Earthquake off Japan

[Broken]

The BWR's are certainly an old design and this whole tragedy seems to underline the issues with the on-site cooling pools and the emergency cooling systems of the reactors themselves. But the fact that even the old designs took an earthquake that was something like 5 times more powerful then they were designed for plus the huge tsunami is damn impressive. That doesn't mean there is not lots to learn from this horrible event or that the NPP's were properly prepared (from what I understand the back-up diesel generators were located at a low-point and thus flooded) with improved safety systems years ago, but the full extent of what else could have been done will likely have to wait until records/recordings can be reviewed, staff interviewed, timelines established, etc. For now we just have to hope the staff on-site get everything in hand and as safe as they can make it.

[Magis]

A BWR in general is not an unsafe design. Even when pumps have failed, natural circulation alone in a BWR can achieve a fair amount of cooling; certainly a hell of a lot more than natural circulation can achieve in a PWR. The most modern BWR design, namely the ESBWR, doesn't even have coolant pumps, and gets by entirely on natural circulation when operating at 100% full power. I dare to say that if these Fukushima units had been ESBWRs, there would not have been any significant in-core increase in temperature. It's completely unjustifiable to think that a PWR would have fared any better.

With regard to the discussion about the insertion of control mechanisms, both a PWR and BWR have some risks associated with their control devices that are absent in, say, a CANDU. Though, I don't see why this is really an issue since the spring-loaded control rods at Fukushima were deployed without incident. The insertion of control rods from below or above is definitely not a reason why a purchaser would decide between a PWR and BWR and definitely does not explain the relative abundances of these reactor types worldwide.

[FSTargetDrone]

The Japanese emperor addressed the nation earlier (with his first appearance on television ever, apparently):

In first TV address, Japan's emperor seeks to calm public

Japan's emperor Akihito sought to reassure citizens who are beginning to doubt government reassurances amid rising fear about a nuclear crisis.

By Ariel Zirulnick, Correspondent / March 16, 2011

In an unprecedented TV address, Japanese Emperor Akihito sought to soothe the country Wednesday as he made his first public comments since Friday's earthquake and tsunami.

He said the country had never seen anything like the current disaster, and said he was "deeply worried." He added that he was praying for the country and encouraged survivors, many of whom are awaiting news on the status of their loved ones, not to abandon hope.

Japanese are also anxiously awaiting news on continuing efforts to fully secure the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactors.

As of Wednesday, the death toll topped 11,000, with more than 3,500 of those people confirmed dead and an additional 7,500 missing and presumed dead, Agence France-Presse reported. Citizens are beginning to doubt ongoing government reassurance.

Public appearances by the emperor and his wife are extremely rare, though they have reached out to the public in the wake of other disasters, such as the 1995 earthquake in Kobe that killed about 6,400 people. But today marked his first-ever TV appearance; in fact, never before has an emperor directly addressed the people via TV during a national crisis.

Emperor Akihito no longer has a political role – his father ceded the emperor's role as national leader following Japan's defeat in World War II – and he must be careful not to tread onto political ground. But he remains a well-respected and influential figurehead, the Guardian reports.

Reuters reports that Akihito's speech may remind older Japanese of his father's address in August 1945, when Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender in World War II in the first radio address by an emperor.

Although some Japanese see the emperor as irrelevant today, those who still revere him as a figurehead will be "encouraged" by his address, Miiko Kodama, an expert in media studies, told Reuters.

He and his wife will hold off on visiting disaster sites to avoid interfering with rescue efforts.

[Keevan_Colton]

It is amongst a great variety of factors, I must say I generally prefer the CANDU style of currently deployed reactors however the pebble bed prototypes show a great deal of promise. The style of reactor at Fukushima however is nowhere near being akin to an ESBWR design. It's essentially the earliest type of BWR, and there have been massive changes since then. It lacks the heat exchanger of the PWR design. There is also generally better provision for introduction of neutron poison into a PWR design than a BWR, given that low levels of boron compounds are part of the design to regulate power output.

I'm not anti-nuclear power and not opposed to BWR designs. I do actually quite like the ESBWR model, but it's not been implemented at large and the design at Fukushima is very far from a modern iteration of the BWR concept. The proposed 7 and 8 reactors would have been much better designs in terms of passive potential for cooling, but this style lacks robustness in the face of damage to the primary loop and the provision for back up seems to have been sorely lacking. There seems to have been particular problems dealing with the hydrogen releases as the temperature has reached the point it cracks the bonds in water. There's been engineering concerns expressed over this particular type of BWR dating back to the mid 70's and its robustness under suboptimal conditions.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I think rather main issue is that because of the high costs of nuclear reactors, old ones like the one in Fukushima are kept in service for so long instead of being replaced after a more finite period of time.

[FSTargetDrone]

So apparently everyone in the USA and Canada are buying up iodide pills, whether they need it or not:

[Aaron]

I talked to my folks about that yesterday (they live outside Vancouver) and their answer was basically "we don't think the risk is worth it."

I live in Ontario, so.....even less point.

[General Zod]

So apparently everyone in the USA and Canada are buying up iodide pills, whether they need it or not:

I was reading about that yesterday, it seems completely absurd. At least someone is profiting off the disaster I guess?

[CaptainChewbacca]

Well the US Surgeon General told people to buy iodine 'just to be safe'. Never mind they're more likely to make themselves sick by taking too much iodine unnecessarily than actually preventing radiation exposure.

[General Zod]

Well the US Surgeon General told people to buy iodine 'just to be safe'. Never mind they're more likely to make themselves sick by taking too much iodine unnecessarily than actually preventing radiation exposure.

I'm just not sure how much radiation people realistically expect to reach us. I mean you're probably soaking in tons of radiation if you live in the vicinity of a coal plant as it is and you don't hear about those people buying up iodide tablets by the dozens.

[Broomstick]

So apparently everyone in the USA and Canada are buying up iodide pills, whether they need it or not:

I was reading about that yesterday, it seems completely absurd. At least someone is profiting off the disaster I guess?

Our local TV was telling people to take the money they were planning to spend on iodide pills and send it to a reputable relief charity for the tsunami victims.

And I wasn't intending to buy the pills anyhow.

[bz249]

I'm just not sure how much radiation people realistically expect to reach us. I mean you're probably soaking in tons of radiation if you live in the vicinity of a coal plant as it is and you don't hear about those people buying up iodide tablets by the dozens.

Iodine tablets are not against radiation in general. But against a very specific isotope I-131, which is a fission product (it is an utterly imbalanced atom, so the only practical possibility to produce it is via fission) with a half-life of 8 days. The iodine is slightly poisonous (over a few gramms it is lethal) but in small quantities it is required for the body. Normally it is stored in the thyroid, which holds practically all iodine in the body. Now if one inhales I-131 than it goes to the thyroid and might cause cancer (AFAIK it was the only type of cancer which showed a significant increase as a result of the Chernobyl disaster) and the purpose of those iodine tablets is to overload the body with the stable isotope so there would be no possibility for the radioactive one to accumulate.

[General Zod]

I'm just not sure how much radiation people realistically expect to reach us. I mean you're probably soaking in tons of radiation if you live in the vicinity of a coal plant as it is and you don't hear about those people buying up iodide tablets by the dozens.

Iodine tablets are not against radiation in general. But against a very specific isotope I-131, which is a fission product (it is an utterly imbalanced atom, so the only practical possibility to produce it is via fission) with a half-life of 8 days. The iodine is slightly poisonous (over a few gramms it is lethal) but in small quantities it is required for the body. Normally it is stored in the thyroid, which holds practically all iodine in the body. Now if one inhales I-131 than it goes to the thyroid and might cause cancer (AFAIK it was the only type of cancer which showed a significant increase as a result of the Chernobyl disaster) and the purpose of those iodine tablets is to overload the body with the stable isotope so there would be no possibility for the radioactive one to accumulate.

Iodide. Not iodine.

[Phantasee]

There's (supposedly) lots of iodine in table salt, how much more do you really need? Honest question.

[Duckie]

As an interesting fact, epidemiologically speaking, Three Mile Island actually saved lives. You see, everyone panicked and went to the doctor to go ask if they had radiation sickness or cancer or anything.

Some of them did. Now, 0 cases were actually caused by TMI at least probabilistically speaking, but a bunch of people who would not have otherwise looked had early detection of their cancers.

This is also why it was originally thought that TMI caused upticks in cancer rates, as a ton of new cancer diagnoses started flooding into the statistics after the incident. However, that's entirely due to way more people going to a doctor after a nuclear incident to look for cancer.

One thing's certain: Japan's after this incident going to have a massive uptick in cancer diagnosis rates and any commentators who notice this almost certainly won't control for every single person in japan deciding it'd be wise to have a checkup after Fukushima. I'd be mildly surprised if, poor doomed workers aside, this incident didn't actually do the same thing.

[Karza]

There's been some iodine-related hilarity in Finland too. People have bought every last package of iodine tablets they could find, despite the authorities constantly saying that it's not necessary. It's especially amusing because the tablets weren't needed even when Chernobyl went up, and that was a more serious accident that happened much closer to home.

[folti78]

So apparently everyone in the USA and Canada are buying up iodide pills, whether they need it or not:
<snip video>

Heh, an acquaintance of mine works for the local branch of Conrad Electronic. She claimed today that they have shortages of the GM counters they carry ... Which are not exactly cheap(90000 HUF for the cheapest, roughly 460 USD in todays exchange rate). And Hungary is pretty much on the other side of the hemisphere.

Of course, older generations remember the government's communication after Chernobyl (they denied everything for weeks, people watched lettuce leaves for signs of contamination...) and if you are a bit critical to the current branch, you wouldn't trust them with a sheet of used toilet paper...

[CaptainChewbacca]

There's (supposedly) lots of iodine in table salt, how much more do you really need? Honest question.

IodiDe and IodiNe are two different things. The tablets people are buying are the former, table salt contains the latter. Some people think eating kelp is a natural alternative because it contains iodine. I'm okay with them being too stupid to know its the wrong kind and possibly dying.

[Simon_Jester]

I think rather main issue is that because of the high costs of nuclear reactors, old ones like the one in Fukushima are kept in service for so long instead of being replaced after a more finite period of time.

Protests against the construction of new plants don't help either, where that's a factor.

[Master of Ossus]

I won't pretend to know more about that site than you do, but if those are the backup power generation stations behind the main plant building there, they look pretty vulnerable to a tsunami. If there's more of them up on the hills, good.

I've never been closer to the plant than San Luis Obispo itself, but if those cliffs are anywhere near as tall as many of the others along the California coast, they're easily 15-20 meters high. I'm also wondering where the tsunami would come from; Californian earthquakes, IIRC, aren't generated by the right type of fault to make one on their own, but I'm not sure what the landslide potential of the seabed is around there.

That's correct: the Southern California faults aren't associated with big subduction zones (unless you count them as continuing all the way north to the Juan de Fuca Plate in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California).

[SCRawl]

Regarding the whole "iodine vs. iodide" thing. The last time I took chemistry was in first year, so it's a long time ago. Similarly, the last time I took radiation physics was only a few years more recent. What I remember was that iodine is the element, and iodide is the ion, but whether you're ingesting the one or the other you're still getting elemental iodine into your system, which is what is wanted in the event that you've ingested I-131, yes? Isn't any iodine we're going to be ingesting going to be found in a compound anyway?

[Agent Sorchus]

Somewhat Iodine will help, but the problem is that elemental Iodine is in a relatively non-reactive diatomic state. But the people who say that salt won't help are wrong, that is Iodide (they are getting confused on chemical naming conventions probably). Any (Natural) source of Iodine is most likely going to be in Iodide form anyway since the only way to get it to be easily soluble in water is to add Potasium Iodide to I2 to make I3-.

There are other things that Iodine is soluble in, but you wouldn't want to go drinking organic solvents anyway.

[Dalton]

I'm just not sure how much radiation people realistically expect to reach us. I mean you're probably soaking in tons of radiation if you live in the vicinity of a coal plant as it is and you don't hear about those people buying up iodide tablets by the dozens.

I suspect that information is carefully concealed by the coal industry.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

There's (supposedly) lots of iodine in table salt, how much more do you really need? Honest question.

Table salt enriched with iodine isn't enough (note: Iodized table salt contains iodides and iodates. It also loses its iodine with time and exposure to oxygen. For another thing, dosing with iodized table salt to protect against radioactive iodine isn't recommended, since you'd be consuming some six kilograms of iodized table salt to get the quantity of iodine supplied by a single emergency potassium iodide tablet.) As has been stated, the purpose of iodide tablets is to saturate the thyroid gland with a benign, stable, isotope of iodine so that the thyroid gland doesn't try to take up the radioactive isotope of iodine and try to make thyroid hormone out of it.

So to stave off horrible thyroid cancer, you take an almost-unhealthy amount of iodine up to a day before you anticipate exposure to radioactive iodine.

Note that iodide tablets do sweet fuck-all to protect you from other radioactive elements, like cesium, radon, or uranium.

Also, if I had a mackerel for every person outside of fifty kilometers of Fukushima who are buying up iodide tablets out of their own misguided 'nukular' paranoia, I'd have them smacked with it until they acquired some sense.

[Stofsk]

I'm just not sure how much radiation people realistically expect to reach us. I mean you're probably soaking in tons of radiation if you live in the vicinity of a coal plant as it is and you don't hear about those people buying up iodide tablets by the dozens.

I suspect that information is carefully concealed by the coal industry.

Not really, there was an article in scientific american about this subject.

But on the other hand, who reads scientific american?