Fukushima: Two Years & Counting

[Polish_Silver]

demographic shift---education

This graph is a double whammy: the position of the circle shows the relationship between child mortality and income, but the sizes of the bubbles are a function of birth rate.

Note how birth rate uniformly falls as income (which in turn is highly correlated to energy use) increases, as does child mortality.

Demographic shift is a very powerful historic force, and has loads of empirical evidence behind it. Less clear is how to bring it about.

People who study the matter recommend educating women to the 6th grade.

That creates this situation:

1) Women pass on their knowledge to their children friends, extended family.

2) They understand hygiene, nutrition, and contraception.

3) The age at first birth increases, and the total births/woman goes way down.

In a lot of these places the last thing the family will do is educate the girls.

You gotta love Martin Luther and John Calvin, who wanted all boys and girls to be be able to read the bible.

[shiny!]

Re: demographic shift---education

Demographic shift is a very powerful historic force, and has loads of empirical evidence behind it. Less clear is how to bring it about.

People who study the matter recommend educating women to the 6th grade.

That creates this situation:

1) Women pass on their knowledge to their children friends, extended family.

2) They understand hygiene, nutrition, and contraception.

3) The age at first birth increases, and the total births/woman goes way down.

In a lot of these places the last thing the family will do is educate the girls.

You gotta love Martin Luther and John Calvin, who wanted all boys and girls to be be able to read the bible.

At the time of Guru Angad in the middle 1500's, only the Brahmin priests and upper caste merchants could read and write; the lower castes were left in ignorance. Guru Angad wanted all people to be able to read and write. To that end he invented the Gurmukhi alphabet, a simplified phonetic alphabet that's easily learned. It's the main alphabet used today for the Punjabi language.

[Polish_Silver]

Re: demographic shift---education

At the time of Guru Angad in the middle 1500's, only the Brahmin priests and upper caste merchants could read and write; the lower castes were left in ignorance. Guru Angad wanted all people to be able to read and write. To that end he invented the Gurmukhi alphabet, a simplified phonetic alphabet that's easily learned. It's the main alphabet used today for the Punjabi language.

That guy was truly revolutionary, and very smart. It's difficult to come up with an alphabet like that.
Interesting that he was contemporary with the european explosion of the printing press, vernacular bible, etc. Germany had the highest literacy rate in Europe, about 10% of the men could read in 1500, I think.

[don]

Re: demographic shift---education

things appear to be going swimmingly . . .


April 9, 2013

Nuclear Plant in Japan Has Leak in Other Tank

By HIROKO TABUCHI

The operator of Japan’s crippled nuclear plant halted an emergency operation Tuesday to pump thousands of gallons of radioactive water from a leaking underground storage pool after workers discovered that a similar pool, to which the water was being transferred, was also leaking.

At least three of seven underground chambers at the site are now seeping radioactive water, leaving the Tokyo Electric Power Company with few options on where to store the huge amounts of contaminated runoff from the makeshift cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Those systems were put in place after a large earthquake and tsunami damaged the plant’s regular cooling systems two years ago, causing fuel at three of its reactors to melt and prompting 160,000 people to evacuate their homes. Since then, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, has been flooding the damaged reactor cores to cool and stabilize the fuel.

But Tepco has struggled to find space to store the runoff water. It initially released what it said was low-level contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean, igniting furious criticism among neighbors and environmental activists. Traces of radioactive cesium were later found in bluefin tuna caught off the California coast.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has stressed that he will not permit Tepco — which has effectively been nationalized since the disaster — to again release contaminated water into the ocean. But Tepco says that it already stores more than a quarter-million tons of radioactive water in hundreds of tanks at the site, or in underground pools, and that the amount of runoff could double within three years.

The company has said it is building more storage space and also filters much of the runoff. But with its underground pools vulnerable to leaks, Tepco is being forced to hurriedly find alternatives.

Workers at the plant had been emptying the No. 2 underground pool after Tepco found that about 120 tons of toxic water, or almost 32,000 gallons, had breached its inner plastic linings and seeped into the soil. Tepco said the leak appeared to be the biggest since the early months after the March 2011 disaster.

But readings around the No. 1 pool, to which the remaining water from the No. 2 pool was being transferred, suggested that it, too, was seeping water, said Masayuki Ono, general manager at Tepco’s Nuclear Power and Plant Siting Division. The No. 3 pool was also found to have sprung a small leak on Sunday.

Mr. Ono said Tepco did not think that the contaminated water would reach the sea, since the pools lie about half a mile inland, but said he could not be sure.

Workers will now empty both the No. 1 and No. 2 pools, and transfer them to other pools. Tepco will continue to use the No. 3 pool at less than capacity, because the leak there was minor, Mr. Ono said.

Asked whether the plant’s other underground pools might also be prone to leaking, Mr. Ono had no clear answer.

“We are still assessing the situation,” he said.

[don]

Who Could Possibly Have Known

By MARTIN FACKLER

TOKYO — Two years after a triple meltdown that grew into the world’s second worst nuclear disaster, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is faced with a new crisis: a flood of highly radioactive wastewater that workers are struggling to contain.

Groundwater is pouring into the plant’s ravaged reactor buildings at a rate of almost 75 gallons a minute. It becomes highly contaminated there, before being pumped out to keep from swamping a critical cooling system. A small army of workers has struggled to contain the continuous flow of radioactive wastewater, relying on hulking gray and silver storage tanks sprawling over 42 acres of parking lots and lawns. The tanks hold the equivalent of 112 Olympic-size pools.

But even they are not enough to handle the tons of strontium-laced water at the plant — a reflection of the scale of the 2011 disaster and, in critics’ view, ad hoc decision making by the company that runs the plant and the regulators who oversee it. In a sign of the sheer size of the problem, the operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, plans to chop down a small forest on its southern edge to make room for hundreds more tanks, a task that became more urgent when underground pits built to handle the overflow sprang leaks in recent weeks.

“The water keeps increasing every minute, no matter whether we eat, sleep or work,” said Masayuki Ono, a general manager with Tepco who acts as a company spokesman. “It feels like we are constantly being chased, but we are doing our best to stay a step in front.”

While the company has managed to stay ahead, the constant threat of running out of storage space has turned into what Tepco itself called an emergency, with the sheer volume of water raising fears of future leaks at the seaside plant that could reach the Pacific Ocean.

That quandary along with an embarrassing string of mishaps — including a 29-hour power failure affecting another, less vital cooling system — have underscored an alarming reality: two years after the meltdowns, the plant remains vulnerable to the same sort of large earthquake and tsunami that set the original calamity in motion.

There is no question that the Fukushima plant is less dangerous than it was during the desperate first months after the accident, mostly through the determined efforts of workers who have stabilized the melted reactor cores, which are cooler and less dangerous than they once were.

But many experts warn that safety systems and fixes at the plant remain makeshift and prone to accidents.

The jury-rigged cooling loop that pours water over the damaged reactor cores is a mazelike collection of pumps, filters and pipes that snake two and a half miles along the ground through the plant. And a pool for storing used nuclear fuel remains perched on the fifth floor of a damaged reactor building as Tepco struggles to move the rods to a safer location.

The situation is worrisome enough that Shunichi Tanaka, a longtime nuclear power proponent who is the chairman of the newly created watchdog Nuclear Regulation Authority, told reporters after the announcement of the leaking pits that “there is concern that we cannot prevent another accident.”

A growing number of government officials and advisers now say that by entrusting the cleanup to the company that ran the plant before the meltdowns, Japanese leaders paved the way for a return to the insider-dominated status quo that prevailed before the disaster.

Even many scientists who acknowledge the complexity of cleaning up the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl fear that the water crisis is just the latest sign that Tepco is lurching from one problem to the next without a coherent strategy.

“Tepco is clearly just hanging on day by day, with no time to think about tomorrow, much less next year,” said Tadashi Inoue, an expert in nuclear power who served on a committee that drew up the road map for cleaning up the plant.

But the concerns extend well beyond Tepco. While doing a more rigorous job of policing Japan’s nuclear industry than regulators before the accident, the Nuclear Regulation Authority has a team of just nine inspectors to oversee the more than 3,000 workers at Fukushima.

And a separate committee created by the government to oversee the cleanup is loaded with industry insiders, including from the Ministry of Trade, in charge of promoting nuclear energy, and nuclear reactor manufacturers like Toshiba and Hitachi. The story of how the Fukushima plant ended up swamped with water, critics say, is a cautionary tale about the continued dangers of leaving decisions about nuclear safety to industry insiders.

When Tepco and the government devised the current plans for decommissioning the plant in late 2011, groundwater had already been identified as a problem — the plant lies in the path of water flowing from nearby mountains to the sea. But decision makers placed too low a priority on the problem, critics say, assuming the water could be stored until it could be cleaned and disposed of.

According to some who helped the government plan the cleanup, outside experts might have predicted the water problem, but Tepco and the government swatted away entreaties to bring in such experts or companies with more cleanup expertise, preferring to keep control of the plant within the collusive nuclear industry.

Tepco also rejected a proposal to build a concrete wall running more than 60 feet into the ground to block water from reaching the reactors and turbine buildings, and the Trade Ministry did not force the issue, according to experts and regulators who helped draw up the decommissioning plan.

Instead, Tepco made interim adjustments, including hastily building the plastic- and clay-lined underground water storage pits that eventually developed leaks.

It was only after the discovery of those leaks that the regulation agency was added as a full-fledged member to the government’s cleanup oversight committee.

But the biggest problem, critics say, was that Tepco and other members of the oversight committee appeared to assume all along that they would eventually be able to dump the contaminated water into the ocean once a powerful new filtering system was put in place that could remove 62 types of radioactive particles, including strontium.

The dumping plans have now been thwarted by what some experts say was a predictable problem: a public outcry over tritium, a relatively weak radioactive isotope that cannot be removed from the water.

Tritium, which can be harmful only if ingested, is regularly released into the environment by normally functioning nuclear plants, but even Tepco acknowledges that the water at Fukushima contains about 100 times the amount of tritium released in an average year by a healthy plant.

“We were so focused on the fuel rods and melted reactor cores that we underestimated the water problem,” said Tatsujiro Suzuki, vice chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, a government body that helped draw up Tepco’s original cleanup plan. “Someone from outside the industry might have foreseen the water problem.”

Tepco rejects the criticism that it has mishandled the growing groundwater problem, saying that the only way to safely stop the inflow is by plugging the cracks in the damaged reactor buildings. It contends that no company in the world has the ability to do that because it would require entering the highly radioactive buildings and working in dangerously toxic water several feet deep.

“We operate the plant, so we know it better than anyone else,” said Mr. Ono, the Tepco spokesman. He then teared up, adding, “Fixing this mess that we made is the only way we can regain the faith of society.”

For the moment, that goal seems distant. The public outcry over the plans to dump tritium-tainted water into the sea — driven in part by the company’s failure to inform the public in 2011 when it dumped radioactive water into the Pacific — was so loud that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe personally intervened last month to say that there would be “no unsafe release.”

Meanwhile, the amount of water stored at the plant just keeps growing.

“How could Tepco not realize that it had to get public approval before dumping this into the sea?” said Muneo Morokuzu, an expert on public policy at the University of Tokyo who has called for creating a specialized new company just to run the cleanup. “This all just goes to show that Tepco is in way over its head.”

Makiko Inoue contributed reporting from Tokyo, and Matthew L. Wald from Washington.

[Polish_Silver]

Designed by Geniuses?

. . .
. . .Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is faced with a new crisis: a flood of highly radioactive wastewater that workers are struggling to contain.

Groundwater is pouring into the plant’s ravaged reactor buildings at a rate of almost 75 gallons a minute. It becomes highly contaminated there, before being pumped out to keep from swamping a critical cooling system. A small army of workers has struggled to contain the continuous flow of radioactive wastewater, . . .


A growing number of government officials and advisers now say that by entrusting the cleanup to the company that ran the plant before the meltdowns, Japanese leaders paved the way for a return to the insider-dominated status quo that prevailed before the disaster.


. . .

The traditional view was that the design had to be idiot proof, so that even incompetent operators would not screw it up.

It appears that a melt down aftermath is not idiot proof . . .

They had planned to let the water run into the ocean. If they cannot do that, then what can they do?

Tritium cannot easily be separated or filtered out. I think the half life is 12 years.

12 years * 75 galls/minute = ?

I wonder how bad dumping the water in the ocean would really be-- the fact that they are not allowed to do it is not a strong argument that it would be an environmental /public health problem.
How much tritium is really in the water?

[don]

Latest (Hairbrain?) Scheme

Ripped from the pages of Marvel Comics, Japanese Anime, or Game of Thrones; the latest cunning solution to what the Japanese admit is an ongoing emergency in Fukushima is, well, creative... Now that TEPCO has been shown to be inept, Abe and his government have sanctioned the funding of a 1.4km wall of ice to surround the building that holds Reactors 1 to 4. No this is not Pacific Rim; as Kyodo reports, chemical refrigerants will keep the underground wall frozen to stop the 400 tons of ground water being pumped into the reactors to cool them from leaking further into the sea water surrounding the catastrophe. This must be a positive for GDP, if 'broken windows' can help the Keynesians (and digging and refilling holes) then why not build a giant ice wall that will require unending energy to refrigerate what is a constantly melting-down core of nuclear awfulness. We wish them luck.
(Zerohedge)


...leaked an estimated 300 tons of water per day from the damaged nuclear plant into the ocean, said a representative of the Ministry of Industry on Wednesday

...

The countermeasures of the operating company Tepco are obviously insufficient . The energy company has "dry walls" claims to be injected into the soil, which should be there to harden a lock. However, as the company announced on Tuesday , the water flows around the wall into the sea.

...

To further penetration of water into the damaged nuclear plant to prevent, is now an underground wall to be built from the ground is frozen to the reactor building, the Japanese news agency Kyodo reported on. To this end pipes with chemical refrigerants to promote the building of reactors 1 to 4 are laid in the ground. The thus created barrier was expected to have a length of 1.4 kilometers.

...

Thanks to the already heavily burdened financially operator TEPCO Group the necessary funding will not be able to apply for the state to step in as a government spokesman said on Wednesday. The construction of a protective wall of such proportions was unprecedented in the world. In order to build such a thing, the state must help the spokesman was quoted as saying.

[don]

Re: Latest (Hairbrain?) Scheme

"There is no credibility from TEPCO or the Japanese government on the extent of the real disaster, its effects, the ultimate cleanup costs, or how many years fish in the area will be contaminated. In addition, contaminated fish may turn up anywhere within their normal swimming range with obvious implications."
Mish

Nuclear power will be so cheap customers may not even be billed for their electricity.
early industry propaganda

[lektrode]

Re: Latest (Hairbrain?) Scheme

"There is no credibility from TEPCO or the Japanese government on the extent of the real disaster, its effects, the ultimate cleanup costs, or how many years fish in the area will be contaminated. In addition, contaminated fish may turn up anywhere within their normal swimming range with obvious implications."
Mish

Nuclear power will be so cheap customers may not even be billed for their electricity.
early industry propaganda

well... of course, but had the luddite brigade not been so successful back in the 1970's, that might've almost been true.

but the fish have been DISAPPEARING for far longer than since the tsunami -

Is The Northwest Sardine Fishery Collapsing?


U.S. closes most of West Coast to salmon fishing


Salmon collapse threatens fishing along U.S. West Coast


Collapse of the Atlantic northwest cod fishery


and some seem to think its NOT being caused by _anything_ to do with nuclear power???


Ocean Acidification: The Other CO2 Problem

Increased carbon dioxide is changing the chemistry of the earth’s oceans, threatening marine life


so, dunno about mish or the rest of the anti-nuke crusaders, but i'd rather take my chances with a bit of contamination
than HAVE NO FISH AT ALL, as fossil fuel _burning_ continues to poison the biosphere.

esp when we have some VERY SMART PEOPLE, with (apparently) no axe to grind, beginning to See The Light ???
and willing to put Their Money where their mouth is, in an attempt to bring sanity and RATIONAL LOGIC into the discussion -
after decades of (anti-nuke) hysteria has brought us to where we are now

[Polish_Silver]

What disaster?

the 400 tons of ground water being pumped into the reactors to cool them from leaking further into the sea water surrounding the catastrophe. .

What "disaster" would happen if they just let the cooling water go into the ocean?

What isotopes, in what concentration, would be present, and what effect would they have?

And if some fish have a higher life time cancer risk, so what?

Since the public is completely ignorant of radation toxicity, anything to do with reactors is "disaster".

For example, you frequently hear that plutonium is "highly toxic". Well no, it isn't.

Or these astronomical estimates of clean up cost. What are they based on?

Some completely absurd standard of isotope concentrations?

What would it cost to "clean up" all the mercury released from coal combustion?

Restore the farm land lost to strip mining?

[gwynedd1]

Re: at least it's contained, right?

What? Me worry?



From Wolf Richter:

Catastrophic nuclear accidents, like Chernobyl in 1986 or Fukushima No. 1 in 2011, are very rare, we’re incessantly told, and their probability of occurring infinitesimal. But when they do occur, they get costly. So costly that the French government, when it came up with cost estimates, kept them secret.
But now the report was leaked to the French magazine, Le Journal de Dimanche. Turns out, the upper end of the cost spectrum of an accident at a single reactor at the plant chosen for the study, the plant at Dampierre in the Department of Loiret in north-central France, would amount to over three times the country’s GDP. Financially, France would cease to exist as we know it.
Hence, the need to keep it secret. The study was done in 2007 by the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN), a government agency under joint authority of the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Environment, Industry, Research, and Health. With over 1,700 employees, it’s France’s “public service expert in nuclear and radiation risks.” This isn’t some overambitious, publicity-hungry think tank.
It evaluated a range of disaster scenarios that might occur at the Dampierre plant. In the best-case scenario, costs came to €760 billion—more than a third of France’s GDP. At the other end of the spectrum: €5.8 trillion! Over three times France’s GDP. A devastating amount. So large that France could not possibly deal with it.
Yet, France gets 75% of its electricity from nuclear power. The entire nuclear sector is controlled by the state, which also owns 85% of EDF, the mega-utility that operates France’s 58 active nuclear reactors spread over 20 plants. So, three weeks ago, the Institute released a more politically correct report for public consumption. It pegged the cost of an accident at €430 billion.
“There was no political smoothening, no pressure,” claimed IRSN Director General Jacques Repussard, but he admitted, “it’s difficult to publish these kinds of numbers.” He said the original report with a price tag of €5.8 trillion was designed to counter the reports that EDF had fabricated, which “very seriously underestimated the costs of the incidents.”
Both reports were authored by IRSN economist Patrick Momal, who struggled to explain away the differences. The new number, €430 billion, was based on a “median case” of radioactive releases, as was the case in Fukushima, he told the JDD, while the calculations of 2007 were based more on what happened at Chernobyl. But then he added that even the low end of the original report, the €760 billion, when updated with the impact on tourism and exports, would jump to €1 trillion.
“One trillion, that’s what Fukushima will ultimately cost,” Repussard said.
Part of the €5.8 trillion would be the “astronomical social costs due to the high number of victims,” the report stated. The region contaminated by cesium 137 would cover much of France and Switzerland, all of Belgium and the Netherlands, and a big part of Germany—an area with 90 million people (map). The costs incurred by farmers, employees, and companies, the environmental damage and healthcare expenses would amount to €4.4 trillion.
“Those are social costs, but the victims may not necessarily be compensated,” the report stated ominously—because there would be no entity in France that could disburse those kinds of amounts.
Closer to the plant, 5 million people would have to be evacuated from an area of 87,000 square kilometers (about 12% of France) and resettled. The soil would have to be decontaminated, and radioactive waste would have to be treated and disposed of. Total cost: €475 billion.
The weather is the big unknown. Yet it’s crucial in any cost calculations. Winds blowing toward populated areas would create the worst-case scenario of €5.8 trillion. Amidst the horrible disaster of Fukushima, Japan was nevertheless lucky in one huge aspect: winds pushed 80% of the radioactive cloud out to sea. If it had swept over Tokyo, the disaster would have been unimaginable. In Chernobyl, winds made the situation worse; they spread the cloud over the Soviet Union.
Yet the study might underestimate the cost for other nuclear power plants. The region around Dampierre has a lower population density than regions around other nuclear power plants. And it rarely has winds that would blow the radioactive cloud in a northerly direction toward Paris. Other nuclear power plants aren’t so fortuitously located.
These incidents have almost no probability of occurring, we’re told. So there are currently 437 active nuclear power reactors and 144 “permanent shutdown reactors” in 31 countries, according to the IAEA, for a total of 581 active and inactive reactors. Of these, four melted down so far—one at Chernobyl and three at Fukushima. Hence, the probability for a meltdown is not infinitesimal. Based on six decades of history, it’s 4 out of 581, or 0.7%. One out of every 145 reactors. Another 67 are under construction, and more are to come....
Decommissioning and dismantling the powerplant at Fukushima and disposing of the radioactive debris has now been estimated to take 40 years. At this point, two years after the accident, very little has been solved. But it has already cost an enormous amount of money. People who weren’t even born at the time of the accident will be handed the tab for it. And the ultimate cost might never be known.
The mayor of Futaba, a ghost town of once upon a time 7,000 souls near Fukushima No. 1, told his staff that evacuees might not be able to return for 30 years. Or never, for the older generation. It was the first estimate of a timeframe. But it all depends on successful decontamination. And that has turned into a vicious corruption scandal. Read.... Corruption At “Decontaminating” Radioactive Towns

In the long run it will kill you. -Enrico Keynes.

[gwynedd1]

Re: Fatalities at Chernobyl

Correction - I never said everyone must live like an American, or even a European.

What I said was richer. Specifically this means an income of around $20,000 per year in present terms. There's been a lot of research on this subject - but this article gives you an idea of what the chasm looks like (i.e. 1/3 of humanity lives on $800 per year or less and burns wood for fuel):

And the way we have been doing it is with World bank scams that colonize them.

The kind of technology this world needs are rocket stoves. This injects an advancement directly into their way of live . I can boil gallons of water with nothing more than small twigs. Now they save labor not having to hunt for wood.

[c1ue]

Re: Fatalities at Chernobyl

And the way we have been doing it is with World bank scams that colonize them.

The kind of technology this world needs are rocket stoves. This injects an advancement directly into their way of live . I can boil gallons of water with nothing more than small twigs. Now they save labor not having to hunt for wood.

Rocket stoves are an incremental step, but quantum improvement of standard of living is primarily accomplished via electrification. Electrification does all sorts of things: more light = more hours to do things. Small cheap labor saving devices of all sorts. Transportable, affordable energy for cooking/cleaning/communication/learning. Shiny's induction stove is a prime example - I guarantee cooking with that is a lot more efficient than any wood burning stove no matter how technologified.

In this respect, the World Bank is actively impeding progress because it refuses to loan money for coal fired electricity plants due to CAGW 'concerns'.

[don]

Re: at least it's contained, right?

Decommissioning and dismantling the powerplant at Fukushima and disposing of the radioactive debris has now been estimated to take 40 years. At this point, two years after the accident, very little has been solved. But it has already cost an enormous amount of money. People who weren’t even born at the time of the accident will be handed the tab for it. And the ultimate cost might never be known.

and, may I add, seldom figured in the per kilowatt cost . . . in nearly every case (is there an exception?) they become a public expense.

[gwynedd1]

Re: Fatalities at Chernobyl

Rocket stoves are an incremental step, but quantum improvement of standard of living is primarily accomplished via electrification. Electrification does all sorts of things: more light = more hours to do things. Small cheap labor saving devices of all sorts. Transportable, affordable energy for cooking/cleaning/communication/learning. Shiny's induction stove is a prime example - I guarantee cooking with that is a lot more efficient than any wood burning stove no matter how technologified.

In this respect, the World Bank is actively impeding progress because it refuses to loan money for coal fired electricity plants due to CAGW 'concerns'.

Yes but the point people miss is that giant leaps often lead wealth disparities and social stratification . It is much better to assist organically. Giving them rocket stove technology ,and simple water purification systems etc., will get them through that incremental stage. Carter did more good getting Africa to build latrines. The first ones to electrify will be in a position to leap frog the others and grab more than the electric power if it is done half haphazardly. Give a man a gun in a primitive society and he could easily become a tyrant. They can build their own rocket stoves. Who is going to build their induction stoves? The West is not a mess because that is how we advanced, step by step.