Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/science/japan-fukushima-nuclear-meltdown-fuel.html?referer=https://www.google.com/

by htiek • 9 years ago

402 179 9 years ago

mobile.nytimes.com

ukulele• 9 years ago

At the plant’s entrance, a sign warned: “Games like Pokemon GO are forbidden within the facility.”

Was this a thing people were doing? Going to a nuclear disaster site as part of a game?

MaulingMonkey• 9 years ago

Could also be workers at the site on their lunch breaks.

NikolaeVarius• 9 years ago

Probably nowhere near as dangerous but I think its interesting. https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/in-the-shadow-of-cherno...

trhway3• 9 years ago

A number of Russian middle class volunteers who fought in Donbass war treated it as kind of similar experience - an adventurous game/vacation, a "noble quest to defend 'Russian world' from dark forces of fascism and imperialism".

Barrin92• 9 years ago

maybe they thought they could find a genuine pokemon?

thesmallestcat• 9 years ago

It's exactly the sort of place where you'd find the baddest pokemon in the game.

Zaita• 9 years ago

Signs forbidden the use of games like Pokemon Go are quite common across Japans. You find them at many Temples etc. Many cafes/bars/eateries have signs out the front with drawings of the Pokemon you'd find nearby with Pokemon Go.

Source. Went through Japan playing Pokemon Go.. saw many many Japanese people playing Pokemon Go. And signs.. signs with Pokemon everywhere.

millisecond• 9 years ago

Web link not bypassing paywall for me, anyone else? Or am I in some experimental cohort? :)

jwilk• 9 years ago

It worked for me. Anyway, here's an archived copy:

https://archive.is/jQlRG

rtkwe2• 9 years ago

Kind of surprising at this point that there’s not an area directly below the bottom of the reactor with a giant ceramic catch basin (or something similarly heat resistant) to catch these failures and cleared of pipes etc so when this happens cleanup workers know the location of the materials.

eberkund• 9 years ago

I think that is easier said than done, the temperatures are in the several thousands of degrees here.

IshKebab• 9 years ago

Clay would hold that wouldn't it?

askvictor• 9 years ago

And radioactive. Which changes the atoms if which your containment material is made of. Which makes things much, much more difficult.

philipkglass• 9 years ago

That's part of some newer reactor designs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_catcher

petre3• 9 years ago

Expensive. The concrete can also crack in the event of an earthquake.

jjoonathan4• 9 years ago

Kind of surprising at this point

Fukushima was built when the nuclear power industry was 13 years old. Now it's 63 years old.

You are seeing the folly of youth, with consequences delayed 60 years, not a design that would be typical of new construction.

Rapzid• 9 years ago

Sounds like life :| Those cigarettes you smoked in your early twenties? Those beers you smashed working in IT? 63 will be interesting..

bamboozled• 9 years ago

Nuclear scientist's weren't like "naive" teenagers though.

Sure the design could've been better; However by your logic they had 50 years to take extra safety pre-cautions and improve the structure.

In-fact, it still absolutely amazes me it was even running at the time of the disaster and built on a coast in a country notorious for Tsunamis.

beached_whale2• 9 years ago

Also, from what I understand, they ignored the reports that recommended to put the backup generators on higher ground and to make the sea wall higher. Fukashima is the worst case for that design I think.

rtkwe2• 9 years ago

True I’d forgotten how old Fukushima was.

ChuckMcM• 9 years ago

I have seen reactor designs with a borosilicate sand pile under the reactor. Presumably the molten core will turn the sand into borosilicate glass which not only freezes at a high temperature but is also a radiation shield.

sschueller• 9 years ago

Wasn't something like that poured under Chernobyl after the accident which prevented the radioactive slurry from entering deep into the ground?

frik2• 9 years ago

The Russians handled the catastrophe better and faster. International help sender them low tech robots, Russians poured tunnels below within days/weeks with lot of human contractors. But Japan is doing little. Contaminated fluids leak into the sea that swaps to Hawaii and west coast ever since 2011. It's the local culture of loosing face that seems to be at odds with handling it and a major corruption problem. After 6 years Japan has done so little, compared to the Chernobyl Sarcophagus and all the handling inside and ever since. Why is there not more international pressure to Japan to do more and do it faster? They have to do it no matter what the costs are or if the have the resources, it doesn't matter - the rest of the world population will thank you for less pollution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...

nielsbot3• 9 years ago

I remember reading articles right after the disaster saying some engineers/scientists tried to warn people that the design had some critical safety flaws..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Three

But not sure this really points to lack of caution?

Personally, I think we need low carbon power sources, but emotionally (irrationally?) nuclear fission always feels like "apes toying with God's fire"

phkahler• 9 years ago

I still think they should fight fire with for. A small tactical nuclear bomb just inland of the plant could blow it all into the ocean where the material would sink. ;-)

narrator• 9 years ago

That would just end up like the Marshall Islands where they did the H-Bomb tests. They are still too contaminated to live on.

franklin_cobb• 9 years ago

I think they tried, but the radiation was too hot and melted through the steel and concrete below. This was an old facility, so it was probably built with that idea in mind. It just failed.

On a related note, I live in Chiba, which is a fair distance south of Fukushima. The rain and wind drove the radiation into my area after the accident. I still have interesting radiation readings in my rain gutters and spouts.

hexane360• 9 years ago

"At Chernobyl, the Soviets simply entombed the charred reactor in concrete after the deadly 1986 accident. But Japan has pledged to dismantle the Fukushima plant and decontaminate the surrounding countryside, which was home to about 160,000 people who were evacuated after accident."

How much of this decision is simply about space? Russia is the largest country by area, with 21 people per square mile, while Japan is much smaller, with 873 people per square mile. If you compare GDP/area the difference is even greater.

babuskov• 9 years ago

I'm possibly nitpicking here, but Chernobyl is not in Russia.

dopamean• 9 years ago

Not but it was in the USSR at the time which many people incorrectly equate with Russia today. To me it's almost ok to say "Russia" when talking about things back then. So long as you don't say Chernobyl is in Russia today.

kurthr3• 9 years ago

Chernobyl is still in Ukrane (near the boarder with Belarus) and not Russia (yet). At the time it was part of the Soviet Union, but Ukraine has always been a bread basket of Central Europe.

Fundamentally, Chernobyl is a much larger (order of magnitude) event with 6 tons of radioactive material burned and released. Frankly, for all the coverage Fukushima gets, it's amazing that you rarely hear about the associated tsunami and the damage it caused... 22k direct casualties with 2.5k still missing, 230k people still displaced in 2015 with ~400k structures destroyed.

joshgel• 9 years ago

"yet" +++

ifdefdebug• 9 years ago

230k people still displaced in 2015

The displacement is mostly due to radioactive contamination still being high in several zones around Fukushima.

The tsunami was a huge catastrophe but it's over. There is no breaking news to get coverage.

Fukushima on the other hand is an ongoing disaster producing news from time to time which, naturally, get coverage.

eritain• 9 years ago

This badly understates the Chernobyl response. They did remove the heavily contaminated surface soil from the immediate vicinity and clean up the rest of the site so they could continue to operate the remaining reactors. They built the Shelter Object ("sarcophagus"), instead of just pouring concrete all over the site, so that they could continue to monitor and inspect. And earlier this year, they at last covered the Shelter Object with the long-delayed New Safe Confinement, which includes cranes and other robotics intended to dismantle and decontaminate both the Shelter and the ruins of the reactor.

It's certainly true that the Soviets, and after them Belarus and Ukraine, did/do use the "just leave it alone" strategy for part of their Chernobyl response. But it's by no means the whole story.

harlanlewis• 9 years ago

The scale of the New Safe Confinement is stunning. Here’s a 2min video of it being moved into place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7aMcKinrWY

jpatokal• 9 years ago

160k is around 0.15% of Japan's population, and there's plenty of space for them to move to since the countryside is rapidly depopulating. Of course, it's not quite that easy to forcibly migrate people in practice...

StreamBright3• 9 years ago

You gonna move their jobs as well? There is a reason why they were living at the area at the first place.

JonoW• 9 years ago

Does anyone know how they extract the molten fuel? Sounds like they will use more robots, but if it's taken this long just to get a robot to see the target, how on earth does a robot retrieve this stuff? Must be a career defining experience for these robotists, doing something that can really help an awful situation

nielsbot3• 9 years ago

That's basically what they say at the end of the article:

“I’ve been a robotic engineer for 30 years, and we’ve never faced anything as hard as this,” said Shinji Kawatsuma, director of research and development at the center. “This is a divine mission for Japan’s robot engineers.”

themodelplumber2• 9 years ago

This is a divine mission for Japan’s robot engineers

That is so cool. I'd love to see some kind of "lessons learned" summary from the robotics people.

tigershark2• 9 years ago

They don't have the slightest idea. It's an absolute miracle that they just managed to get a picture of the molten core after 6 years. Now probably they can start to think what to do, but my guess is that they don't have any idea at the moment.

an_account• 9 years ago

The article says they’ve built a $100 million research center for the purpose of building radiation hardened robots for this environment.

I’m sure as they learn techniques and technology for building these robots it will progress quicker. A small robot with a camera is the first step.

civilian• 9 years ago

What is the article talking about when they say "radiation-hardened materials"? What kind of materials might that be?

jjoonathan4• 9 years ago

"Neutron embrittlement" is a term to chase down. Generally people talk about the effects on metal, but I'm sure neutrons affect ceramics, too.

ghaff• 9 years ago

One of the issues with metal is that it starts out as a ductile material and neutrons can embrittle it by introducing voids and dislocations. (i.e. basically moving the atoms around from their ordered crystal state) I'm sure some of the same mechanisms apply to ceramics but they're fairly brittle to start with so designs/applications using ceramics need to account for the fact that they're brittle from Day One.

perlgeek• 9 years ago

I don't know what they did in this particular instance, but basically there are two things you can do: shield, or in the case of electronics, use larger parts.

The smaller some piece of electronics is, the smaller the charges in there are, and the easier it is to introduce errors with ionizing radiation.

_ph_• 9 years ago

And the design of the electronics might help with radiation tolerance. Computation paths could be redundant to detect/eliminate bit flips due to radiaton.

(Some server Power cpus seem to run parallel in pairs, comparing the output at critical parts to detect cpu errors)

FiatLuxDave• 9 years ago

There is a third thing, which is to use a dopant which reduces minority carrier lifetime and provides radiation resistance when manufacturing the semi-conductor. Platinum works really well for this. Unfortunately, this can be a poor engineering tradeoff for some kinds of electronics (power transistors for example) and usually increases electrical resistance. AFAIK nobody manufactures platinum-doped microprocessors.

I used to be a product manager for radiation measurement electronics, and we used platinum-doped diodes for the part intended to go in the beam.

See for example: https://academic.oup.com/rpd/article-abstract/17/1-4/527/311...

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5436014/

spyspy• 9 years ago

Non-mobile link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/science/japan-fukushima-n...

MilnerRoute• 9 years ago

If I'm reading the article right, the robots actually made this discovery back in July.

wiz21c3• 9 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

reminds us that nuclear kills much less than regular earthquakes, car accidents, or air pollution due to the burning of fossil fuels...

googletazer• 9 years ago

So you extrapolated what will happen to the spent nuclear fuel that already began to leak in some places and did the math? I'd like to see it.

baron816• 9 years ago

I’m not worried about how many people nuclear power kills every year. I’m worried about how many people it kills every hundred years. A major nuclear disaster, however unlikely, has the potential to kill millions of people and leave a big portion of the Earth uninhabitable for centuries. Just because we haven’t seen one on that scale yet, doesn’t mean we never will.

Tarrosion• 9 years ago

By nuclear disaster do you mean weapons use or just a power generation accident? I've never heard of a power plant accident potentially leaving a big portion of the Earth uninhabitable for centuries, but if there is something please enlighten me!

wruza3• 9 years ago

Every year it kills 100 times less than every hundred years, that’s how average works, no matter what exact period you’re worried about. Also, no nuclear disaster ever killed millions — it is barely possible even with nuclear weapons. Relocation and financial risks, yes.

Likelihood of such disaster is estimated to be too minor to not care about, say, “an asteroid kills the planet” movie scenario.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/scientists-say-nuclear-...

http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-waste/safer-stor...

thaumaturgy2• 9 years ago

Ok, let's do a Fermi-like estimation.

Estimates on the number of deaths related to coal generation vary from around 13,00 to 30,000 per year in the US [1] and 500,000 per year in China [2]. The current world population is 7.6 billion, of which the US and China account for approximately 1.8 billion people. Let's round the coal-related death rate way down for easy math: 10,000 per year in the US and 100,000 per year in China. Then, multiply that rate by the world's population, and you have, let's say 450,000 coal-related deaths per year worldwide. This is a really squishy number, but we only need approximations here.

You were concerned about how many people would die every hundred years from nuclear disasters, so let's see if we can work today's 450,000 per year estimated deaths backwards for the last hundred years.

The world population was somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.8 billion people in 1917. Assuming linear growth (I know, I know) and a strong r-value correlation for population vs. coal-related deaths (arguable, but again, Fermi estimate), we have to sum .00006 * population from 1.8 billion -> 7.6 billion, and we end up with approximately 28 million people.

Which is to say, if we could gather up all the deaths, worldwide, from coal, over the last hundred years, and convert it into a single disaster, it would kill the entire city of Shanghai, and New York for the apple on top.

That would have to be one hell of a nuclear disaster.

Now, there are arguments to be made that the energy we've received from coal has also powered hospitals and technology which have saved or improved people's lives. There are also arguments to be made that the side-effects of coal (hospitalization, environmental disasters) cause the death toll to absolutely pale by comparison.

And again, I've rounded these numbers down at every stage of the calculation.

[1] http://www.catf.us/resources/publications/files/The_Toll_fro... [pdf]; it includes its own numbers, at the 13,000 estimate, and the EPA's, at 14,000 to 36,000 range.

[2] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener... (blog, but includes lots of supporting links; I'm open to alternative sources that give vastly different estimates).

baxtr• 9 years ago

Uninhabitable? Maybe for humans. Wildlife grows back stronger:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/23/wildlife-returns-...

xelxebar• 9 years ago

"However unlikely"

This is where probabilities bite us. If the probability is small enough then the expected death toll will drop to almost zero which merits little worry, despite how horrific said event mightt be. It sounds like you're doing the natural, intuitive thing of picturing a very scary scenerio and then wanting to avoid said scenerio at all costs.

The problem is, while you're busy avoiding some almost-zero probability event, you're also nuking your ability to mitigate events with actual high expected deaths and loses.

Fossil fuels already kill on the order of millions per century [citation needed], so if you think nuclear power does the same, it means we should expect several Chernobyl level events in the next few decades. Are you sure your probabilities are well-calibrated here?

Also, some of the rough skimming I've done has me believing that cycles without possibility of medown can be built, cf. liquid salt reactors. IIRC, some of these even have really nice waste profiles with the worst stuff only having half lives in the decades and very low volume at that [citation badly needed].

Anyway, fear of nuclear power reads to me like a fear of planes over cars. Chernobyl and Fukushima were single, isolated events making them visible and viscerally scary like plane crashes. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, pick us off one by one, relentlessly, but never so loudly as to evoke that gut-level fear.

adekok• 9 years ago

And that's with incompetence and neglect.

http://chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/cause/

Personnel had an insufficiently detailed understanding of technical procedures involved with the nuclear reactor, and knowingly ignored regulations to speed test completion

And a Japanese reactor that didn't melt down:

https://thebulletin.org/onagawa-japanese-nuclear-power-plant...

Before beginning construction, Tohoku Electric conducted surveys and simulations aimed at predicting tsunami levels. The initial predictions showed that tsunamis in the region historically had an average height of about 3 meters. Based on that, the company constructed its plant at 14.7 meters above sea level, almost five times that height. As more research was done, the estimated tsunami levels climbed higher, and Tohoku Electric conducted periodic checkups based on the new estimate.

There's just no good reason for either Chernobyl or Fukushima. Both were preventable by following simple safety procedures.

lovemenot2• 9 years ago

> And that's with incompetence and neglect.

Yes, and rightly so. Engineers must design around human fallibility. They don't get to blame human error and claim the whole system is otherwise perfectly safe. Either the system is safe under conditions of human fallibility, or it is unsafe.

> There's just no good reason for either Chernobyl or Fukushima

Of course there is reason. Humans are part of the system and a relatively weak part at that.

imtringued• 9 years ago

That is the fundamental problem with nuclear power. You can trust the technology but you can't trust the humans.

tigershark2• 9 years ago

Go and live there if you think that it is really harmless. I would rather not honestly after it took them 6 years just to get the first image of the corium after endless attempts.

kurthr3• 9 years ago

Well, just note that after Chernobyl, Western Europe did live there. The size of the smoke plume (1000s km), radioactive material released (6000kg), and wind/weather during the event affected almost every country including Spain, England, and Norway. Those 300M people arguably recieved higher doses than you would living in the evacuated Fukushima area.

https://youtu.be/MU4_bJT8W3Y

The point is that it remained contained... that's good. With prpoer monitor wells even the ground water need not be badly contaminated.

serichsen• 9 years ago

Given the choice, I would.

Grue3• 9 years ago

Been near there just like a week ago (Tomioka town). Opened up for resettlement this year. Lots of damage from tsunami, but new buildings are being constructed and there are several functioning hotels and convenience stores. There's massive work going on to decontaminate the remaining areas by 2020. As long as you don't go inside of the nuclear station it should be ok.

SiempreViernes3• 9 years ago

Most radiation kills are due to slow secondary effects, so it's relatively easy to get out of the way. I don't think anyone really argues that if people would move back before deconamination they would all be fine.

Just for reference, the number of people worldwide who died due to contamination from atmospheric atom bomb testing is estimated to be 430 000 by the end of last century:

"Radioactive Heaven and Earth, The health and environmental effects of nuclear weapons testing in, on, and above the earth", pages 163-165

cocoablazing3• 9 years ago

That is an extrapolation using the unproven linear no threshold hypothesis.

jimktrains2• 9 years ago

Isn't that the same as attributed to burning coal in undera year world wide?

Those were also tests where the escape of massive amounts of radiation into the environment was a planned, even if indirectly, effect.

Also, as a sibling comment said, that numb is probably overstated by a large amount.

StanislavPetrov2• 9 years ago

Thankfully for the world and the future of all life on earth its not a binary choice between fossil fuels or nuclear.

Aron• 9 years ago

Gah -- reminds me of the press at the time talking about detectable radiation on the West Coast of the US. Yeah -- you know what else is detectable radiation? Stars from light-years away. I was shocked to see Germany respond so strongly to Fukushima. I think fortunately for the world solar and wind have become so cheap we can give up on making the world more rational about nuclear power.

bluthru• 9 years ago

It sure is expensive though: https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/world/japan-now-estimat...

frik2• 9 years ago

reminds us that nuclear kills much less than regular earthquakes

Stupid comment. Would you relocated near Fukushima or Chernobyl? Maybe you should. You would educate yourself and change your mind. And you would have to life with the related health issues. (The same for evil greedy owners of such energy companies)

StreamBright3• 9 years ago

Actually you cannot. They do not let anybody live near to these sites.

wiz21c3• 9 years ago

I work in a big city. It is polluted by cars, trucks, heating. That pollution kills 2 or 3 hundreds of people every year in that town. That scares me a lot more than the hypothetical explosion of the nuclear plant which I live 40km close...

chiefalchemist• 9 years ago

As seen as another HN thread, seemingly relevant here as well:

http://www.sciencealert.com/new-composite-material-reduces-h...

SiempreViernes3• 9 years ago

"... exotic space particles called muons "

welph, that's my eyes rolling right out of my head. I mean really, "space particles"! The might as well call all metals "supernova remnants" -_-

archgoon2• 9 years ago

Would you prefer for them to be referred to them as "Cosmic Rays" :) ? To be honest, "Space Particles" sounds less silly and more descriptive. It also emphasizes that they're not generating the muons themselves, but collecting them from space.

EDIT: Though I guess, now that I think of it, it's a bit unfair to refer to muons as 'exotic'. People will typically encounter thousands of them in a day [1].

[1] http://cosmic.lbl.gov/SKliewer/Cosmic_Rays/Muons.htm

[1] "Muons arrive at sea level with an average flux of about 1 muon per square centimeter per minute."

SomeStupidPoint• 9 years ago

Aren't muons terrestrial particles created by cosmic ray impacts on the atmosphere, though?

SiempreViernes3• 9 years ago

Yeah, of course! They are cosmic ray muons after all, as in "muons created by cosmic rays". The words "space particles" is more correctly applied to dust (the type in space obvs.) and stuff like that in my opinion.

Honestly "space particle" to me sounds to be the same sort of suspect phrase as "space pen".

whichdan• 9 years ago

If anyone's interested in related reading, there's a manga called Ichi-F[0] that walks through the daily life at Fukushima Daiichi.

[0] https://kodanshacomics.com/series/ichi-f/

scoggs• 9 years ago

Wow, thank you! The art is pretty good overall and the story seems well done enough. There are 39 chapters according to where I found it to read online but MyAnimeList (MAL) says 24 chapters from 3 volumes.

More info on MAL here: https://myanimelist.net/manga/61341/1F__Fukushima_Daiichi_Ge...

uptown• 9 years ago

Early on there was considerable talk about the contaminating impact this might have on the Pacific. Has anything come of that?

scott_karana• 9 years ago

Water sampling happens frequently at various points near the reactor, all of which showed levels at expected bounds to date.

Most of the scary charts were fake: https://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/fukushima.asp

AlleyTrotter• 9 years ago

SO! it never made it to China LOL

jenga22• 9 years ago

I wonder what they do once the robot sees the uranium? I mean the robot itself is now heavily contaminated. Do they just leave the robot down there? Or do they somehow decontaminate it so they can use it again?

prebrov• 9 years ago

Robots just kept dying in there all those years [1]. I reckon they are disposable, in effect.

[1] http://mashable.com/2017/03/03/fukushima-robots-fail/

vidarh• 9 years ago

That's the primary reason it's taken so long, as far as I understand. It's not that it was hard to find the location, per se, but that the robots didn't last long enough.

littlestymaar2• 9 years ago

I wonder what they do once the robot sees the uranium? I mean the robot itself is now heavily contaminated.

Contamination isn't as dramatic as you'd think, it's mostly superficial : you have radioactive dust sticking on the robot, and you "just" need to wash it thoroughly to remove the contamination.

People usually have a wrong vision of radioactive contamination : they think being exposed to radiations makes you radioactive in return. In fact, it doesn't : being exposed to a radioactive material (which means you get struck by gamma rays, alpha and/or beta particles) doesn't make you radioactive. You can get contaminated with radioactive dust (which is a real problem if you ingest or inhale it, since it's hard to wash there) but you don't become radioactive yourself.

The mistake didn't appear out of nowhere though : things exposed to neutrons becomes radioactive (they become activated) and neutrons are emitted by nuclear fission, which occur in a exploding atomic bomb or a working nuclear plant. But when the plant shuts down, the chain reaction stops and so does the neutron emission. All that remain is radioactivity, as fission products keep decaying.

That being said, in practice I'm not sure the electronics in the robot is in a good enough shape to be used again …

exabrial• 9 years ago

What causes a robots electronics to go bad in radioactive environments?

robinwassen• 9 years ago

The YouTube video with images of the core that nytimes linked, is one of those spam news videos using text-to-speech.

themodelplumber2• 9 years ago

I was wondering about that. Was about to adjust my false-positive filter for YouTube click spam. I mean, if the NYT links to it...

geon• 9 years ago

https://youtu.be/c5hQ6WlioRE

This has to be the worst possible way of sharing information; a video of 2 still images and a computer voice reading a text.

Right up there with images inside a word document, inside an email.

petepete• 9 years ago

YouTube really should be detecting and pushing them to the bottom of search results. Downvoting doesn't appear to have much of an effect.

jimcsharp• 9 years ago

I believe likes and dislikes on Youtube both count as "interaction" as far as rankings are concerned.

Cthulhu_5• 9 years ago

Won't matter much in this case as it's heavily linked to by all kinds of news outlets.

thesmok• 9 years ago

No it shouldn't. Sometimes videos like this one are a source of unique information.

usertrjx• 9 years ago

I think you're lucky a fax was not involved.

crankylinuxuser• 9 years ago

I've seen a few of those before.

Some were CC text from CNN articles with random "war pictures". It was surreal - like a badly done brainwashing video. It had the eerie qualities of belonging as perverse art exhibit.

I have also seen these in "alt"/neonazi/kkk politics channels. There's not much worse than showing pictures of the KKK and black people while a robotic voice throws curse words and racial epithets. There isn't much else to say other than "WAT?"

eric-hu2• 9 years ago

I long believed that nuclear power was the only energy source cleaner than fossil fuels and scalable enough to meet the energy demands of the world. While that might still be true in some sense, I now believe that humanity isn't ready for nuclear power.

Besides the Fukushima and Chernobyl type issues with organizations skimping on design, there's still an outstanding problem of nuclear waste storage. The current nuclear power statistics haven't factored in a major waste storage incident because one hasn't happened yet. Until we've witnessed multiple lifecycles of nuclear fuel consumption to full waste breakdown, the safety stats could still swing against nuclear power. Maybe all it'd take is a terrorist incident involving nuclear waste. From what I understand, breeder reactors can vastly reduce the quantity of a power plant's waste and produce waste with a much shorter half life. This isn't widely implemented or shared because that technology can also be used to produce weapons grade material. I think humanity will be ready if/when we can sort out our differences without violence and greed/corruption are no longer problems for most large orgs.

Additionally, renewables seem to have better scalability today than they did in the 90's when I formed my initial opinions. Right now, the worst case situation with a renewable power source is probably a large dam bursting. That's certainly possible due to corruption or terrorism too. If the three gorges dam suddenly burst, that could take out most of Shanghai. For most other renewables, the potential worst case is much milder though.

cel1ne• 9 years ago

Isn't there also the issue of fuel-reserves (uranium etc.) actually not lasting more than about 50-100 years?

eric-hu2• 9 years ago

Yeah, that's an issue too, though again, breeder reactors could extend that number significantly. But the countries that possess that tech don't want to use it widely or share it. Not sure if the former is due to cost or lack of expertise. The latter is definitely due to distrust in humanity.

gizmo2• 9 years ago

I agree that renewables are a very good alternative to nuclear power, but in practice moving away from nuclear means doubling down on coal. The problems with nuclear are political, but the alternatives to nuclear power are mired in political conflict as well.

As for your dam bursting scenario, something like that actually happened in the 70s when the Banqiao Dam burst. Nearly 200.000 people died. Fukushima had 0 radiation deaths.

cptskippy• 9 years ago

Fukushima had 0 radiation deaths.

I think making that statement or even the comparison to other types of disasters is a little disingenuous. With most disasters they happen and then they're over in very short order. A nuclear disaster is very slow to unfold and the deaths from radiation related illnesses are not yet fully realized for quite some time.

The Chernobyl disaster is still unfolding and even with the latest containment, NSC, having been installed. It will take hundreds of years before we're done with it.

RobAley2• 9 years ago

You can't really say 0 deaths, because no one knows. We don't have good epidemiological models for wide-spread low-level dispersal such as was seen at Fukushima, we already know incidences of cancer and gene mutation don't scale linearly with exposure at low levels. There are also associated deaths from psychological factors of those who were evacuated, lost land / business etc. which will only become apparent in years to come.

Dams do have the potential for massive loss of life as you say, and they also suffer from the problem of massive centralisation of capacity (unlike e.g. solar or wind). On the smaller upside, the models related to fatalities are pretty well understood.

Perhaps an instant move away from nuclear may need coal, although here in the UK it's gas that has been taking up the slack while the government dilly-dally on whether to build out new nuclear or invest in renewables research (successfully doing neither).

I see over the longer term renewables coming up as nuclear is naturally retired at the end of the current plant's lifespan. Solar is now cheaper than coal to built-out in many places, there are other impediments but (generally) lack of public support isn't one of them (compared to coal/nuclear).

rtpg• 9 years ago

in practice moving away from nuclear means doubling down on coal

Is it not possible for us to build out renewable energy on a large scale? My impression was that we're reaching points where it's very cost effective to do so.

littlestymaar2• 9 years ago

Maybe all it'd take is a terrorist incident involving nuclear waste.

There are so many radiologic sources out there, used for many purposes (medicine, gammagraphy), very dangerous[1] but taken with much less care than nuclear wastes from the nuclear power industry. Stuff like this [2] happen all the time …

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident [2] (in French) https://www.asn.fr/Controler/Actualites-du-controle/Avis-d-i...

wahern• 9 years ago

Or whatever happened in Russia within the past few weeks: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/10/nuclear-accide...

I kinda agree with your point: terrorists already have considerable access, theoretically, to radioactive materials. In fact, the materials used for medicine and science are in many ways much more dangerous from a public health perspective given their short, energetic half-lives.

The only substantial, long-term danger from terrorists is to the financial viability of nuclear power. Nobody cares about incidents like the above. But if it were tied to terrorism somehow it would be all over the news and nuclear stocks would plummet. Similarly, for a terrorist incident involving medical use even anti-nuclear activists would have more nuanced reactions, whereas if it involved nuclear power such an incident would herald the end of the world.

Cthulhu_5• 9 years ago

An accident with spent fuel rods / nuclear waste will happen in our lifetimes, and probably in the US; the US does not have proper nuclear waste disposal because nobody wants to host it. Earlier they'd just dump it in the ocean, but now, it's stashed in the nuclear plants' spent fuel rod basins, waiting (for decades now) for the country to build a proper disposal facility. IIRC the last one was a huge project inside a mountain somewhere.

specialist• 9 years ago

The ongoing failure to cleanup, mitigate the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is proof enough that we are not (yet?) mature enough to manage nuclear energy.

When the contaminates reach the Columbia River, every where downstream becomes uninhabitable. eg Portland OR.

gnu8• 9 years ago

Why in fuck is this a link to mobile?

Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

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