The "more political thread" besides "Japan Earthquake: nuclear plants" scientific one

jlduh

Did workers at Fukushima ingested much more than what has been measured and announced?

I cross reference this post on the other thread:

http://www.physicsforums.com/showpos...postcount=7933


Drakkith, could you explain us how this is possible with what you asserted some pages ago when we were discussing the assessment of internal exposures?

Nuceng, if I quote your answer to my question:

do you conclude that "they didn't do it properly" for these many workers?

And if the answer confirms this, what are the implications for the other citizens around in exposed areas?

Please don't consider my comment as personal attacks, but I, as many other people, would like do understand all those apparent important contradictions between communications and facts and reality...

Luca Bevil

I disagree.
The point being made is about the overall cultural interrelation of civil use of nuclear power and military use.
It is historically true that military use came first, and that the era of first diffusion of civil nuclear plants was also a period of cold war and military weapons proliferation.

The technical fact that a BWR reactor may not be the best reactor to breed military grade plutonium does not undermine, I think, the cultural point being made.

Even recently when IRAN was supposedly building plants for claimed civil use, the international comunity was suspicious to say the least.

By the way if a nation is determined to produce military grade plutonium and can only get his hands on a BWR could it be possible to make a shorter run with a core of fuel just to obtain better chances of extracting military grade plutonium from it ?

Drakkith

Could you elaborate? Did I say or imply somewhere that it was impossible for that to happen? I went back several pages, but I'm not sure what you are referring to exactly.

jlduh

Well, we were discussing the fact that the officials (government, Tepco, etc.) were only communicating with measurements in mS/h or mSv to set the limits over which it was considered to be safe for the various people involved (citizens, children, workers, etc.).

Some of us were saying that this was an oversimplification because it could not take into account all the specific factors especially all the ones related to what the individuals would ingest by inhalation, food, drink...

For Tepco workers, until now, we only heard about the facts that the doses they got was below a certain level (250mSv) and that consequently, except for 2 or 3 isolated cases, everything was safe for them.

But now, it seems (but I'm sure that we will have more infos on that in the future) that their internal contamination could be also a problem...

My question is concerning this apparent contradiction: the readings (i guess based on their dosimeters) were under the limits but they may be internally more contaminated than expected?

One (partial) explanation could be that as we know, the first workers in the plant, during one months, didn't have all a dosimeter because Tepco didn't have enough (which is in itself criminal), and that they had one for two based on what Tepco finally recognized.

But, is it the only explanation or is it link also to the way the limits and measurements are set, not assessing the specificities of internal contamination from the various isotopes?

Drakkith

I believe that is true.
The different isotopes will have very different effects on the body depending on which ones they are. The full body measuring thing cannot take this into account, it only measures Full Body Dose I believe. The actual effects could differ greatly from person to person.

Astronuc

The military certainly made use of such an effective energy source. The civilian side wanted to use "atoms for peace" to use the phrase that Eisenhower used. The civilian uses were quite independent of the nuclear weapons program. The civilian power reactors essentially evolved from the naval nuclear propulsion reactors, not nuclear weapons program. There were several Pu production reactors in various countries, and they were different than power reactors. The form in which Pu is produced is different than that used for commercial fuel.

There is the concern that any nuclear reactor could be used to produce Pu for weapons. One could certainly run a reactor in short cycles if the primary goal is isotope production instead of power. The more frequent the outage, the much lower capacity factor - and isotope production. That's why isotope production reactors are designed to have isotope targets inserted and removed while operating.

That's an excellent documentary - and spot on!

tsutsuji

The opinion developped by Mito Kakizawa at the House of Representatives Budget Committee on May 16th (see http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/natio...na021000c.html ) is that if no internal contamination surveys are conducted now among the general citizens, it will be more difficult for them to make their case in court, should they suffer from cancer later, years from now. It will be more difficult to assess the causality between NPP troubles and cancer.

Mito Kakizawa had to rely on the data for workers at nuclear power plants because until that day (May 16th) no such internal contamination survey had been performed among the general population.

tsutsuji

Fukushima prefecture announced the launching in July of a medical survey of 150,000 people from 12 villages and cities around the plant. The long term survey will be conducted over at least a 30 year span, and will study white blood cell count, cancer occurrence and genetic impact. Experts from the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba will be invited : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPl9pfp13wI

yakiniku

Below text copied from http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7GO04420110524

Some analysts said the delay in confirming the meltdowns at Fukushima suggested the utility feared touching off a panic by disclosing the severity of the accident earlier.

"Now people are used to the situation. Nothing is resolved, but normal business has resumed in places like Tokyo," said Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Tokyo's Sophia University.

Nakano said that by confirming the meltdowns now, Tepco may be hoping the news will have less impact. The word "meltdown" has such a strong connotation that when the situation was more uncertain more people would likely have fled Tokyo, he said.

jlduh

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/23_34.html

Parents demand lower radiation limit for children

AntonL

Japan to Set Up Panel to Probe Fukushima Nuclear Accident
http://jen.jiji.com/jc/eng?g=eco&k=2011052400126

Why does one need legal experts on a panel to probe the accident.

I can think of only one and that is to advise on how to word the report to limit any liabilities resulting from the findings, thus overthrowing the independence of the scientific findings.

zapperzero

There needs to be a feeling that the accident phase is over. Of course, this is far from true, yet, but no matter. Those who have lied and dissembled and censored news about three nuclear meltdowns surely have no qualms in misleading the public some more.

The other main reason is to set an agenda. It is the findings of the commission that must (and will) be hotly debated, so that other facts may slip by largely ignored. You will see talk about institutional paralysis at TEPCO, about the tsunami and the earthquake and what the prime cause of the accidents was and whether it was beyond design basis or not.

You will NOT see any discussion of regulator capture, design failures, the real costs of the nuclear industry, dual-use technologies, the role of France and Areva, the unholy alliance between Hitachi and GE...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7GO04420110524

Here's the money shot: "<<I am very sorry that the public is mistrustful of the various disclosures made by the government on the accident," Prime Minister Naoto Kan said in parliament on Monday.>>

The trust must be regained.

Bandit127

We should remember that the Tepco engineers that are making the calls are doing so with woefully inadequate data, and what they did get was unreliable.

Data has improved, but is still woefully inadequate for sound and reliable decision making. And making conclusions of what did or didn't happen.

To call for prison terms when management might have been 'optimistic' in interpreting such sparse and unreliable data is short sighted I think. More likely (and quite rightly), they will not make a conclusion with serious consequences until they have sound data to support it.

That is good management. Any other way is speculation to pander to sensationalism.

One of the biggest failures in all of this is the failure of reliable data.

You can't blame Tepco for that, it is a function of the system of reactor design and risk assessment. That system has to improve. We should be fitting transducers, signal processing equipment and transmission in a way that can handle the same level of equipment failure in future.

My guess is that you could cut the total emissions from any possible future accident by half if you did that.

turbo

Not if plant-siting is allowed using the most optimistic (low) tsunami-surge estimates, low sea-walls, and locating emergency equipment and controls within the (overly optimistic) levels that could be flooded. Putting emergency diesel generators, battery banks, control rooms, and other critical systems where they can be flooded is a recipe for disaster, as we have seen. All the extra sensors in the world could not help mitigate such a disaster.

zapperzero

I think you're trolling. Instrumentation matters very little here, if at all.

The laws of physics involved are known and they do not change. Such accidents were being modeled since the seventies, TMI even produced a nice case study to validate the models.

For a given core configuration, where starting parameters (water level, temps, pressures) are known, one can find out if and when the core melts. The process does not take days, for a reactor as big as those at Fukushima. The calculation can be done literally on the back of a napkin by anyone in possession of freshman year physics. So many MW of heat, so much fuel, so many tons of water, so much steel in the vessel that could melt. Easy.

There is no need for further measurements.

Good crisis management is the uncanny ability to make good decisions without having all the data. Take a pilot in a stalled fighter jet with an engine flameout, at low altitude. Does he try to determine the cause of his engine flameout and whether a recovery might be possible?

Smart pilots pull the ejector handle and generally live to find out the results of the post-accident inquiry. Brave pilots try something, anything. Sometimes it works. Bad pilots get confused and flustered trying to decide what to do. Bad pilots end up dead.

SteveElbows

This argument seems to be getting political enough to belong in the other thread, but really I have to say something about this point. I do not want people who manage nuclear emergencies to 'try something, anything'. Dealing with nuclear incidents is a complex and sometimes almost impossible balancing act, depending on the exact details, and it is actually possible to do all sorts of things that would make matters worse. So whilst I do not want people to be paralysed by fear that their decisions may make things worse, I dont want them to take certain risks just for the sake of acting.

zapperzero

Me neither. That's why you need smart, even-keeled people in charge of nuclear reactors. Jocks are fine for fighter jets only. They make awful airliner pilots.