"Why does nobody see fit at these points to mention that smoke from coal power plants- even cleaner ones- kills by the thousands?"

Good point, TGM. But it is still a PR disaster for the nuclear industry.

The journalist have turned the whole situation into a 3 ring circus. Quake, Tsunami, now Meltdown. They're having a field day at everyones expense.

While it's nice to see you again, TGM, I don't quite get the objection...

I was agreeing with Jack_Klein...so yes, perhaps a bit redundant, but what's the harm, really? It's not like I was antagonizing anyone.

And as I never claimed to be a nuclear physicist--in fact, I think I've made it pretty clear on these forums that my scientific knowledge, outside a bit more for biology and mediicne, extents to bullshit-science fiction knowledge, that is, no knowledge--I don't see the objection there, I'm not pretending to be something I'm not...

And I've been watching CNN--as I state right there in the titular post--where they have Anderson Cooper, but I was referencing their nuclear/physics specialist, wahtever his name is, I couldn't be troubled to learn his name as I didn't realize there'd be a quiz afterward.

So since I haven't been antagonizing anyone, pretending to know more than I do, and freely admit the source from whence I'm getting all my information, true or false--what's the problem, exactly? (I mean, not to throw stones or anything, but how is it I post on topic with some captials and that gets your attention but mapleleaf hijacks thread adfter thread and generally degenerates every conversation and that doesn't warrant your shaking the proverbial finger?)

Oh for sure spyman, but in all seriousness I agree with TGM. It's certainly not the end of the world. And a PR disaster doesn't necessarily spell the end of the road for an industry. Let's face it last year's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico did nothing to slow down or hurt the oil industry in any way shape or form.

As for the coal power plants--again, didn't know that, I don't pretend to know these things firsthand or through expertise, hence my citing sources (and hoping they're credible; they may or may not be on the ball, but that's the best I can do.)

obiwan: The coal plants also release radiation in the form of uranium and thorium that's in the coal. You get more radiation from being down wind from a coal plant than a reactor.

Huh...never would've guessed coal plants could be more potentially deadly than nuclear plants...well, there we are, then--the more you know...

And KNOWING is half the battle! ;)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

There is a problem with the meltdown, but its probably not nearly as bad as the press is making it out to be. The moment the earthquake hit, these reactors shut down. As it was mentioned before, the heat that needs dissipating is just from the reaction slowly dying out. and its not like they didn't have enough safety precautions. I mean, three backup systems failed! You can't blame them for not trying. And just curious, but hypothetically if it did meltdown and nuclear radiation did go into the atmosphere, wouldn't the bulk of it just fall into the Pacific Ocean in small quantities?

And no, I'm no nuclear physicist but I agree with Jack Klein, there's no huge worry at this point. Better to focus on the tsunami damage to other areas

I wonder...goldginger's not a nucelar physicist...I'm not...I'll assume TGM and spyman aren't...

ARE THERE any nuclear physicists in the house? :p

I've read things about thorium reactors, but I'm not familiar with them like I am uranium fission reactors. You have to realize that because of Three Mile Island, the amount of research and funding for reactor design hasn't exactly been... plentiful. There are a lot of interesting ideas that simply haven't been explored. But what I know about breeder reactors and thorium utilizing reactors is limited to effectively what you can read on the internet.

To be clear, I'm not a full nuclear physicist. I'm merely a Navy man who went through Nuclear Power School. Its an impressive school, but its not a full degree. As I explained to a friend of mine with a physics degree... my knowledge of physics is extremely narrow, but deep in the areas I needed to know about.

warspite: Venting the reactor would make the steam bubble worse. The reactor coolant is pressurized so it remains a liquid at a higher temperature.... all venting the steam would do is lower the pressure, thus making more water flash to steam, thus negating the entire purpose of the operation. The key thing here is cooling. And its a fun operation, because with insufficient cooling, you can get swelling of the fuel elements, blistering, and even fuel element failure (which is where, as they say, things get fun). Once that happens, you now have a coolant channel whose fluid flow isn't exactly optimal. That is why they're willing to dump seawater into the reactor to cool it.

Klein: Ops! Did not think about the pressure drop causing a steam flash.

obiwan, I'm saying that your information source is strongly biased towards over-exaggerating risk, and even if the facts they give are valid, the interpretation they imply in the reporting will be excessively fearmongering. As a layperson it is very easy to get the impression that we have a "second Chernobyl" when in fact (last I heard) we were nowhere near there. (It was a level 4 event a couple of days ago, the Windscale fire was level 5, and Chernobyl was level 7)

Obiwan, I am a nuclear engineer.

I'll try to share some of the knowledge here, briefly (at work now...)

Inside a nuclear reactor there is a lot of heat that comes from nuclear fission. There is a concept of critical mass, "A critical mass is the smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction." (Wikipedia, great for copy and paste).

Anyway, nobody really knows what's going to happen. For example, PWR reactors that Jack_Klein mentioned control the critical mass by insertion of graphite rods and water between the fission material rods (fuel rods).

It is possible that due to various processes in the damaged reactor(s) a criticality will be reached, followed by a nuclear explosion, breaking all hell lose because all the radioactive material that is now contained inside the reactor will be spread all over Japan and more.

However, I don't think it will happen - although it is a possibility. The problem now is that even if a reactor is shut down, it still generates heat - quite a lot of it. Cooling systems are in place to cool the reactor, but obviously the 9.0 (it was changed from 8.9 to 9.0) earthquake followed by a tsunami obviously fucked up the cooling systems and the backups. This heat can generate a lot of pressure, and the reactor might explode due to the build-up pressure - spreading a lot of radioactive materials. This is exactly what happened in Chernobyl - the reactor exploded because of the pressure - it wasn't a nuclear explosion.

Furthermore, the rods that were burn out (it doesn't mean there isn't any fuel in them) should be placed in a storage. If you put too many of these together, there is a risk of reaching criticality, so from what I understand, the Japanese put a lot of these together and flooded them with water or some other fluid, to prevent them from reaching criticality, and the container was damaged... So this might be a problem as well.

Anyway, what makes me wonder is the security precautions. Chernobyl happened because of stupid people and because the graphite rods could not be inserted into reactor if diesel generator failed. Since then, the precautions were changed so you don't need electricity to insert the rods - the rods *fall* into reactor. I would think that something along these lines would be thought of for the cooling systems. On the other hand, after all it was a 9.0 earthquake followed by tsunami...

New designs work better, like the pebble bed reactor that was mentioned before... But you can't just replace one nuclear reactor with another, there are a lot of economical and engineering issues involved.

From my understanding, a nuclear detonation was impossible on the cores I worked on due to poison loading.... (and we were enriched a hell of a lot higher than civilian cores). Again, my experience is limited to military reactors, so I'll defer to Bask, but I reason that if a highly enriched (95%+) core can't explode in a nuclear detonation, it would follow that a civilian plan enriched 5-10% wouldn't either.

Bask, if you've ever had a chance to read the whole IAEA report on Chernobyl... it'd make your asshole pucker that they'd build something that fucking dangerous. Positive void coefficient, positive temperature coefficient.... scary stuff.

I did read it, even had to lecture about it once to the class...

Combine all of this with the experiment they were doing during it, and how they deliberately removed all the safety measures... Japan is a different story alltogether.

Glad to see so many can see through a lot of the sensationalism in the media. I think it's sad that anything "nuclear" takes the headlines when it's inconceivable that what's happening at Fukushima could ever be a blip on the radar compared to the death and destruction from the tsunami itself

Meanwhile my grandfather was handicapped after a coal mine accident for 60+% of his life along with many of his friends, along with countless others who got worse, and had to scoop **** out of his *** for the remainder of his life while being careful not to get infected, yet who cares because radiation wasn't involved?

I understand it, but I really wish people (in general) were better educated and less knee-jerk about it

P.S. I've just received a nice PDF file regarding the incident, compiled by Prof. Alex Galperin from Ben Gurion University in Israel. It is not a newspaper level read, but it is not too hard to understand.

I've uploaded it to my website:
http://elibaskin.com/sites/elibaskin.com/files/FUKUSHIMA%20NUCLEAR%20POWER%20PLANT-1.pdf

Have fun...

That pretty much confirms what I thought. If the Japanese atomic energy regulations are anything as anal retentive as the US, the only radioactivity that they need to worry about for the general population is short lived stuff from the intentional release. Take your iodine pills, and there isn't much to worry about.

Not to say they don't have their work cut out, but if the containment is holding (and if they've had fuel element failure, you'd bloody well know if containment failed... that can be some nasty crap), its just a matter of how much its going to cost monetarily.

FACTS:http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/

i admit i haven't read them... but i think it may be really good.

@Jack - yes, yes indeed.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/14/fukushiima_analysis/

if you like biased reporting, here's is the best i could find...

i especially like the bit about asteroids...

Ghost +10000.

I have a friend over there right now who's a nuclear engineering major. The media is blowing this way out of proportion. People who have no idea what scientific words like "meltdown" technically mean are using that word, even though they, as well as the vast majority of the public, only know the scary connotations associated with it. It's the same thing as when creationists say "Evolution is only a theory." While theory means something close to "idea" in every day English, in science, it means that there's damn good evidence for it.

I'm surprised everyone else is surprised the media is blowing it out of proportion...
Get in the minds of a media mogul. More viewers == more profits == bigger bonus == buying your 3rd private jet, right?
Well, we have a NUCLEAR issue! The world knows that NUCLEAR is a horribly dangerous element that could END THE WORLD!!!
So, let's bring up recent nuclear disasters... Chernobyl... three mile island... hey, a-bombs work, since we are in the same country....
Ok, let's talk about radiation poisoning... how dangerous it is.... hey, can we get some of our high profile people down there... yeah, and find some physicist quacks that think this will end the world... I don't care if they teach junior or community college... slap 'expert' and 'PhD' on the screen, and people won't look it up.... if that doesn't work, do a long interview and we'll just cut and paste what we need to make it sound sensational!!

And everyone is worried and glued to their sets, and the media moguls get a few more billion in bonus again this year.

So... while I don't have near the physics background as Bask and Jack, I do have quite a bit of engineering and business knowledge to show you the corruption of media.

Actually, I was hoping the internet would be the 'grounding force' to compete with the media sensationalism, but the media has such a grip on the internet as well that it isn't nearly an anchor as I'd hope it'd be...

Oh, and obiwan, I'm not picking on you or anything... you can't learn if you don't ask, so I'm glad you asked :)

I just get frustrated with the media and go off when I start talking about it ;)

I'm not at all surprised by the media, I'm just disgusted by it.

This isn't really a big deal. Something to be concerned about, sure, but they've got the situation well under hand.

Melt down is bad enough but what is hardly ever mentioned are the hazards associated with U mining, Americans need not go so far as Japan to be concerned about this. A good example is the Church Rock 'incident' on the Navajo lands -
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-navajo21nov21,0,2271711.story

Here is the one good paper published on the subject

The Sequoyah Corporation Fuels Release and the Church Rock Spill: Unpublicized Nuclear Releases in American Indian Communities
Doug Brugge, PhD, MS, Jamie L. deLemos, MS and Cat Bui, BS

I find it ironic that many hundreds of papers have been published on the Three Mile Island accident, which occurred in the same year, but yet more radiation was released at Church Rock. What dies this say about the scientific method?

I'm not going to read the entire discussion because I'm supposed to be doing work now.
I'm a master's student in nuclear engineering and, from everything I have gathered, the effect of the nuclear disaster in Japan is largely economic.
The is likely NO UNHEALTHY DOSE TO THE PUBLIC. However, I am concerned that some of the nuclear energy workers may have been exposed. In the scope of things, the plants should be championed as engineering marvels for behaving the way they did. The real tragedy is what is happening in the rest of Japan, not the power plant.

Here is one of the better sites I have found for information:
www.bravenewclimate.com

The TMI accident was really shitty economically but not environmentally or from a safety perspective.

Tennessee Coal ash disaster released a lot of radioactivity (I believe that it was the largest accidental release of radioactivity in the states).

Technical information is hard to obtain but once it's confused through Japanese translators and main stream medias misunderstandings it's pretty much useless so take most of what you read with a grain of salt.