I've watched the video a few more times now and checked out the band's other songs. I suspect based on the imagery and lyrics that the song is excoriating the Japanese government for its failures in Fukushima. The switch halfway through the song to decry Winny may be referencing the fact that despite the multiple fuck ups at Fukushima, the Japanese government last year was somehow able to get its shit together enough to pass a law criminalizing the downloading of copyrighted material.

This band is pretty cool. I've checked out their other songs and they also provide an interesting mix of social commentary and comedy. Thanks for bringing them to the Sift's attention.

*quality

I can't be the only one that wondered where these were when Fukushima had it's meltdown. I think lots of us expected the Japanese to have robots like these at the ready and were surprised at their absence. Now it looks like they're really still in their infancy, but getting there. Maybe for the next major meltdown.

Cat, "Put me down and leave me alone. Or what I do to your stuff later will make Chernobyl and Fukushima look like minor clean ups. If you think I'm bluffing, I've already had the topping off the pizza so I'm fully loaded."

It's a shame that fukushima has tainted the idea of safe, clean nuclear power. There are some really cool, safe modern designs out there that create orders of magnitude less waste, can't melt down and of course produce no carbon emissions. But they are just not politically viable in most western countries. This is probably another area that China will dominate in the future.

http://www.activistpost.com/2013/08/11-facts-about-ongoing-fukushima.html

Your video, post atomic hour-photographing fukushima, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'nuclear disaster, fukushima, donald weber, earthquake, tsunami, japan' to 'Vice, nuclear disaster, fukushima, donald weber, earthquake, tsunami, japan' - edited by lucky760

Something like this happened after the tsunami/Fukushima accident in 2011.

Indeed, I am all for reactor simplification, the reactor I want to see constructed could theoretically be nearly completely made on a factory line then shipped and installed very simply. The molten salt reactor concept is just a bunch of pipes with a graphite core. Most of the Gen4 reactors have this goal, and while large construction projects do mean jobs, usually good jobs...they are also costs, and if we want China and India to adopt greener power systems, they need to be cheaper than coal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw

I am going to sift this after I post, but it is a short look into reactors in general, and why the MSR and other potential Gen4 concepts could eliminate that huge capital and labor cost. And nearly completely eliminate radioactivity problems to the general public.

300 billion is actually not to much money when you get down to it. Each year, the global economy spends up to 10 trillion dollars on dino fuel technology. Considering the reliability of NPPs and the nearly 90% load rate over the course of many years...those costs are really really good! Typically speaking, when you consider the costs of decommissioning, waste transportation, nuclear generally ends up being about on par with coal...mostly because nuclear plants last so darn long, over 60 years for some of our gen2 plants in the US and still going strong! Compare that to the 150 billion or so Germany has spent on solar project to their total ACTUAL output and it is a very telling tail. Even more so when you look at total carbon emissions of Germany compared to France.

Waste is actually what made me anti-nuclear myself. My introduction to caring (negatively) about nuclear was the Fukushima Daiichi incident. But after learning more about that situation, I actually really started to appreciate nuclear more. No one died as a result of FD failure, the containment building stopped most of the most harmful radiation, and the stuff that did get out is the really mild stuff (stuff with the million year half lives). I don't want to downplay this, it is still a very serious industrial mess to clean up, but compared to the 20 thousand people who died in the Tsunami and the tons of fuels, trash and other crap that got souped around in Japan as a result, the old reactor help up respectably, and is a credit to the operators (all of whom are currently alive an well).

I had a common misconception about radioactivity, I thought something with a long half-life was bad because it was going to be radioactive for a long, long time. That is mostly wrong. What that means is it is going to be hardly radioactive for a long time, elements that are short lived are VERY radioactive, but disappear very fast. I don't want to mire you in most of the gritty details, but the fission products reactors produce don't last very long, most only hours, a fewer some decades, and only a few longer than that. Stuff that has billion year a billion year half life...well, you don't really need to worry about it at all, it just isn't that radioactive. Most of the worry is based around "transuranics". That is just fancy speak for "stuff heavier than uranium". This is the stuff like Plutonium and Curium ect. The great thing about modern, Gen4 reactors is they don't really make those things...the thorium reactor I like starts with thorium, which is a long, long way from making anything heavier than uranium (less than 1% theoretically possible). So micrograms per year...not really that much to worry about (there is also no way to really get that to go into the environment because we don't use pressure vessels, but I will leave that to Kirk to explain).

I don't want to make it sounds like there isn't any risk or anything, but the risks have been way overplayed by political interests and not technical ones. For instance, many of the exclusions zones for FD were way overblown, they were no more radioactive than my home in the mountains ...but that isn't want you heard in the news.

But I think I will leave it like that. Nuclear has a bunch of mystic joojoo around it. Don't take my work for it, please, give "bill gates nuclear" a google, or other "gen4 reactor" stuff a chance before you completely write off nuclear as a green option for the future. I personally think it will have a big role to play if we want to stem off CO2 production AND bring more people into a western quality of life. Thanks again for the back and forth.

>> ^Yogi:

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
This shouldn't be surprising really, when experts were called in to talk about how fukushima wasn't going to cause the death of all humans, they wouldn't air them without some loony talking about how it was a mass extinction event.
We live at a time when emotions and feelings count more than truth,
and there is a vast ignorance of science.
James Lovelock
Perhaps it will end sometime in the future, I don't see when, why or how though.

You put a quote in without quotes. You are bad at posting and you should go to jail!


"Ill just quote myself next time, kind of like a double quote to make up for it" -GeeSussFreeK

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

This shouldn't be surprising really, when experts were called in to talk about how fukushima wasn't going to cause the death of all humans, they wouldn't air them without some loony talking about how it was a mass extinction event.
We live at a time when emotions and feelings count more than truth,
and there is a vast ignorance of science.
James Lovelock

Perhaps it will end sometime in the future, I don't see when, why or how though.


You put a quote in without quotes. You are bad at posting and you should go to jail!

This shouldn't be surprising really, when experts were called in to talk about how fukushima wasn't going to cause the death of all humans, they wouldn't air them without some loony talking about how it was a mass extinction event.

We live at a time when emotions and feelings count more than truth,
and there is a vast ignorance of science.

James Lovelock


Perhaps it will end sometime in the future, I don't see when, why or how though.

Safe nuclear refers to many different new gen4 reactor units that rely on passive safety instead of engineered safety. The real difference comes with a slight bit of understanding of how nuclear tech works now, and why that isn't optimal.

Let us first consider this, even with current nuclear technology, the amount of people that have died as a direct and indirect result of nuclear is very low per unit energy produced. The only rival is big hydro, even wind and solar have a great deal of risk compared to nuclear as we do it and have done it for years. The main difference is when a nuclear plant fails, everyone hears about it...but when a oil pipeline explodes and kills dozens, or solar panel installers fall off a roof or get electrocuted and dies...it just isn't as interesting.

Pound per pound nuclear is already statistically very safe, but that isn't really what we are talking about, we are talking about what makes them more unsafe compared to new nuclear techs. Well, that has to do with how normal nukes work. So, firstly, normal reactor tech uses solid fuel rods. It isn't a "metal" either, it is uranium dioxide, has the same physical characteristics as ceramic pots you buy in a store. When the fuel fissions, the uranium is transmuted into other, lighter, elements some of which are gases. Over time, these non-fissile elements damage the fuel rod to the point where it can no longer sustain fission and need to be replaced. At this point, they have only burned about 4% of the uranium content, but they are all "used up". So while there are some highly radioactive fission products contained in the fuel rods, the vast majority is just normal uranium, and that isn't very radioactive (you could eat it and not really suffer any radiation effects, now chemical toxicity is a different matter). The vast majority of nuclear waste, as a result of this way of burning uranium, generates huge volumes of waste products that aren't really waste products, just normal uranium.

But this isn't what makes light water reactors unsafe compared to other designs. It is all about the water. Normal reactors use water to both cool the core, extract the heat, and moderate the neutrons to sustain the fission reaction. Water boils at 100c which is far to low a temperature to run a thermal reactor on, you need much higher temps to get power. As a result, nuclear reactors use highly pressurized water to keep it liquid. The pressure is an amazingly high 2200psi or so! This is where the real problem comes in. If pressure is lost catastrophically, the chance to release radioactivity into the environment increases. This is further complicated by the lack of water then cooling the core. Without water, the fission chain reaction that generates the main source of heat in the reactor shuts down, however, the radioactive fission products contained in the fuel rods are very unstable and generate lots of heat. So much heat over time, they end up causing the rods to melt if they aren't supplied with water. This is the "melt down" you always hear about. If you start then spraying water on them after they melt down, it caries away some of those highly radioactive fission products with the steam. This is what happened in Chernobyl, there was also a human element that overdid all their safety equipment, but that just goes to show you the worst case.

The same thing didn't happen in Fukushima. What happened in Fukushima is that coolant was lost to the core and they started to melt down. The tubes which contain the uranium are made from zirconium. At high temps, water and zirconium react to form hydrogen gas. Now modern reactor buildings are designed to trap gases, usually steam, in the event of a reactor breach. In the case of hydrogen, that gas builds up till a spark of some kind happens and causes an explosion. These are the explosions that occurred at Fukushima. Both of the major failures and dangers of current reactors deal with the high pressure water; but water isn't needed to make a reactor run, just this type of reactor.

The fact that reactors have radioactive materials in them isn't really unsafe itself. What is unsafe is reactor designs that create a pressure to push that radioactivity into other areas. A electroplating plant, for example, uses concentrated acids along with high voltage electricity in their fabrication processes. It "sounds" dangerous, and it is in a certain sense, but it is a manageable danger that will most likely only have very localized effects in the event of a catastrophic event. This is due mainly to the fact that there are no forces driving those toxic chemical elements into the surrounding areas...they are just acid baths. The same goes for nuclear materials, they aren't more or less dangerus than gasoline (gas go boom!), if handled properly.

I think one of the best reactor designs in terms of both safety and efficiency are the molten salt reactors. They don't use water as a coolant, and as a result operate at normal preasures. The fuel and coolant is a liquid lithium, fluoride, and beryllium salt instead of water, and the initial fuel is thorium instead of uranium. Since it is a liquid instead of a solid, you can do all sorts of neat things with it, most notably, in case of an emergency, you can just dump all the fuel into a storage tank that is passively cooled then pump it back to the reactor once the issue is resolved. It is a safety feature that doesn't require much engineering, you are just using the ever constant force of gravity. This is what is known as passive safety, it isn't something you have to do, it is something that happens automatically. So in many cases, what they designed is a freeze plug that is being cooled. If that fails for any reason, and you desire a shutdown, the freeze plug melts and the entire contents of the reactor are drained into the tanks and fission stops (fission needs a certain geometry to happen).

So while the reactor will still be as dangerous as any other industrial machine would be...like a blast furnace, it wouldn't pose any threat to the surrounding area. This is boosted by the fact that even if you lost containment AND you had a ruptured emergency storage tank, these liquid salts solidify at temps below 400c, so while they are liquid in the reactor, they quickly solidify outside of it. And another great benefit is they are remarkably stable. Air and water don't really leach anything from them, fluoride and lithium are just so happy binding with things, they don't let go!

The fuel burn up is also really great. You burn up 90% of what you put in, and if you try hard, you can burn up to 99%. So, comparing them to "clean coal" doesn't really give new reactor tech its fair shake. The tech we use was actually sort of denounced by the person who made them, Alvin Weinberg, and he advocated the molten salt reactor instead. I could babble on about this for ages, but I think Kirk Sorensen explains that better than I could...hell most likely the bulk of what I said is said better by him



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw

But the real question is why. Why use nuclear and not solar, for instance?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

This is the answer. The power of the atom is a MILLION times more dense that fossil fuels...a million! It is a number that is beyond what we can normal grasp as people. Right now, current reactors harness less that 1% of that power because of their reactor design and fuel choice.

And unfortunately, renewables just cost to darn much for how much energy they contribute. In that, they also use WAY more resources to make per unit energy produced. So wind, for example, uses 10x more steal per unit energy contributed than other technologies. It is because renewables is more like energy farming.

http://videosift.com/video/TEDxWarwick-Physics-Constrain-Sustainable-Energy-Options


This is a really great video on that maths behind what makes renewables less than attractive for many countries. But to rap it up, finally, the real benefit is that cheap, clean power is what helps makes nations great. There is an inexorable link with access to energy and financial well being. Poor nations burn coal to try and bridge that gap, but that has a huge health toll. Renewables are way to costly for them per unit energy, they really need other answers. New nuclear could be just that, because it can be made nearly completely safe, very cheap to operate, and easier to manufacture (this means very cheap compared to today's reactors as they are basically huge pressure vessels). If you watch a couple of videos from Kirk and have more questions or problems, let me know, as you can see, I love talking about this stuff Sorry if I gabbed your ear off, but this is the stuff I am going back to school for because I do believe it will change the world. It is the closest thing to free energy we are going to get in the next 20 years.

In reply to this comment by ReverendTed:
Just stumbled onto your profile page and noticed an exchange you had with dag a few months back.
What constitutes "safe nuclear"? Is that a specific type or category of nuclear power?
Without context (which I'm sure I could obtain elsewise with a simple Google search, but I'd rather just ask), it sounds like "clean coal".

>> ^RadHazG:

Something tells me that most of those protesters (and most of the ones against restarting the reactors) are probably NOT the ones having to deal with the extreme power shortages the PM was talking about. It's very easy to be against something when it doesn't actually affect you. Not to mention most of them were probably perfectly ok with the reactors for all the years they were providing them with safe cheap energy. It took a ridiculously huge earthquake and several other factors to make things that bad for the reactors, it not nearly as dangerous as these people would believe.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/world/asia/13briefs-Heatstroke.html

So, this is pretty tragic. By my math, an extra 20ish people are dying every 10 days in japan due to the reactor shutdown. By the end of summer, assuming the same rate, 180 people will die due to the conditions of japan after the reactor shutdown. Let us count the deaths of all nuclear accidents ever, in the history of the world (only counting direct deaths)

Chernobyl: 56
Mihama plant: 5
INL test rector: 3
Fukushima: 2
Tokaimura: 2
Jaslovske Bohunice: 2

for a grand total of 70. So the worse nuclear disaster in the history in the world could unfold in japan over this summer; leaving the reactors off. This is unacceptable, so I am glad to see they are finally putting some reactors online. This week alone, 10x more people died of stroke then in Fukushima, end the freaken madness.

Meanwhile, off the coast of Japan near Fukushima....