Why Fukushima made me pro nukes

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/why-fukushima-made-me-pro-nukes-20110322-1c4qk.html

by daniel02216 • 15 years ago

70 106 15 years ago

smh.com.au

hartror• 15 years ago

I heartily agree with the main premise that Fukushima should be held up as a success story of the nuclear energy sector. However I found the whole local production vs grid section is a bit weak, certainly there are merits to both and each solution alone is not the answer.

jacques_chester11• 15 years ago

There's a relatively simple way to settle the right mix of local or centralised generation. Let people pay for whichever they prefer.

tb• 15 years ago

It's not that simple, because you have to factor in all the negative externalities. That's what got us into this mess in the first place, people aren't paying the full cost of the planetary resources they are using.

lispm5• 15 years ago

Hmm, a large multi-billion dollar wreck is a success story?

that's a nuclear powered reality distortion field.

jacques_chester11• 15 years ago

At this stage it seems that it will cost more to clean up BP's Gulf of Mexico spill than the aftermath Fukushima.

vacri3• 15 years ago

1) The story is not complete yet.

2) Things other than a simple count of short-term fatalies matter.

How about we do a deal: stop deciding whether Fukishima is a good or bad thing at least until it's completely under control. We've already had the darkly amusing round where the pro-nuclear have said "See, perfectly safe, no nuclear explosion" and then there was one.

Wait for the chapter to be finished before claiming win or loss.

jacques_chester11• 15 years ago

The story isn't complete, but already it's being used by critics of nuclear to prove that nuclear is unsafe.

Fatalities is an objective, verifiable measure of safety.

If you want to compare apples to apples, you might look at fatalities attributable (including statistical estimates) per TWh since the introduction of nuclear power. Watt for watt and year for year nuclear has been safer to date than coal, oil, gas, hydro, solar, wind and biomass.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...

jbm2• 15 years ago

Nuclear power is clearly unsafe, it's just a question of whether or not it is more unsafe than the other alternatives. This accident doesn't need to prove that, the fact was apparent the first time someone lit a match.

However, Nuclear Power does have a special need to prove its case in the aftermath of this incident. Just look at the economic damage from the Fukushima issue. Other than the flight of foreigners out of Tokyo (fear + uncertainty is inevitable with the notoriously closed Japanese nuclear industry), there are issues with farming in Japan's third or fourth largest farming area, medium-term damage to energy output ("All eggs in one basket"), damage to businesses in Tokyo & environs (Rotating power outages, etc..). Summer in Tokyo will be HELL without air conditioners.

I think It's pretty obvious Japan needs nuclear power. A future without 20% of Japan's energy sources is a non-starter. I'm sure the power-downs & practical alternatives (fossil fuels) will show that decisively.

However, putting so much generating capacity in one location in an earthquake & tsunami prone country is a mistake. Maybe mini-nuclear plants are what we need going forward. Maybe we need less nuclear and more renewable power. Maybe something else.

However, what we don't need is people outside of Japan using this life-and-death situation to promote energy politics, be it green, nuclear or otherwise. The geographical & historical context is completely different. (Ontario will never be hit with giant 8 meter Tsunamis after a 9.0 earthquake.)

skybrian• 15 years ago

They were hydrogen explosions, not nuclear explosions.

jacques_chester11• 15 years ago

And indeed there couldn't be such an explosion, the fuel is not rich enough in U235.

vacri3• 15 years ago

Sorry, bad terminology: release of large quantities of radioactive materials. The pro-nuclear side were talking about how safe the plant was and how there had been no release of radioactive materials - and then there was such material released.

icarus_drowning• 15 years ago

I think his point is that up until now the Fukashima situation has proven to be an illustration of the stability and safety of the technology rather than the dangers of it. Since the situation seems to be stabilizing, I think its a pretty good argument.

Also, there has been no nuclear explosion. (IMHO, that's not a trivial error you made there)

vacri3• 15 years ago

For the knee-jerk downmodders, I'd like to repeat that I'm on the fence here: Wait for the chapter to be finished before claiming win or loss.

FirstHopSystems4• 15 years ago

I always thought that the reactors survived a tsunami and a earthquake at the same time was pretty good. Damaged but still intact, I do think it will take awhile for the whole picture to emerge on what took place. It seems most of the news about the nuclear hazards are an echo chamber so there might be some real danger. Most of the safety systems were wiped out and it's still standing? I had imaged the reactor turning into a roman candle launching fuel rods all over the place. The entire picture has yet to emerge and yet people are talking about it like the show is over.

But then again most people commenting about the situation are pretty far away from Japan. Myself: I'm sitting in California. I'm sure if the San Onfre Plant started venting a small amount of radiation I would get a little edgy including a shift in perspective

An out of control/damaged nuclear plant is still a out of control/damaged nuclear plant. Radiation leakage or no radiation leakage. I would be mad if any radiation came my way due to someone cutting corners or just not caring, no matter the dosage.

jacques_chester11• 15 years ago

> An out of control/damaged nuclear plant is still a out of control/damaged nuclear plant.

Indeed. To borrow a meme from elsewhere, TRWTF is that the design requires active cooling for safe operation. Fukushima has proved that any safety system requiring active operation will inevitably fail.

The worst failure mode is meltdown, which the containment vessel would catch as the final line of defence (a la Three Mile Island), but it shouldn't have gotten this far in the first place.

That said, Fukushima is a 40-year-old design. Hopefully it'll be replaced with something with more passive safety.

wiredfool4• 15 years ago

It's a 40 year old plant with a 50 year old design that was done before Plate Tectonics and subduction zones were accepted theories. (ca late 60's for those theories)

And, despite fudged safety records, losing all cooling power, and having a 9.0 quake and a 12 m tsunami hit it, it still hasn't killed anyone. That's pretty good. It's bad that it's going to cost billions of dollars to secure, but in the scope of the overall disaster, it's a small percentage.

In 20 years, there's a good chance that people will be saying "I can't believe that they kept building gas and coal plants, look at what it's done to the environment."

neutronicus5• 15 years ago

    TRWTF is that the design requires active cooling for safe operation.

It's less of a WTF than you think. You have to read the fine print of the supposedly "passively cooled" designs. The Westinghouse AP1000, for instance, is "passively cooled" in the instance of a scram, but only for 72 hours. Although this is about 9 times as long as the Japanese cooling systems ran on batteries, it is significantly less time than the reactors have been without power. The fact is that a lot of decay heat is dumped into that system in a pretty short time, and you're going to need mass flows (read: pumps) if you're going to reject it all safely.

(I suppose a molten salt reactor might allow you to get more creative with mass transport, since you can conceivably move the fuel somewhere else, but those designs are a long way off, and I'm sure they come with their own unique hazards)

FirstHopSystems4• 15 years ago

Agreed,

There is always going to be risk involved with nuclear power. Your trying to contain something that will kill you if it has the chance.

During a nuclear emergency they should release laughing babies and kittens. Only one of the two might try to kill you. The only problem is you can't tell which one. Upside: Laughing Babies and Kittens!!!

I could only theorize you could use some sort of backup turbine built into the containment vessel. Then again if your not sure what kind of damage is done having something that is self powering might not be a good idea if it's out of control.

lispm5• 15 years ago

you are watching a car which has been pushed over the cliff and while it is falling, you are telling us that the car is still looking fine...

FirstHopSystems4• 15 years ago

That's what I was trying to say, Most people are basing judgment of the situation from a echo chamber of media outlets. There might be much more going on hazard-wise than just the core overheating. The overheating is main stage right now from all the tension it has caused.

michaelochurch2• 15 years ago

Nuclear power is necessary to provide "bridge" energy until we can go fully green. We don't have the resources yet to meet all our needs using green energy sources, and nuclear is far better than fossil fuels. Also, modern nuclear plant designs don't have any of the dangers that reactors like TMI and Fukushima had. Those relied on active safety-- that is, there is something that must be done to stop the reaction, and if the safety devices fail or if some input, such as electric power, becomes unavailable, it becomes difficult to stop. Modern designs (pebble bed, thorium) have passive safety (i.e. the reaction stops if not continually supported).

patio11• 15 years ago

No, that isn't correct. Fukushima (along with every reactor on the eastern half of Honshu) failed into quench, within seconds, exactly as designed, as a consequence of the earthquake rattling a system around the control rods which is intentionally designed to only keep them out of the reactor by continued effort.

All the problems were caused by waste heat, rather than ongoing criticality (which would have produced 20 times the heat and been a much, much scarier proposition for the teams on site).

CountSessine• 15 years ago

Pebble bed in particular, if I recall, is passively safe precisely because it resists waste heat.

michaelochurch2• 15 years ago

I might be using the term "passive safety" incorrectly, but I wouldn't call a design "safe" if, even after criticality ended, there was still enough heat/pressure to cause explosions that subject nearby people to high levels of radiation.

There's no doubt in my mind that Fukushima is far better designed and in much better operating order than Chernobyl (a terrible comparison for a number of reasons) was.

noelchurchill• 15 years ago

Nuclear power is necessary to provide "bridge" energy until we can go fully green.

Not exactly so.

Wind or solar are dependent on it being windy or daytime, therefore will never provide base load power and can only provide incremental power on top of base load power sources such as coal, oil, gas, nuclear, or... geothermal. Geothermal is one of the best green energy sources that can provide baseload power.

After 100 years a geothermal power plant will still produce 35% of it's original first year production, so it's a pretty long lived asset.

I don't understand why geothermal is always overlooked.

Detrus2• 15 years ago

Geothermal increases earthquake risk/frequency, so it's not all roses either.

There are plenty of problems for large scale power plants, like limited locations, custom fit for each spot, etc.. But there are some pretty large ones, I wouldn't say it's overlooked by the industry, maybe by the media.

jacques_chester11• 15 years ago

> I don't understand why geothermal is always overlooked.

Because it's hard to come by. Either you're in a geothermally active area, in which case it's a no-brainer, or you aren't. If you're in a normal area you need to drill extremely deep for the heat and then, somehow, keep the drill hole open. Tectonic drift is actually a serious show-stopper at the depths we're talking about.

yourpenguy• 15 years ago

Read Revelation. Nuclear power is the mistake that caused Revelation to be written. Faster Than Light Data Transfer Results in earthquakes from Time Travel that allows man to write the Bible.

http://tinyurl.com/teslamadeearthquakes

afterburner10• 15 years ago

By buying nuclear plants now, we lock into today's nuclear technology for the next 50 years (nuclear plants have 40-50 year life cycles). By investing heavily in renewables and a new power grid, we can continually improve renewable generation and incrementally add to and improve existing facilities.

Also, when a disaster happens, we can go "uh oh, 100 windmills fell over; man, we better wait until it's safe to go fix/replace them" instead "holy shit this could turn into a disaster right now unless we frantically try to control the situation and in doing so put several workers' lives in immediate and horrible risk!"

Every dollar wasted on nuclear power is a lost opportunity. Renewables can be vastly improved, several advances have already been made just not fully capitalized on. Nuclear power doesn't show the same promise. Maybe in 50 years it will, but now it looks like same old same old. In the meantime I keep reading how advances in solar cell technology and long distance power grids can tap into more energy than perhaps most expect.

light34• 15 years ago

'Renewables can be vastly improved, several advances have already been made just not fully capitalized on' such as?

I think the major advantage of nuclear is its cost efficiency and low pollution.

afterburner10• 15 years ago

If you insist on a cited post, lead by example.

lispm5• 15 years ago

A total disconnect from reality. In reality a new reactor here in Europe costs about 5 billion Euros a piece.

Nobody is wanting to finance a nuclear reactor. They even don't need to be insured, since no insurance company would provide insurance for a nuclear reactor.

The nuclear reactors all need huge government subsidies or need to be fully financed by the government.

In the US almost nobody wants to finance a nuclear reactor, even though the government runs around with lots of money for those.

In France for example the nuclear industry is a fully government run system. Socialism at work.

whyenot3• 15 years ago

Fukushima is 40 years old and recently got an extension to operate for another 10 years. TEPCO had said they wanted to continue operating the plant for another 20 years. Maybe nuclear plants should have an unextendable expiration date -- you can operate a new plant for 40 years or whatever, but after 40 years you have to raze the plant and rebuild with a more current, hopefully safer design.

pjscott6• 15 years ago

You'd get bigger safety improvements by keeping old, less safe nuclear plants operating longer and building new ones alongside them. Even aging nuclear plants are a hell of a lot safer than the coal and natural gas plants that would otherwise be supplying the power they produce.

(Note that natural gas is a lot less dangerous than coal, but they're both several orders of magnitude more dangerous than nuclear.)

pjscott6• 15 years ago

Some numbers of design lives: in general, the older nuclear plants were designed to be in operation for 40 years, and the newer ones are designed for 60 years. In the time since the older plants were built, we've learned a thing or two about how to keep them in good working order, and many of them are being extended to operate for more like 60 years. There are efforts underway to figure out how to extend that to 80 years.

afterburner10• 15 years ago

I don't think my point about plant lifetimes was clear. It's not a good thing that they last so long; after all, you're still paying a lot for that long lifetime. But the long lifetime means that, for all that is said about whatever potential nuclear power plants might have (breeder plants and whatnot), that's not what would get built right now if all governments caved to nuclear lobbies right now. What would get built is today's technology, which would be so expensive that we would be stuck with it for 40, or 50, or as you say, 80 years. Renewables, which everybody loves to say aren't good enough, will get good enough, provided we shift enough funds to develop them. I would prefer if those funds aren't tied up in 40, 50, 80 year projects. Because if a project is projected to last 80 years, you'd better believe that'll allow a much higher bottom line to get passed in the local budget.

jacques_chester11• 15 years ago

Before spending trillions of dollars building triplicate and quadruplicate power systems to distribute wind and terrestial solar power from all over the place, I'd rather invest the trillions in orbital solar power.

corin_2• 15 years ago

Anyone who doesn't know that "nukes" refers to weapons not power sources should perhaps steer clear of offering opinions on the subject.

I stopped reading after this line:

  Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution.

Firstly, "some greens"? A surprisingly snide remark from someone who only just become pro-nuclear.

Secondly, that's not even the point he then goes on to make? His argument is that what happened in Japan is below the safety guidelines. The worry of people who are anti-nuclear is that there is a possibility that something could happen to put the radiation levels above what is safe.

I'm not anti-nuclear personally, but the worry I have isn't that, if a small amount of radiation leaks for some reason that it will have worse effects than believed by scientists. My worry is that the accident/whatever could cause the leaks to be far higher, if that happens it will be a very real problem.

light34• 15 years ago

I don't see what's so snide about 'some greens', the Greens are a political party in Australia, they have a strong anti-nuclear stance as I recall(might be wrong).

corin_2• 15 years ago

We have a Green Party in the UK too, but "some greens" would generally be said in a negative way, and referring to people with environmental concerns rather that just Green Party supported.

Even about a political party - if someone who until just now was a tory MP said "some tories think..." and then went on to dismiss their views I'd make the same point.

Maybe I took it the wrong way, but that's how it read to me. Either way seems like a fairly nonsense article.

WarDekar• 15 years ago

Isn't the point that it took a pretty major natural disaster (or two, depending on how you want to look at it) to even cause a problem like this in the first place? And STILL the radiation levels are below the safety guidelines? I'm sure plenty of bad things can happen to coal and natural gas power plants given a natural disaster (or two).

There's a certain point where you just have to accept the fact that in the most extreme of circumstances, bad things can happen- that doesn't mean nuclear power is bad overall.

mistermann4• 15 years ago

It's not nuclear power that scares me, it's the seemingly inevitability of incompetence of human beings. I am a very big advocate of nuclear power, and the Japanese are a very pre-prepared culture, yet this got way out of hand.

Yes it was a huge and unprecedented earthquake, but in my opinion, there were so many totally unnecessary failures, even under these extreme circumstances, that I'm a lot more leery of nuclear power than I was before. Or, to be more precise: I'm not leery of nuclear power itself, but of humans ability to form societies advanced enough to harness this power properly.

FirstHopSystems4• 15 years ago

This makes me feel like someone who ran across a few lanes of a freeway survived, then proclaimed, All freeways are safe. I didn't get hit!.

fmkamchatka• 15 years ago

Dictionary.com:

nuke [nook, nyook] -noun 1. a nuclear or thermonuclear weapon. 2. a nuclear power plant or nuclear reactor. 3. nuclear energy: to convert from coal to nuke.

feral2• 15 years ago

This article is bad.

There will always be unknown unknowns. One such happened in Fukushima - an earthquake and tsunami exceeding design specifications; the earthquake logarithmically so.

This resulted in near total defeat of the safety protocols. Layers of containment designed never to be breached, were breached. Rods in the nearby cooling pools even got hot. Fundamentally, the plant operators lost control of the situation.

Yes, its probable the final number of lives lost will be low. But, almost all the safety mechanisms were breached. With slightly more misfortune (perhaps another hydrogen explosion), much radiation could have been released, and many could have died.

Anyone (like Monbiot, the author) who argues that this incident increases faith in the safety of the nuclear power plant needs to read Feynman's minority report on the shuttle disaster.

When the safety systems, designed never to be breached at all, are 50% breached, you do not have a 50% margin of error. You have an extremely serious problem.

Is nuclear fisson probably going to be our medium term energy source? Yes; there are few better alternatives. But we are going to have to be very careful about how we build them.

Finally, while I am not attacking nuclear power here, it is erroneous to reason about the relative safeties of technologies based purely on the historical track record.

What we should be thinking about is what the risk is in future; not what it has been in the past. If I told you I had an energy source that had a known 0.01% of ending the world, each year, but a clean 50 year track record, would you allow me to continue with it? Of course not!

We must not make inferences about possible risks based purely on the track record, with no regard for improbable, but perhaps catastrophic, scenarios.

Thankfully, nuclear power is not the doomsday energy source some people make out; and I'm not arguing against it - just against the specious reasoning.

jacques_chester11• 15 years ago

> Finally, while I am not attacking nuclear power here, it is erroneous to reason about the relative safeties of technologies based purely on the historical track record.

I'm the one who made that argument.

That the safety systems failed points to the systemic flaw in Fukushima: it requires active safety. Better designs, such as those developed in the 40 years since Fukushima was started up, rely on the operation of physical laws to maintain safety in the event of a reactor emergency (edit: It's since been pointed out to me these only lengthen the window of reaction time, but do not remove the necessity to provide active cooling eventually).

It is not specious reasoning to point out that these designs would be even safer than a flawed design which has so far (with active management) survived an event far above its engineering specifications.

The problem with calculating unknown risks based on imaginable catastrophic consequences is that 1) the scope of imagination is large and 2) interested parties to the estimate can skew it up or down. The best known example of this problem is Pascal's Wager.

afterburner10• 15 years ago

Thanks for reminding me about Feynman's comments on the first shuttle disaster. For those curious, here's a nice summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report#Role_o...

It reminds me how very few of those involved in building things really, truly respect scientific rigour and make a serious attempt to actually know their shit. I know because I see it first hand, all the time, including in projects contracted by NASA. There's a ridiculous amount of cross-checking and testing that prevents it from being a serious problem most of the time, but as we can see it can cause oversights that can rear their ugly heads unexpectedly.

And this is why it's troubling to see people pushing so hard for nuclear with the battle-cry "we've figured it all out". We have to keep having it figured it out as long as the reactor as around, until they are fully decommissioned (which takes many years after they stop being productive). And there have to always be a handful of people who know their shit, always paying attention, and who can somehow resist the bullshit.

In 1998 one of the nuclear plants near Toronto, Ontario was taken out of service. During the Fukushima troubles, it sprang a coolant leak into Lake Ontario. Insignificant radiation, they say, and I'm inclined to believe them, but still... I have to worry about a nuclear plant 30km from me that was taken offline 13 years ago?

mistermann4• 15 years ago

>Yes; there are few better alternatives. But we are going to have to be very careful about how we build them.

I don't know about that....even just careful would have sufficed in this case (using an intelligent definition of careful). Placing your backup generators at low elevation seems like an amazingly bad design choice. I mean really, how much does it cost to build a very tall tower to house your backup generators? In projects this capital intensive, it is a rounding error.

>What we should be thinking about is what the risk is in future; not what it has been in the past. If I told you I had an energy source that had a known 0.01% of ending the world, each year, but a clean 50 year track record, would you allow me to continue with it? Of course not!

Total hyperbole (ending the world)....but your general assertion is absolutely correct. Nuclear power is statistically by far the safest form of energy, but there is a very large inherent risk, that while not terribly hard to manage, must absolutley be managed properly, without exception. And I'd say in this case, was not handled properly, at all.

I am sadly disappointed in the nuclear industry in general, and also the Japanese...I expect more from them than I expect from other countries. I may be wrong about one or more things though in this assessment, but that's how I think about it at this point in time.

fbailey2• 15 years ago

You can't design against a 7m tsunami wave following a 9.0 earthquake. What exactly does low elevation mean when the wave is 7m high? A tsunami wave that reaches 5km from the shore has so much water and pressure that designing against it is nearly impossible.

Your tower would have been nearly as high as the reactor itself http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-66018.html nobody sane would have proposed something like this before this event.

Looking at past events and errors it's always easy to say that it was a stupid to do it like it was done. Anticipating future events and their inherent risks and designing against them is nearly impossible. That's the danger of nuclear power, it's able to multiply the risks of every natural desaster. You design for a 5m wave - there comes the 7m wave - you design for a 20m wave - the wave was 23m high in some areas.

"Must be managed properly" is not an sentence we should have in anything we design that can have these catastrophic effect, because there's human error, and it will always be there, even in the best planned facilities on the globe.

InclinedPlane4• 15 years ago

So.... your argument is that we should stop building nuclear plants using 50 year old designs? I think that problem is already well solved.

New nuclear plants would actually fare far better against these unprecedented natural disasters.

Edit: the problem is this, nuclear power is being put up to a far higher standard than any other power source because of irrational fears. There is risk in any activity, especially providing electrical power. People die from dams failing, from refinery explosions, etc. The question should be whether we can build nuclear plants that are at least as safe as competing power sources, and the answer, even in the wake of Fukushima, seems to be a resounding yes.

chris_j• 15 years ago

"the problem is this, nuclear power is being put up to a far higher standard than any other power source because of irrational fears"

That's probably correct. The question is, why? Perhaps it's because it is so much more difficult to understand. When a dam breaks or when parts of an oil refinery explode, the result may be catastrophic but at least we can understand what is happening, on an intuitive level. When something goes wrong with a nuclear reactor, it is so far removed from anything in our everyday world that it's difficult to understand on that same intuitive level. If something is on fire then we can see and hear it and we can use our experiences of other things being on fire to understand it. If something is radioactive then neither of the above apply.

So perhaps there is something about nuclear that makes it uniquely frightening (even if those fears are irrational). Unless everyone studies nuclear physics, those fears aren't likely to go away any time soon.

feral2• 15 years ago

>So.... your argument is that we should stop building nuclear plants using 50 year old designs? I think that problem is already well solved.

No. My argument was that the reasoning in Monbiot's article was bad.

>New nuclear plants would actually fare far better against these unprecedented natural disasters.

Glad to hear it. I have a lot of faith in the power of modern design. People can do some amazing things.

> Edit: the problem is this, nuclear power is being put up to a far higher standard than any other power source because of irrational fears.

Yes, thats true. But it is also held to a higher standard, because the contents of a reactor (eg plutonium) are extremely toxic, in a way that no other power source is. The worst case scenario is thus very bad.

>There is risk in any activity, especially providing electrical power. People die from dams failing, from refinery explosions, etc. The question should be whether we can build nuclear plants that are at least as safe as competing power sources, and the answer, even in the wake of Fukushima, seems to be a resounding yes.

However, if out-of-control events had happened just slightly differently, the answer would have been a resounding 'No'.

And that's my problem with this sort of reasoning. Whether the answer was a resounding 'Yes' or 'No' seems to depend on whether there was (for example) another explosion, in an out of control situation, that had already had several explosions.

This is just like the shuttle scenario. Most of the safeguards, which were never designed to be defeated, have been defeated. That there was no release does not mean there was a margin for error.

We nearly - from an engineering point of view - had a level 7 event, in a highly populated, first world country. I am arguing that anyone that derives solace from this situation is being foolish.

I am not arguing the merits of nuclear power. (I think fission should probably play a large role in our medium term energy provision).

lispm5• 15 years ago

Is that satire?

molecule• 15 years ago

currently in or traveling to tokyo or fukushima soon, submitter or author?

Derbasti• 15 years ago

Any technology that makes awful natural disasters worse, is not a technology I want to have around.

Also, a technology that makes it impossible for humans to be close to it in event of failure, is a bad idea.

Why Fukushima made me pro nukes

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