foreign corporations, few of which have made any coherent commitment to funding of renewable energy technology beyond the cheap and cheerful "right-on dude" industry realignment advertising drives.

Japan is the third exhibit of nuclear technology ballooning costs way beyond its industry...when is the message learned, on the fourth, fifth, tenth, twentieth incident?

We need major re-alignment of the nuclear industry worldwide to commit to funding of solar, wind and clean, modular, decentralised energy production and that must include serious movement on encouraging and funding existing research to maximise the efficiency of newly emerging technologies. The nuclear industry waste billions on non energy production costs such as advertising, bonuses for its CEO's, premium kickback payments to government agencies and third party deal-makers, excessive premium dividends for its shareholders and bureaucratic costs, that money should be recovered and channelled into building obsolescence into the industry.

The nuclear industry is too risky, too dangerous, excessively inefficient, non renewable and a standing threat to any nation that is foolish enough to employ it. We need to understand that what has happened in Japan is the last straw.

Above all...nuclear is NOT SAFE.

There's been some very irrational statements made here about the nuclear component of the Japanese earthquake disaster. Let me just remind everyone that 10,000 or upwards people have been killed by the earthquake and the subsequent tsunami. The number killed by the nuke power stations is zero... so far. People are questioning the sense of siting nuke power stations in an earthquake zone when they should really be questioning the idea of PEOPLE living in an earthquake zone near the coast. This was an extremely powerful earthquake that happened in a country that is well prepared for them. The city of Istanbul by comparison has a population of 15 million, is nowhere near as well prepared and is overdue for a massive quake. When a mega quake does strike somewhere vulnerable like Istanbul then the death toll could be hundreds of thousands or even reach a million. There has NOT been a nuclear explosion - the explosions that have occured have been simple chemical or steam explosions that have ruptured the containment buildings. No one knows for certain yet if melt down has occured or will occur. If melt down does happen then that's obviously more serious. For sure those reactors sound pretty crappy if the backup cooling systems have failed for so many of them but they are particularly old designs.

Before everyone thinks I'm a rabid fan of nuclear, I should say at this point that I don't like nuclear power myself and never have done. Obviously accidents can be very serious and the waste issue is unlikely to ever be easily resolved. I should also say that I don't like the idea of runaway climate change either. The likely deaths and environmental damage caused by nuke accidents will be utterly trivial compared to the desertification and mass species extinctions if the predictions about runaway climate change are true. Nuclear power may be the least bad low carbon energy source we have so far. It's not just me saying this - George Monbiot, Mark Lynas, Jim Hansen and many other far more scientifically minded persons than your average climate activist agree that we can't do this without nuclear energy.

Those who keep banging on about how we can supply ALL our energy from renewables seem to know nothing about baseload power and the intermittency of renewables or are just in plain denial. These two problems cannot be conveniently ignored. Solar power is incredibly expensive, takes years to pay back the very high energy consumed during solar cell manufacture, is not really viable when most days in this country are cloudy and get this - it goes off at night. Tidal energy can only supply a few percent of what we need. Wind power if fully developed can supply a great deal of power - while the wind blows. But when it doesn't blow - and there really are times when it doesn't - that's a different story. During the very cold spell, when the country was demanding almost the maximum amount of power that the grid can deliver, the contribution from wind power plummeted to just 5% of our present installed wind power's capacity FOR SEVERAL DAYS. We don't yet have the ability to store several days worth of energy on a countrywide scale - this could be decades away. The zero carbon Britain report quoted relies heavily on biofuels but these can cause massively increased CO2 emissions when land use is changed to grow them and over time will cause irreversible soil depletion. The Greenpeace report is very idealistic - solar powered streetlamps, and contains many innacuracies - the efficiency of electricity generation drops once you start extracting heat as in CHP systems so 80 or 90% efficiency is never possible and the CHP systems will just lock us into continued fossil fuel burning. Obviously we have to make enormous reductions in how much energy we use but there are limits to how much you can expect from a society that has become used to cheap abundant energy for decades. Try telling people that they can't run their xboxes or heating when it's sub zero outside and they'll simply riot and demand a return to fossil derived energy and sod the consequences of climate change.

I'll repeat that I really don't like nuke power either but the future is bleak and I just don't think we have much choice. I stongly urge people to stop knee jerking against nuke power and research the facts for themselves.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/mar/13/nuclear-power-station-plans-criticised

 http://boycottedf.org.uk/?q=node/46

"There's been some very irrational statements made here about the nuclear component of the Japanese earthquake disaster. Let me just remind everyone that 10,000 or upwards people have been killed by the earthquake and the subsequent tsunami. The number killed by the nuke power stations is zero... so far. People are questioning the sense of siting nuke power stations in an earthquake zone when they should really be questioning the idea of PEOPLE living in an earthquake zone near the coast."

No, people should not be questioning population density in the Pacific region as the entire area is prone to earthquakes. The number of people living in these areas is in the hundreds of millions! You can't move them out. And living by the coast in these areas is a fact of life, not done by choice.

Yes we are all aware of what has happened in Japan, nobody can forget or ignore this. Why would you try to suggest otherwise?

This article is about the nuclear industry and I would suggest you stay on topic.

The death toll from the earthquake and Tsunami is certainly higher than 10,000, this figure will rise as time goes on. Much of the eastern coast of Japan has been demolished and the civil infrastructure in these areas has also been demolished. At a time when the Japanese need freedom of movement, power and complete focus on the matter at hand, the nuclear industry has severely antagonised the situation and made things much much worse. The problems at these plants are also taking up resources the Japanese Government can ill afford and the wider consequences of the world seeing reactor buildings exploding are backing up for the future.

Energy production and distribution is something you need to be able to count on in an emergency, it should not constitute part of the emergency. Power cuts are the very last thing the Japanese need right now!

As for your statement that the failure of these facilities hasn't killed anybody, well that's remarkably short sighted. The power cuts alone will kill somebody somewhere. Japan is a very populace nation, lack of power after a national disaster...that will kill! Its very cold in Japan at night right now, power failure for any length of time will hit large sections of the population.

The elderly, infirm and disabled or disease suffering will be the first groups to report deaths simply because they lose heating. That will continue for as long as the power is out.

"I'll repeat that I really don't like nuke power either but the future is bleak and I just don't think we have much choice. I stongly urge people to stop knee jerking against nuke power and research the facts for themselves."

You future is as bleak as your outlook. There is no knee-jerking here. Just reaction to exploding reactor buildings!!

Those facilities are designed NOT to do that, by people who are the worlds foremost authority on earthquake management!

Doesn't look good! In fact it looks very very bad!

To Operational Editorial:
I really don't understand your logic speculating on how many will die from lack of electricity. I suspect that like too many activists your grasp of numbers is so poor that you're just unable to see figures in proportion. It's looking like the death toll from the tsunami could be a staggering 100,000 and maybe 1000 people max could die due to hypothermia or failure of ICU machines in hospitals etc? Who knows? It's likely to be such a small number by comparison that it may never be reported. Now hospitals always have their own backup generators but it's likely that these too will have been swamped. A 35 metre wall of mucky debris laden water is going to wipe out ANY generator plant be it coal, gas, solar farm, wind farm. It will also wipe out substations, pylons etc that all forms of generation need. Electricity and water shouldn't be mixed plain and simple. Mucky sea water is thousands of times worse because it will leave a conductive film of brine on everything that's supposed to be an insulator while corroding at a furious rate everything that's supposed to conduct. The only source of electricity that wouldn't have failed here would be offshore wind - provided the towers weren't toppled by the quake but again, onshore substations and pylons would have been wrecked.

I am NOT defending the Japanese nuclear industry or politicians who do sound like a bunch of lying cowboys. If they have ignored previous safety warnings then they should all be jailed. No one knows for certain what the long term health hazards from radio-isotope leakage will be so I for one won't be speculating on that.

What we do all need to think about though is future sources of energy that are not going to tip us into runaway climate change. Like I said before, if this happens then the death and destruction caused by climate change will make all earthquakes, tsunamis and leaking nuke power stations appear completely trivial events by comparison. Wake up! The future really is bleak unless we get it sorted. Read Mark Lynas' book - six degrees. Until someone invents a perfect zero carbon form of energy and/or a way of safely storing incredibly large amounts of energy to make up for the chronic intermittancy of renewables then however ghastly it sounds, we just cannot rule out nuclear as an energy source for the future. Renewable energy in it's present forms won't be our saviour just because we want it to be.

"I really don't understand your logic speculating on how many will die from lack of electricity. I suspect that like too many activists your grasp of numbers is so poor that you're just unable to see figures in proportion."

Like many activists my 'grasp' of numbers is based on what those numbers represent, that being lives and not calculations of losses and gains. I live in the decimal-centric UK and long ago dismissed the western logic of following every catastrophe with an appraisal of how much has been lost from a business point of view. I don't suppose there is anything wrong with being concerned about the cost of a given event (the UK is still a nation of shopkeepers after all), its just that as an activist, cost means nothing in relation to the loss of a life. In terms of a life, money has no value and appraisal of cost is a pointless calculation to make excepting the cost of what it takes to save a life.

In Japan tonight over much of its area, money means nothing for those who's lives are now wrecked.

But the morality of it aside, no I don't suppose any renewable technology would have faired any better against the Tsunami. It would still have ended up wreckage. But not wreckage that explodes, spills out poison, needs to be cooled with hundreds or thousands of tons of seawater, has to have a 20 kilometre exclusion zone put into place around it or costs billions to replace not to mention rendering much of the Japanese economy demolished and unrecoverable.

Solar, wind, wave or any other technology is easily and quickly replaced. No fuss, no drama.

Renewable, you are right is not efficient as a means to generate energy on a national level and on a national scale. Why, because the vast majority of residential, commercial and industry plots place 100% of their energy demands on the national grid. Few domestic residential areas make any attempt whatsoever to generate any local electrical charge at all. Its considered too expensive to build solar into new housing developments, instead, house prices are driven up and up by the supplementary economy of property speculation to the point that there is no economic room for the extra cost of renewable energy to be built in to new developments.

Property speculation is considered more important than clean energy. WRONG.

In the UK it is possible to buy land without building or plot development permission for just a few thousand pounds. Go through the process of applying for development of that land and you are faced with spending thousands of pounds with local authorities to pencil push the application through. Then you sell that land on for hundreds of thousands of pounds as land with building permission on it. Again, no room for the extra cost of localised energy production through renewable. Its all taken up with the profits of the land speculator.

Land speculation and derived profits to the developer is considered more important than clean energy. WRONG.

It goes on and on.

We don't have a coherent renewable energy policy in the UK because the immediate economy of development and profits from development takes precedence. Development of land and property is running at maximum profitabilty and the nuclear option is what we are forced to use as a result. It isn't that renewable doesn't have the required capacity to meet our needs, its that our economic model doesn't have the spare capacity to accommodate the inclusion of renewable.

This isn't a case of wanting renewable just because we want it, its a case of understanding what barriers exist that prevent clean energy production from being used, removing those barriers, and opening up the required capacity to fit it in. If it isn't yet efficient or reliable enough, build an economy centered around its development. That's the way computer technology has been developed and brought forward. All we need, is the nerve to commit to a term of subsidy until the efficiency peak arrives.

What has happened in Japan is disastrous for nuclear as a technology and as an industry. The worlds third largest economy has just been pole-axed and the ramifications of that are yet to be felt. Fukushima is now a right off and cannot be used to generate electricity again...ever! The only way to get round this, is to bulldoze the entire site, clean it of all radiation and rebuild. Japan will not be able to raise the money to do this due to its debt position so the international economy will be required to come in and bail it out.

But will it be able to do that given the now obvious risk of building in that region? The international financial community work on calculations of risk. Does the algorithm used to work out that risk still hold true? Is nuclear built on faultlines still viable in terms of calculated risk?

In japan we have seen the largest earthquake ever recorded, doing unprecedented damage to the worlds third largest economy, a Tsunami that has swept large chunks of its infrastructure away, leading to the destruction of a nuclear facility that was calculated to be expected to survive such an event.

I think you will find, Mr man who knows energy facts, that the formula the international economic community use to quantify its international business dealings through risk analysis just broke.

Your day of doom just arrived!