Is Japan Gonna Die?

[trysail]

Foxes, Hedgehogs and Prediction

http://judithcurry.com/2011/03/15/foxes-hedgehogs-and-prediction/

 

[stephen55]

Foxes, Hedgehogs and Prediction

http://judithcurry.com/2011/03/15/foxes-hedgehogs-and-prediction/

Good link, trysail. I particularly liked this part...

Toward the end of his book, Gardner considers how we can get better predictions. He makes four suggestions.

* Accept that the world is complex and uncertain.
* Look at a wide variety of information and combine that information to gain deeper understanding.
* Think about thinking: be aware of the biases and fallacies of thought.
* Strive for humility.

I'm also a big fan of Arthur C. Clarke's three laws of prediction...

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Let's hear it for solar and nuclear fusion!!!

 

[Verdad]

What this guy fails to mention is that in the Fukushima reactors, spent fuel is stored above the reactor core, and it contains all sorts of really nasty radionuclides other than Cesium and Iodine, and it's cooled by the same system as the core.

I was hoping you’d show up.

I found this out the first day I began following this mess. I’d always assumed spent fuel was tucked somewhere safely away at plants’ premises, then I found this diagram. Holy shit.

In the meantime, they’ve had another fire at the fuel pond in number 4 and pulled the remaining workers but then brought them back. The temperature’s rising in numbers 5 and 6 too, and it’s anyone’s guess how the meltdown in the first three reactors is proceeding. It’s becoming too horrible to keep reading.

 

[vrosej10]

Good link, trysail. I particularly liked this part...

Toward the end of his book, Gardner considers how we can get better predictions. He makes four suggestions.

* Accept that the world is complex and uncertain.
* Look at a wide variety of information and combine that information to gain deeper understanding.
* Think about thinking: be aware of the biases and fallacies of thought.
* Strive for humility.

I'm also a big fan of Arthur C. Clarke's three laws of prediction...

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Let's hear it for solar and nuclear fusion!!!

There's a few nimrods on the GB I would like to bash over the head with this excellent advice. the idea that every text expresses some kind of bias is lost on some of them...it is frustrating, like talking to children...

 

[mynameisben]

There's a few nimrods on the GB I would like to bash over the head with this excellent advice. the idea that every text expresses some kind of bias is lost on some of them...it is frustrating, like talking to children...

It's not exactly like talking to children. Children can learn.

 

[ishtat]

these reactors are 40 years old, so I'm pretty familiar with them.

There are still Magnox type reactors which started life commercially in the early 60's with a projected life of 25 years. Some are still running at almost 50 years old. When they are eventually decommissioned, they remove the fuel, the boilers, the turbines all the ancillary stuff. Everythings sweet... well not quite because the reactor core has to stay in situ for a long, long, long time. The Brits have closed a few of their old Magnox facilities and estimate that the minimum period of supervision and maintenance will be 250 years.

It doesn't take a genius to work out that in a country like Japan which gets a cat 9 earthquake every 100 years or so could have single reactors subject to not one but several cat 9's impacting during the hazardous life of the reactor.

I suspect that as these old nuclear facilities become non operational, maintenance of structural integrity of the reactor cores may become a huge problem.

 

[stephen55]

It's not exactly like talking to children. Children can learn.

You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.

Dorothy Parker

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I was hoping you’d show up.

I found this out the first day I began following this mess. I’d always assumed spent fuel was tucked somewhere safely away at plants’ premises, then I found this diagram. Holy shit.

In the meantime, they’ve had another fire at the fuel pond in number 4 and pulled the remaining workers but then brought them back. The temperature’s rising in numbers 5 and 6 too, and it’s anyone’s guess how the meltdown in the first three reactors is proceeding. It’s becoming too horrible to keep reading.

I didn't know spent fuel rods were stored above the main reactor core either, and you've really got to wonder about the wisdom of that design. Spent fuel rods are still tremendously thermally hot and radioactive as hell and they have to be stored first in water for a number of years until their radioactivity falls to a level where they're finally cool enough to be very carefully sent for reprocessing, which is all done remotely, because these things are still lethally radioactive.

Spent fuels rods are also especially nasty because they contain a whole slew of daughter radionuclides that were produced by the fissionable decay of the original Uranium oxide (or mixed Uranium/Plutonium oxides, called MOX) fuel , some which can be vaporized at temperatures much lower than what it takes to vaporize UO2 or PuO2. Also, the zircalloy tubes of these spent fuel rods are usually badly corroded, pitted, and oxidized, and the integrity of these tubes in not real good.

I suppose the idea in storing the spent fuel close to the reactor made a kind of economic sense, because (1) spent fuel rod bundles are going to be very expensive and dangerous to move, so you want to keep their journey as short as possible, and (2) using the same cooling system for both reactor and waste storage is going to save you the trouble of building two of these very expensive closed high-pressure cooling systems. But part of the decision had to be based on the galling hubris of assuming that nothing really that bad was ever going to happen to your reactor.

If the spent fuel should be released in a steam explosion, it'll produce a truly malignant bouquet of fallout, most ominously, various isotopes of Plutonium, with half lives of from days to 24,000 years. Unless someone can come up with a clever way of separating Pu nuclides from the environment, the area around the plants could become a dead zone, uninhabitable for upwards of 100,000 years.

They've been talking about these fires in the buildings and what they might be, and it seems to me it should be pretty easy to tell. When you heat atoms up, the electrons jump from one energy level to higher one as they absorb energy, and then fall back down to their original level and emit that absorbed energy as light. That's why hot things glow. Every different kind of atom has its own characteristic color of light it emits when this happens, and this light can be analyzed in an instrument called a spectrometer to determine what kind of atom emitted it. They've been doing this for 100 years by now, and it's how we know what stars are made of and how we analyze for trace elements.

I can't believe that no one's trained a spectrometer on these flames to find out just what's burning: whether they're just some kind of industrial chemicals or whether we're seeing the spectra of Uranium and Zriconium and Plutonium and other bad characters from the reactor cores in those flames. It makes me wonder whether someone is maybe covering something up.

 

[3113]

Yes, and I'm filthy rich too of course, from my control of all the world's media outlets, stabbing Germany in the back in WWI, and precipitating the Great Depression and the Credit Collapse of '08!

Now I've got to go boil up some Christian kids for Passover and work on those plans for world domination by homosexual negro feminists. It's a busy life, but a full one...

See you under my boot heel, suckers!

--Hymie Mabeuse

Don't I know it. The work I have to do managing Hollywood is exhausting. I mean, my gosh, Purim is coming up on the 19th and I just don't think I can make convention we're having to discuss the future of the world banks (and I'm gonna miss out on all that hamantash! ).

I shouldn't have married outside the faith. It makes controlling things behind the scenes so much harder....

 

[3113]

If the spent fuel should be released in a steam explosion, it'll produce a truly malignant bouquet of fallout, most ominously, various isotopes of Plutonium, with half lives of from days to 24,000 years. Unless someone can come up with a clever way of separating Pu nuclides from the environment, the area around the plants could become a dead zone, uninhabitable for upwards of 100,000 years.

You know, when I dreamed about living in the future, I kinda was thinking of flying cars, walkie-talkie watches, and the up-and-coming fashion of spotless white tunics. Not living underground with the Morlocks

 

[Verdad]

You know, when I dreamed about living in the future, I kinda was thinking of flying cars, walkie-talkie watches, and the up-and-coming fashion of spotless white tunics. Not living underground with the Morlocks

Heh. When I was a kid, every other story was set in a post nuclear-disaster world. I guess we just came to feel they and shoulder pads went safely out of style.

I can't believe that no one's trained a spectrometer on these flames to find out just what's burning: whether they're just some kind of industrial chemicals or whether we're seeing the spectra of Uranium and Zriconium and Plutonium and other bad characters from the reactor cores in those flames. It makes me wonder whether someone is maybe covering something up.

It is pretty impossible that they don’t know what’s coming out of there. I get that no one wants more panic than is necessary, but with all the vacillations you can’t help but think it’s even worse than they’re letting on.

 

[ishtat]

An American Tsunami ??

I am in Seoul at the moment, travelling to Japan tonight. A major topic of conversation at meets scheduled will be:-

Japan is 2nd largest holder (after China) of US Bonds (US$885 Billion).

Japan needs cash to rebuild but:

Japan is Worlds largest debtor (200% of GDP)

Japan to raise cash must:-

1. Raise Taxes.
2. Sell off its US Bonds .

Japan's Parliament will probably procrastinate about the necessary increase in Taxes, specifically sales tax from 5% to a minimum of 10%.

US bonds will have to be sold, which because Bond sales drive interest rates up will mean sharply increased interest rates in the USA . I don't think Mr Bernanke had the financial impact of a Tsunami factored into his models for US recovery.

American citizens are about to pay for Japanese recovery, and the US recovery President Obama hoped to ride to re-election victory in 2012 just may not materialise at all.

 

[amicus]

Evacuation Plans for Tokyo?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...eaving-tokyo-as-foreign-pessimism-climbs.html

The U.S. plans to airlift citizens from Japan along with military and diplomatic families, reflecting widening skepticism that the authorities can contain leaks from the quake-stricken Fukushima nuclear plant.

Evacuation plans for Tokyo with 18 million residents, China hoarding salt for radiation protection, Australia considering plans....more at the link above...

Is this really happening?

Amicus

 

[3113]

Oh, dear....

Behind Japan's escalating nuclear crisis sits a scandal-ridden energy industry in a comfy relationship with government regulators often willing to overlook safety lapses. Leaks of radioactive steam and workers contaminated with radiation are just part of the disturbing catalog of accidents that have occurred over the years and been belatedly reported to the public, if at all.

From here.

Well. That's not very comforting.

 

[wzerw100]

I spent over twenty years as a Nuclear Biological and Chemical specialist with the Army and I can tell you that enough radiation 150 + rads will kill you. Radiation is accumulative. That aside people who know have never considered nuclear energy to be a viable option simply because we have no way of handling the waste it creates. Right now we store it in trenches and that is not a good thing. The Columbian River in Washington State has been deemed the most radioactive river on earth thanks to nuclear waste.

I am thoroughly convinced that we humans will not be satisfied until we have made this planet completely uninhabitable and all for a dollar. Just my thoughts. No matter how the prevailing winds go I live in Kansas too far inland to be affected.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

It is pretty impossible that they don’t know what’s coming out of there. I get that no one wants more panic than is necessary, but with all the vacillations you can’t help but think it’s even worse than they’re letting on.

Yeah. The less they tell us, the worse it obviously is. The US Navy's there, and there's no doubt they know what's coming out of the plant, but apart from what they told the US Nuclear Regulatory Agency (and which apparently prompted the Agency to extend its recommended evacuation zone to 50 miles), they're not saying anything. No doubt out of deference to Japan.

But if there were good news, we'd certainly be hearing it.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

With fear now bordering on panic, it might be a good time to step back and take a deep breath (respirators, everyone), and remember that exposure to radiation, while never a good thing, isn't necessarily instant death either.

We're all exposed to low levels of radiation just by virtue of living on planet earth, and how dangerous radiation is depends on what kind it is, how energetic it is, where it hits us, and how long we're exposed to it. Someone working on the exposed core of one of the Fukushima reactors would probably be exposed to enough intense radiation in a few minutes to suffer acute radiological poisoning and be dead in a matter of hours, fried like a piece of bacon. (Actually, ARP presents as intense sunburn, gamma rays having a similar effect to untra high-energy UV)

People farther away--and you don't have to go far--don't have to worry about ARP. For people in Tokyo, the danger comes from the fallout of the radioactive material the reactors spew into the air. It's going to come down somewhere and be washed into the water or taken up by plants or blown around with the dust. The biggest danger is from ingestion, mainly by inhalation.

No one's going to die clutching their throats in Tokyo or anywhere else beyond the reactor buildings. But what'll happen is that in 3, 5, 10 years, there'll be a big spike in the number of new cancers, especially cancers in children, and a lot of them will die. The cloud of radioactivity might blow around the world as did the one from Chernobyl, raining some cancers down here, some cancers down there. But no one will be able to prove that their individual cancer was caused by Fukushima, and so how do you award compensation?

Also, depending on what sort of stuff spews out of the reactors and how it falls, the ground where it falls will be contaminated with radioactivity for a long, long, long time. Plutonium 244 is probably the worst. It has a half-life of 80.8 million years.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I spent over twenty years as a Nuclear Biological and Chemical specialist with the Army and I can tell you that enough radiation 150 + rads will kill you. Radiation is accumulative. That aside people who know have never considered nuclear energy to be a viable option simply because we have no way of handling the waste it creates. Right now we store it in trenches and that is not a good thing. The Columbian River in Washington State has been deemed the most radioactive river on earth thanks to nuclear waste.

I am thoroughly convinced that we humans will not be satisfied until we have made this planet completely uninhabitable and all for a dollar. Just my thoughts. No matter how the prevailing winds go I live in Kansas too far inland to be affected.

Back when I was in the biz (he drawls), we were working on this waste disposal process called waste vitrification or something like that. The radioactive waste was diluted with sand and borax and heated till it fused to form a glass which was similar to Pyrex in its inertness to leaching and chemical attack. The idea was that the vitrified waste would then be tossed into a salt mine or some other super-stable geological formation.

I don't know whatever happened to this technique or whether it ever proved economically feasible, but I always thought it was pretty slick.

It turns out that up until the '50's and Cold War paranoia, Uranium was used to color glass and as a ceramic glaze. Because it fluoresces in UV light and there's enough UV in sunlight to make it glow a soft, mystical green, it was especially popular for absinthe bottles.

​

You can still find uranium glass in antique markets. It has some radioactivity, but I suppose the absinthe drove you mad before you ever got a chance to get cancer. Plutonium acts similarly, but all the isotopes of Pu are bad customers.

 

[Stella_Omega]

I can't find it, but i remember an article about people who have moved back into the Chernobyl area. They said; "Yeah, we might die younger, but we're peasants-- we've always died younger."

I'm not clutching my throat in panic, but I feel very sad.

This is especially horrible when you consider that the Japanese religion is Shinto-- the island itself is a god to them. They've wounded their god.

 

[stephen55]

Back when I was in the biz (he drawls), we were working on this waste disposal process called waste vitrification or something like that. The radioactive waste was diluted with sand and borax and heated till it fused to form a glass which was similar to Pyrex in its inertness to leaching and chemical attack. The idea was that the vitrified waste would then be tossed into a salt mine or some other super-stable geological formation.

I don't know whatever happened to this technique or whether it ever proved economically feasible, but I always thought it was pretty slick.

Economically feasible or not, I'm sure there are more than a few in Japan who now wish it been used at the nuke plants.

 

[3113]

With fear now bordering on panic, it might be a good time to step back and take a deep breath (respirators, everyone), and remember that exposure to radiation, while never a good thing, isn't necessarily instant death either.

....No one's going to die clutching their throats in Tokyo or anywhere else beyond the reactor buildings.

[Raises hand] So what superpowers can we expect to get?

 

[Stella_Omega]

I don't know if this has been shared-- animated Japan Quake map
It starts slow. Then-- it isn't slow any more.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

[Raises hand] So what superpowers can we expect to get?

This is horrible thing to say but someone's got to do it, because I know we'll all thinking it:

Where Is Godzilla??

I mean, this is Japan, the nation that developed an entire art form to express its obsessive fascination with wet dreams of technological auto-immolation.

And so now, in this hour of his apotheosis, where is its greatest symbol? Where is that poodle-faced lizard rising from the deeps? Where are the hordes of panicked salary men and stampeding housewives in ugly overcoats and oversized handbags? Where are those obnoxious too-cute children in short-shorts calling down Johnny Socko and his Giant Robot on their wrist radios to save the day?

Everyone had always thought that the Godzilla/Gammara/Rodan/Mothra/et.al. mythos was a reaction formation to the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombings. But now you really have to wonder whether the Japanese fascination with destructive monsters isn't some sort of modern deification of their own geological fears.

 

[sr71plt]

This is horrible thing to say but someone's got to do it, because I know we'll all thinking it:

Where Is Godzilla??

Someone else did say it. There was a whole thread on this posted right after the tsunami hit.

 

[3113]

This is horrible thing to say but someone's got to do it, because I know we'll all thinking it:

Where Is Godzilla??

Hey, ya gotta have some kind of life raft to stay afloat on all this news. Black humor works for me.

Everyone had always thought that the Godzilla/Gammara/Rodan/Mothra/et.al. mythos was a reaction formation to the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombings. But now you really have to wonder whether the Japanese fascination with destructive monsters isn't some sort of modern deification of their own geological fears.

I'm in agreement, though it is interesting to note that the Japanese monster of recent times has been the ghost in the machine, like in "The Ring."