The Fukushima Nuclear Reactor Accident: What Happened and What Does It Mean?
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- Опубліковано 1 тра 2024
- Speaker: Robert Budnitz, LBNL
The talk will describe (technically, but in laymen's terms) what happened at the Fukushima reactors during and after the disastrous March 11 earthquake and tsunami, what the radioactive releases have been and what they mean, and what the path forward seems to be at the site. The potential implications that these events might have upon the future of nuclear power in general will also be discussed.
He forgot to mention, or maybe I missed it
The workers. Having zero power , resorted to pull their batteries out of theyr cars
And then somehow hooked them up inside control rooms to be able to at least take some readings from some systems.
If anyone knows more detail I’d love to hear it.
I’ve seen footage of them with their car batteries. Wiring into panels in the control room.
He mentioned that in a different video he did on this accident, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. That video is on UA-cam, I saw it a while ago.
As a controls technician. It’s ass backwards to have to power a safety on. We set them up so that when power fails the safety activates in this case powered by steam. In others by springs or other systems. So that if no power is on the system it will open the steam valve to run the steam powered pump and it will run that way till power is restored or there is not enough heat to run the safety pump. Eather way you are good.
Your not good..
Springs used to be life giving natural things of beauty and health
@@annychest718 He's talking about mechanical springs.
I was wondering why the water cycle couldn't be run by the steam produced from the core as long as it's still hot, but it sounds like you actually can. When was that first implemented in reactors? As he said, these were built in the 70s.
@@volbla that´s, I think, what the test in Chernobyl was about: To demonstrate that the generators could be started by the residual energy
'not trivial, but... you know... not as huge as it might be'
so, you're meaning to say... not great... not terrible?
Weren't we told that if a reactor ever melted down it would end life as we know it? Well here we have three melt downs and it hasn't destroyed the world. I think someone has been lying to us.
@@seanmckinnon4612 never listen to drama queens.
@@seanmckinnon4612 /whoosh
A lot of people are criticising the Japanese for where they built the power station, etc. But most don't realise that there is a far worse and far more powerful radiation contamination threat in the Pacific, After the Americans did their nuclear testing on the Enewetak Atoll between 1946 and 1958, The Americans had around 73,000 cubic metres or 95,000 cubic yards of highly radioactive material (including Plutonium 239) to dispose of.
So they buried it in a bomb crater on a small coral Island called Runit Island, then they capped it off with a concrete dome.
This dome is now breaking up, contamination levels are increasing and the Americans were supposed to come up with a plan to decontaminate the area by 2020, they have done nothing!
Is there no type of generator attached to the pumps that can be engaged to charge the DC batteries? If no, why?
Thank you for the even non-political discussion. All forms of power need to be pursued, from solar to wind to geo-thermal to natural gas to nuclear. We do not want to lose our knowledge and technical ability in this field (like happened to NASA). We also need to start shutting down those old reactors. They will not last forever. At some point (as I learned in IT hardware management) the cost of new is less than the cost of maintaining old equipment.
There is plenty of agreement I think between pro and anti nuclear proponents on decommissioning older units. The Pro nuclear power side however wants to replace older units with new gen3+ designs that are on several orders of magnitude safer just by design. To be clear, nuclear plants do not exist in a vacuum, and our current fleet of reactors in the US have all been extensively retrofitted with new safety systems to maintain their nrc certifications. It’s frustrating because all the evidence shows that nuclear power is by far the safest and most environmentally friendly way to generate power and there are just some people that don’t care.
@@Penryn87 those people are not concerned about energy. That's why they just don't care. They are pushing a political agenda. They hide behind the environment -- green on the outside red on the inside.
No they dont need to explore more energy. we overpopulate like a virus at some point the planet will shake us off theres a limit at wich you can destroy a host before it does and we push that limit everytime the ozone opens in Antarctica if that shit dont close out oxygen vents into space and we die.
Until we can live ala startrek in a socialist unified world we dont need any more energy ie more weapons or ways to kill each other.
If life exists it will never come to OUR(SOCIALIST) world because we kill each other over dirt.
Wanna be star trek wanna be happy start working g towards a common goal we can all celebrate not be greedy.
Everyone hates russia but they gave US the space race WE WON see where I'm going.
America get ur head out of your ass stop being so greedy. WE want to win? Then let US stop being douches to each other.
@@Penryn87 so windscale Fukushima and Chernobyl were just blips ha ha you pro nuclear folk sure are bat shit crazy, you remind me of these creepy looking scientists who say as long as we are having such fun doing our cern and haarp experiments we don’t really care about the planet , duh ya know that globe which will support your future children’s children, get a grip
@@melanieladbrooke1221 Do you always enjoy making yourself look like a fool on the internet? The statistics clearly show nuclear is the safest form of electricity we have. Get a grip
I would like to understand the purpose of the torus better. Is it simply a backup condenser for an emergency situation like this or does it have a more everyday purpose?
It’s the heat sink for the green pump. The limitation is that this final tier of defense is a closed system. As it operates, the water gets warmer so it eventually runs out of capacity to take any more heat from the core.
This guy is a great guy. He’s humble.
He’s not arrogant about any of this.
He believes in this tech. So do I.
He makes me wish I had followed my dream.
I wanted to be a nuclear engineer.
But I assumed that few would be built.
And I’m right.
As far as I’m concerned nuclear is the perfect energy source.
We could be so much more productive if we would build these new designs all over the place. And bring the cost down big time. And. Use thorium Use up all the w radioactive waste sitting there waiting for disaster.
I wouldnt say its the perfect energy source, because even if the chance of disasters in very low the size of a disaster might be enourmous. But I also think its not the right call to shut down nuklear energy just now. Shut down coal plants now and nuklear power as soon as we can provide all demand with renewable sources (or nuclear fusion technology once (or rather if) it becomes avaliable).
@@StAngerNo1 But without nuclear we will have massive rolling blackouts when fossil fuels are phased out.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk My comment was two years ago xD. Not necessarily. We need multiple different renewable sources and large energy storages. First of all you could store biogas in large tanks to only use them to generate electricity when wind and solar output is low. The problem is of course, that the biogas infrastructure is very decentralised because every farmer or at least village has their own facility. If there is the possibility of pumped storage power plant like in Norway or the Alps, this is a good way to store it, but you can also use the electricity during overproduction to create hydrogen or methanol and store that in large tanks until there is demand.
It will of course require a large and heavily interconnected infrastructure, because you need to be able to react on different production amounts spontaneously, but it is definitely doable. It would be good if we had nuclear power to supplement that until the system is there instead of fossil fuels. And even if it was not possible to go 100% renewable, it would definitely be possible to go like 95% renewable and supplement with a tiny amount of nuclear.
And you need to keep in mind that our nuclear ressources are not infinite. If I remember correctly our remaining nuclear fuels would last for 170 years, if all electricity was produced nuclear and the consumption stayed the same.
@@StAngerNo1 All of the storage methods you mentioned have no viable utility scale plants built or under construction because those technologies are just not up to the task. Usually people praise battery storage, but it's the same story there. Until we have a quantum leap in energy storage technological development, the future is still grim for renewables.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk They are up to the task. They can be scaled well. Of course they all do have problems. Hydrogen is hard to store, because it diffuses easily, methanol has a lower energy efficiency, biogas is decentral and would need a lot of piping to central storage sites or each of the small sites would need a large tank itself, and pump storage needs a mountainous landscape. Biogas is basically the same as natural gas so we know it can easily be used, if we store it rather than immediately use it, I know of hydrogen and methanol storage plants in northern germany where they store wind energy and pump storage is already in use in norway and the alps.
Of course we don't have the infrastructure and it will be very expensive to install it, but we have the technology required and those technologies are up to the task (minus the problems I mentioned).
I'm pretty sure I read somewhere the number of deaths at Fukushima was only one and he died years later. - from Google - "Nobody died as a direct result of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. However, in 2018 one worker in charge of measuring radiation at the plant died of lung cancer caused by radiation exposure. In addition, there have been more than 2,000 disaster-related deaths."
Note, that disaster-related in this aspect means people who died in the panic evacuation and the lack of care-giving services given to elders.
Interesting talk even 5 years later.
Still interesting. Dr. Budnitz is a very good teacher.
Damn, time flew! I thought this happened 5 years ago.
25:00 Could you design a battery power pump that would be capable of cooling the reactor from full operation to safe temperature in emergencies? A routine check of the batteries to ensure charge.
Energy density. Those back up generators will have thousands of gallons of diesel on tap with it being easily refilled. To get that kind of energy from batteries would require a huge bank many times larger than the fuel tanks and the generators, not to mention recharging in use (which would require generators itself) plus the cost over diesel generators and hopefully it's clear. If you use batteries you have to convert DC to AC where generators produce AC naturally as well
You're on the right track but@@ATSaale lays out the challenges with this idea. Current designs include passive cooling systems that don't need the pumps in a disaster situation. For a few days you can get by without the pumps, and hopefully the techs and engineers can get them back online. A few of these are operating in China, and the first set in the us are supposed to start up in 2024 I think.
Yeah I recall that incident. I wuz working in Japan and didn't touch sushi nor sashimi during the remainder of my stay, just to be safe.
The inventor of the light water reactor Alvin Weinberg, also invented a better reactor, a molten salt reactor that will not have the inherent issue with the use of water at 2000 psi, and are inherenly safe from a runaway condition.
The issue with molten salt is that crystals are created into the pipes. If we went ahead with that design 50 years ago by now they would work well. But restarting using that design today means a lot of trial and error to go trough. And nobody can afford that cost with today's costs of clean up a mess. Already nuclear power can barely compete economically with gas electric plants as fracking releases lots of gas besides oil, making gas very cheap. Also the cost of setting up, the time, the insurance, the operation costs for a gas powered station is sooo much lower. And gas is much more flexible. So nobody is going to risk billions for a reactor that might be better in the long run but very dangerous in the short run. Probably they won't be able to get insurance for it, nor finance. Just today nobody is doing nuclear anymore in the west.
@@MrRedsjack Gas is cheaper if you consider global warming to be acceptable.
Don't compare cost of gas to current nuclear tech. It is outside the scope of my comments.
The cost of molten salt reactors have been estimated to be much lower than coal plants by very recent commercial ventures in the field. A small leak in a molten salt plant would likely be self sealing. Heaters are needed on piping to start the flow at startup.
Both fast and slow spectrum molten salt reactors have merit. I lean towards fast spectrum as moderators are not needed and nuclear waste can be used as fuel.
The exorbitant cost of LWR stem from containing insane pressures, and solubility in water of leaking substances.
No there won't be "crystals" in the molten salt reactor as the word molten implies. These salts have a viscosity close to that of water at their operating temps.
I honestly expect molten salt to be more economical to build than conventional nuclear plant. With molten salt, you don't need to build a huge containment vessel that has to withstand the impact of an aircraft AND a steam explosion event. You still need a containment vessel but this can build a strong structure outside the containment vessel to provide protection from intrusion from the outside.
It is good but it's not economical for the government. That's why they still not implement ing it
@@ices_fires The LWR produces plutonium, and much money is being made refuelling old reactors, and people are afraid of the magical ills of anything nuclear. MSR cost less money, not more.
Actually, Fukushima Daiini (#2) DID lose site power, but they moved Heaven & Earth & RESTORED site power with cables that they ran on the ground. Their manager is in charge of the decommissioning of Fukushima Daiichi (#1).
My biggest questions are,
1 id they needed power to run the pumps why didnt they use the power station they were in?
2 why didnt they wire the generators from the safe building to the station to run at least gauges and controlls?
Working in the aviation safety business, I feel that the last answer really summarizes what safety should and, fortunately, is in most of the safety critical processes around the world. And that is based on sharing and disseminating information around and across the communities. It is paramount that no political or cultural barrier exist such that they prevent operators and designers from sharing their own mistakes and mishaps, so that other may learn from them and improve their own design and procedures. Both Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown how cultural aspects of a society can affect the ability to prevent or correct undesirable situations.
This is something the medical field has put significant efforts into. M&M conferences (morbidity and mortality) are meetings where doctors frankly discuss their mistakes and how to rectify them in the future. Extremely important to their utility is the fact that, by law, the proceedings of such conferences are not admissible in court. Honest discussion of your mistakes in that context will not come back to bite you in the form of a malpractice suit, which allows people to actually learn from mistakes instead of just hiding them.
@@Frommerman except for the jab
So at 34:55 it was... "not good, not terrible"?
Generators up high, double redundant power lines with auto transfer switches, the cost would have been nothing.
I still can't believe someone thought it was a good idea to put emergency generators in the basement that close to the ocean.. Duhhh.. WTF did they think was gonna happen.
I have never heard if they had at least thought to waterproof the rooms with doors and concrete structures. I can see them being below grade as being good as they can be hardened and they won't get washed away, but this would require a lot of thought and effort to do.
Why does it matter where the generators were when the switching gear which attaches the diesel generators to the turbine was damaged and power couldn't be distributed?
So what do you want put it on the air? Duhh. If you put it above ground it will still caught by tsunami or an earthquake.
It is my understanding that there were allot of people yelling about the generators needed to be protected from tsunami. Like there was no excuse except that we are planning to do it.
Why can't u use the decay heat to run the turbines to get power for the pumps? I don't get why u need grid power... ? I mean they produce power.. as long as heat is produced shouldn't u be able to produce power? I mean as long as it isn't the turbines that have stopped working.. and if the turbines r too big for them to use just the decay heat couldn't u have a smaller backup turbine/generator just big enough to run the pumps?
GE knew that these reactors with the rods going through the bottom of the containment vessel would not stand up to a reactor runaway back in the 70's and there are about 26 reactors of this design running in the USA at this time, as far as the fukushima plant who was STUPID enough to put the emergency generators that low and close to the sea when they had a mountain right behind the plant that the emergency generators could have been put up on and maybe they would have not have had the melt down
Not stupid, greedy.
How would generators on a hill done any better when all the switchgear was destroyed?
Rooftop would have been better
@Oliver Mayo correct.. If the core is already damaged insertion from any direction will fail.
@Oliver Mayo now figure put how to solve the corrosive nature of molten salt and we're good to go
I think he's jerking us off. The man sounds very nervous. A sign of a liar. Guilty man.
Can someone tell me roughly how much power is needed to run the pumps on one of these reactors? I’m assuming that a few hundred KW would be enough but I don’t have a clue. I don’t mean to armchair quarterback here but If I’m right I don’t understand how in 3 days they couldn’t have flown in a few small 200 kw diesel gensets and some electrical cable with a helicopter? I’m just curious as these are likely just 3 phase motors and the people working there could have jury rigged something together in a couple hours to get them running unless these pumps had huge motors that ran at medium voltage and took megawatts of power to run. In that case you would think they could have just paralleled a bunch of smaller gensets together and had a transformer flown in to get medium voltage? I am not criticizing the workers or the Japanese government by any means here but I just don’t understand how it wasn’t possible to get some gensets and cable on site in a day or two regardless of the damage to the roads in the area for something as critical as a nuclear power plant. I have had much less critical sites back up and running in less than 24 hours after a hurricane flooded the on-site backup gensets.
Sounds like it would be a good blackout redundant system to use steam pressure from the cooling reactors to directly drive pumps to keep coolant flowing.
Did you even watch the video?
@Vihari Royal
Cooling towers or sea water, this is a prevent meltdown not for daily use
No one would have thought you could have a 9+ megathrust in Sumatra either, but it happened 6 years earlier...Seems to be a pattern here of risk management denial. So what's next, Cascadia? Cumbre Vieja?
@blob assimilate this is the dumbest fucking comment I've ever read
Well we wanted to put a nuke plant at Kaiseraugst, exactly the place where around 300 a earthquake extinct a whole roman town, called Augusta raurica, killing about 2/3 of the Population, as the later settlement in the lower castle was 1/3 of the original town. Imagine stones as big as 2m times 1.5 times 30 cm used for the Amphitheater where shaken to rumbles! Later roughly 1000 years later, around 1200, a new massive quake hit the nearby Basel so hard, that half of the church slipped with its underground into the Rhine river!
We closed AKW-Mühleberg as direct consequence of Fukushima, because it was built below a artificial concrete damm, if broken by quake, it would have been flooded by may be a 20-50 m wave.
The meltdown started due to destabilization of the core geometry by the earthquake, before the tsunami hit. This was absolutely the worst nuclear accident yet...
could these coastal nuclear plants be placed there on purpose to fail
Why didnt the US bring an aircraft carrier into the port? They have both the power and the connections to provide power to a small city.
If it takes an hour or two for it to melt down, couldn't they use gravity feed water from tanks to keep the reactor cool in an emergency?
Wouldn't it be nice if the last ditch steam driven pumps (the "green system" the speaker talks about) didn't rely on DC battery power and just by design were entirely mechanical and steam driven. Mechanical catastrophic core cooling system designed with extremely reliable mechanical valves and with at least double redundancy; normally forced closed (by electric power) mechanical valves activated based on temperature, pressure or manually by staff, making the redundant steam driven pumps force water through the core for as long as there is enough heat to make steam. Oh and if the water in the "taurus" containment vessel becomes too hot/pressurised, redundant and extremely reliable steam driven pumps kick in circulating ocean water for as long as there is enough heat in the core to make steam. Am i just too stupid to get why electric power in some form has to be present, because it sure seems like when all that's left is energy in the form of heat from decay, it might be good to design a safety system driven by heat from the decay and nothing else.
I think ocean water had to be approved by the government because it was so corrosive. They wasn't expecting a 50ft wave. They did an amazing job with what they had to work with
This is exactly one of the lessons learnt. Bear in mind that the reactors at Fukushima date back to the very ealiest designs ever. A lot has changed since the 1960s when those were imagined to be adequately safe.
They were actually doing a test like that when Chernobyl blew. It was supposed to be a test where they shut down all systems and use the steam in the system and then inertia of the turbines to restart everything. They failed. They had tried it 3 other times before on rbmk reactors before and also failed, partially melting a core.
Like @@ATSaale said it is theoretically possible to do this but in practice nobody's built a reactor with thermodynamic passive safety systems in it until recently. The Russian idea was clearly thought up after the fact. "Oh yeah SAFETY....hmmm well how about if we..."
what are the rads / hour near fuku..
what are the rads per hour in the ocean a kilometer from the plant ?
what number of cancers are reported from fukushima so far ?
No deadly radiation anywhere outside of the three containment buildings. No deaths, no cancers.
The exclusion zone was setup to evacuate residents and prevent health effects from the above commenters' supposed zero radiation.
A huge area around the NPP and fallout zones will remain off limits despite removing the topsoil.
Dosimeters still pickup high readings where rainfall concentrates runoff of fallout in low points.
Water continues to spread fallout from the plant under ground, despite freezing barriers. It's a massive mess that will take 40 plus years, if ever to reduce the transuranic contamination.
Eeek!
How could anybody have been so stupid as to put those emergency generators at the bottom of the reactor? I cheated to get thru high school physics and I immediately spotted this one? Was it "cost effectiveness"? Was it middle managers toadying up (the space shuttle Challenger problem)? Why have the guilty not done the right thing and committed seppuku?
ita dec 19th they have already manded up it only came almost 8yrs latter
So basically, don't build your reactors next to the sea when you live in an area that sees a lot of seismic activity and thus is under a huge tsunami risk...and don't put your emergency generators underground...AKA common sense.
Japanese dont watch the monster movies they make this is how we get godzilla.
This is not the only nuclear catastrophy though is it ?
Nuclear power is uncontrollable and very destructive..
No body knows how to shut them down..
No body knows what to do with the waste..
Too many have died.. it's not worth it.
@@annychest718 false information, nuclear power is controllable and thats why our governments use them in weapons and commercial use, we do know how to shut them down .
approximately 204 to 4000 people died to nuclear accidents in power stations. compared to the many thousands that die from fossil fuels and green house gases.
there were 4 major nuclear accidents and 96 minor ones that dont really get talked about that much and even then the death toll is quite small. your comment has a lot of bias in it and alot of it isnt true. based on what you said about no one knows how to shut down a reactor, if that was true then the death toll would be larger and every nuclear power station would have exploded during an emergency.
What is common?
@@annychest718 tell that one to sun,...
What frustrates me is that so-called "subject matter experts" weren't able to foresee a large quake and tsunami and authorized building this ON THE COAST.
Add to that, not enough redundant power systems other than diesel generators to generate operational power. No significant UPS, no flywheels, not enough steam powered generators to run in an emergency.
That’s an unfair statement
they wanted it on the coast because it was designed to dump into the ocean
@@Aaron-zu3xn Have you heard of these things called "pipelines"?
Ouch...his comment on 737s at about 1:00:25 DID NOT age well.......
Either he wasn't personally involved with Japan in the problem or he chose to not mention besides power being lost some backup valves designed to automatically open didn't function as intended due to high pressures not allowing them to open. Bad design or faulty equipment. Who knows who made the valves.
Or he specifically said he wouldn't go over every detail of the incident.
@@ATSaale As in the main problem of the valve designs failure was the pressure presented in an emergency which the valve was supposed to handle put the valve in a jammed condition unable to operate. A simple statement of the valve jammed due to pressures it should of been able to handle would of sufficed. No in depth explanation needed. Just putting the information out there in case anyone would like to understand the train wreck. A worker that was in a separate diesel generator building that automatically sealed shut after the earthquake broke the buildings doors open to escape leaving them open allowing the tsunami to flood the emergency power supply out of commission. It was a real train wreck of an event. I also don't think anyone is going to view storing fuel at the top of a building in an earthquake zone as a good idea anymore.
@31:40 he mentions relief valves that failed to function.
@@BitJam Yah those valves when tested couldn't function when under the pressures given from and emergency situation. For some reason they would jam when under higher than normal pressures. At least that's what the test result were. The smooth things over is saying it was an accident. The person working in the emergency generator room at the time of the quake that bypassed to emergency lockdown of the doors to get out and left the door open before the tsunami arrived so the place got flooded and they were left without power didn't help either. A perfect example of going to Hades in a hand basket. Terrible accident.
@@BitJam Yah that's a main failure point not allowing pumping coolants or pressure release getting the vessels to pop. End of story as I see it since the pollution from the explosion and following flushing with water was and is the problem. The aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami had a chance if those valves would have functioned. They were supposed to automatically function if over pressured, but they didn't even when testing new valves of the same model. It's a valve specifically designed for nuclear reactors in the place of function it had. Scary? You might say so.
Would it have been better if they didn't shut down the core so it could continue to generate enough steam to run the generator to keep electricity going?
Probably not. A shut down reactor only needs 7 percent of the cooling a functioning one needs. Also, even when shut down it produces a lot of energy for some time. The problem is that it still produces too much energy to harness safely when in crisis:
It requires a lot of water to transform that energy to electricity and it would provide so much electricity that it would fry on site electric systems. It's like trying to make a light bulb shine consistently on a fully blown windmill, that bulb is gonna pop no matter what
When the grid goes down, nuclear power plants do to. It's a fact of life, even solar and wind shut down when the grid goes down.
This is some good gouge, even though it's 4 years old. If you want to really understand what's important before this bores you, jump to 40:00, but then go back and watch the whole thing. Sorry, this is boring, but reality isn't as sensational as anti-nuclear scare porn.
***** I certainly agree that some people just want the public to be scared. Your theory that nuclear reactors being just hydrogen factories is CURRENTLY wrong, but someday may be a reality, just not quite the way you envision it. CURRENTLY nuclear reactors are just heat sources used to boil water into steam at high pressure to drive electric turbines. Although there are electrons produced when atoms fission, they are simply captured by other atoms very quickly and are not harvested. There is NOT any voltage, let alone millions of volts across reactors. Yes, inside a nuclear reactor water is broken down into hydrogen and oxygen gas, but it's not through electrolysis (separation of hydrogen and oxygen by an electric current), it's dissociation of the water molecules bombarded by gamma rays and neutrons the produces hydrogen and oxygen gas. Although hydrogen gas made 3 of the Fukushima confinement buildings explode in 2011, the hydrogen was produced as a chemical reaction between the steam in the uncovered reactor cores and the uncooled cladding which got above 2200 degrees. Hydrogen had nothing to do with the Chernobyl reactor exploding in 1986. It exploded because they did a stupid experiment and had a power excursion which caused massive amounts of heat which caused the coolant in the core to flash to steam generating a huge pressure transient & ignited the graphite moderator. While I have not PERSONALLY seen anyone get cancer because of radiation, I have no doubt that overexposure can increase the chance that someone might get cancer. A lot of the survivors of Nagasaki & Hiroshima got cancer, and many died decades after the bombs fell. You're right, no one can tell if radiation exposure was the cause of a particular case of cancer, but you can be darn sure there are millions of lawyers standing by to sue whoever they can get their hands on when someone who has been exposed comes down with ANY disease. Yes, as an operator we are drilled in nuclear and radiation safety, but we are trained to UNDERSTAND the SCIENCE, so the dangers are not exaggerated, or down-played either. We understand the small increases in our chances of getting cancer from all the exposure we get, and work to keep our exposure "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" (ALARA). I agree that the oceans are not dying at all, but I fully expect every single fish or marine mammal that dies to be blamed on Fukushima or some other MANMADE nuclear event.
Getting back to your "hydrogen generator" theory, there's actually a lot of research going into using nuclear reactors to do more than simply generate electricity, one of which is to generate very high temperatures to allow chemical engineers to crack organic compounds and strip away the hydrogen for use in hydrogen fuel cells while sequestering the carbon to make the global warming idiots happy, except many of them will still be unhappy because they hate nuclear. Nuclear-powered desalination plants can boil seawater and make huge amounts of freshwater in places like the Middle East.
@@todkarlson1142 the idiots are "true believers" green on the outside & red on the inside. Naval Reactors has a lot more man-years operating nuclear reactors and on submarines does a good job of making sure the non-occ workers have a basic understanding of nuclear safety.
I do prefer the two loop system the navy uses, but it's what I'm used to.
sooo 2020 now...
no one talks about it. what is happening now?
Nothing much to talk about in 2021 either. No one has died from Fukushima radiation and it will take decades to clean up. Will the same in 2022 also.
so.. in a world war these stations would basically become a nuclear time bomb.
maybe not bombs but due power outage and limited reserves the cores would melt and poisoning huge areas.
In most cases, they wouldn't. As stupid as it sounds, but modern reactors are indeed pretty safe if it wasn't for greed or negligence
A reactor can be completely shut down in less than a month, it's not that big of a concern unless nations are purposely bombing nuclear facilities hoping to cause meltdowns. Which if they were I think nuclear war would occur shortly after anyway so the reactors would be a drop in the bucket relatively speaking.
Remember kids, total war is a bad idea in the modern age.
There were three complete meltdowns and no one died from radiation.
Why steam turbine can be attached to a small generator to provide electricity for automatic systems. Seems logical.
@@tripplefives1402
Plus the plant seismometers SCRAMmed the reactors immediately after the earthquake. One of the reactors actually did have a coolant turbopump capable of running on the decay heat steam.
The ‘no shit Sherlock’ design oversights will cost Tepco untold billions of $ and do great harm to nuclear power’s credibility in Japan. This is a terribly tragic boondoggle of hubris, really a shame. Every nation must be honest about nuclear when deciding how to attain core energy.
Who was the idiot that approved placing critically needed Generators in the basement? The Designers of this plant demonstrating zero worst case situ’s in the event of an earthquake.
F de trabalho não tinha visto a mensagem do meu pai f de um dia que g a gente se fala né é assim que g e é assim mesmo que eu
Good storyteller...
Sorry, one more point: I love Japan (the world of the shining Prince Genji). I do not know the language. I translate "Fukushima" as "F*uck you island"
Its like the heart. It pumps blood but most heart disease is because the heart cant get enough blood.
CV para todos nós estamos indo embora agora vou fazer um pedido do evento da copa da minha casa do povo do Brasil
the official position lol
As a time of thumb, don't use water in the core of your nuclear reactor. It's an inherent weakness in the ultimate reliability of a nuclear plant. Seemingly, every nuclear accident has to do with a loss of cooling, leading to an uncontrolled increase in temperature, leading to water flashing to steam which blows things apart.
The problem is, then, what to replace water with. What's a good coolant AND moderator? For the meantime heavy water is the coolant /moderator of choice.
Your comment follows the same logic as "every human that died did breathe at some point, therefore breathing is deadly".
@@xaquko9718 When water evaporates, it expands 1600 times larger in volume to become steam. So, my comment follows the logic of physics. Or perhaps the logic of engineering. We have learned a lot about engineering over the years from engineering failures like that of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
@@ws6002 I know. I was talking about the part you say "don't use water in the core of your nuclear reactor". The thing is water is an integral part of a nuclear reactor.
@@xaquko9718 Molten salt reactors don't require water in the core. The advantage is that the molten salt will not change to vapor even if the the core overheats. The disadvantage is that this type of reactor has never been used in a commercial reactor. But there is reason to believe that this may soon change. In a molten salt reactor, the fuel is mixed with the moderator and if it exceeds a certain temperature, the reactor is designed to shut itself down without control rods, computer programs or emergency cooling water. But it is still unproven. Another type of reactor, the Terrapower TWR, is a pool type reactor surrounded by liquid sodium instead of water.
Como assim mesmo que é assim que g a tarde não vou conseguir fazer o dia todo dia que g o dia todo e o dia todo dia de trabalho não tem como fazer o dia que eu não t a transferência e o que eu não sei o
the commentator was full of it explaining theoretical issues: that is NOT what happened when rods were storred on top and tsunami push them down. erik
When can I resume eating canned tuna without fear of radiation? Thanks Fukushima
It means the oceans will forever be poisoned. Who puts backup generators in the basement in a building that's along the shoreline? No, not the smartest people...or so they claim. Guess they're not as smart as they think they are.
Lol, you can hear a phone ring in the backround at 17:11
Hold tight because someone sneezes at 53:08
Why in da NRA responcible for nuclear safety?
Wow I'm dumb. 😔
Foi o
total core meltdown
*wink*
What it means "is" we are all fucked so just come ut and say it!
No one died from Fukushima radiation.
Beyond stupid! They knew the water had to be going somewhere else, but didn’t think it was important enough to find out 😂😂😂 a 2nd year pipe fitters apprentice would figure it out. But the smartest engineers in Japan couldn’t figure it out 😂😂
Interesting talk. Until he starts comparing the tsunami's devastation to the nuclear disaster's saying that by comparison, the tsunami has been much more devastating. I'm glad someone in the audience challenged him on that.
Yeah. Tsunami, a natural occurrence completely out of our control destroys a lot yes. But after that, it's over.
Nuclear reactor meltdown leaves incredibly toxic material that is gonna stick around being toxic for years.
I think we have to admit that until we have no reliable way of INSTANTLY AND COMPLETELY STOPPING heat generation inside a reactor, we shouldn't even have created those power plant. No matter how much you try to plan for backup safety systems, there is always something that can go wrong. The reality is that putting it in water doesn't constitute controlling it.
A power plant requiring power both to function and to safely stop generating power. It's so ironic.
So the thing is indeed, the reactor generates about 6.5% of its rated power, even after you stop it, and you can't really prevent this without going with a radically different reactor design. So a 1 GW unit would still generate 65 MW of power. Why? Because fission produces isotopes with too many neutrons for their atomic weight. These fission products are usually highly radioactive, wanting to turn those excess neutrons into protons, and produce a lot of energy via beta decay. There's no way around producing this material when you use a fission reaction. So, in case of a reactor emergency, you have to provide this 65 MW of cooling when the reactor shuts down. This figure first decreases rapidly then more slowly over time as each fission product decays. So how much cooling is that in real terms? Well, if you used all that heat to boil water, you would be boiling away about 27.5 litres // 7.25 gallons per second (assuming a pretty bad scenario, 40C/105F water temperature; hot summer day). Now that decay heat reduces over time. In total, in order to keep a reactor core of this size from melting after it scrams for 10 days it would take about 1000 cubic metres of water*, or about 1/3 of an olympic swimming pool. And actually, people have done that: some new reactors have an emergency system that can dump water onto a core overheating from residual decay of fission products as a last resort to prevent a meltdown. Essentially it boils down to having a large tank of water that sits above the reactor core, so you can use gravity and have this system work even when there's no power available.
*The exact figure also depends on how long the reactor has been operating, how enriched your fuel was, and how often the fuel is replaced. I used conservative estimates. You also don't want to boil the water away, rather heat it to at most 100C, because you want to store the water as it becomes radioactive by being inside the reactor.
The only type of nuclear reactor which would have the characteristics you desire would be one where the fission products can be separated out of the fuel while it's running. No reactors of this type are currently in commercial operation, although some experimental units have been built (ex. molten salt type reactors).
However, even in that type of reactor, after separating out the fission products, they're still radioactive. So, you would still need to have that 65 MW of cooling capacity, or you risk the fission products essentially cooking themselves through their own radiation and causing a release of highly radioactive hazardous waste (though without containing any actinides, it will be less toxic than the spill at Chernobyl or Fukushima).
Tsunami killed over 15,000, radiation killed zero.
Japan wanted to create Godzilla.
Godzirra!
In the US a number of nuclear power plants are built on fault lines. In the future he and people like him will come and tell us how safe these power plants were, before the accident.
I had a comment but, I'LL TALK ABOUT THAT IN A MINUTE.
giant engineering clusterf*ck...should have not located these plants right on the ocean shores.
Its actually for preventing the meltdown, because you have unlimited supply cold water
Also the reactors took the hit of water pretty well, but not enough thought was put into it to deal with the backup systems and what would happen with a huge wave.
That guy who asked the first question was so damned rude. But that happens with "true believers" pushing an agenda.
Let me ask my question without correcting me like my parents did, even though I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
Its great how after all accidents, no matter if TMI, Chernobyl or Fukushima all other reactors are "made strong" by "oh this and that was bad, but this wont happen again"
By this method we now have how many molten cores worldwide? 5?
At least when something like that happens in Japan - a high develeoped, high technology country - should make you think that its quite difficult to say "we are safe" when using such complex technology
One person died form cancer, 0.1% increased risk for cancer, the rest haven't got cancer. Long island was similarly so actually has no increase in cancer in surrounding area. Despite all these failures its still safer then even wind and solar panels. Chernobyl had alot radiation illness but not much cancer only 100 deaths. Further all these disasters where using old designs,
@@swampdonkey1567 Actually no one died of cancer due to Fukushima radiation, that was a fake news story I debunked many years ago. Wouldn't have even been possible since the highest exposure anyone on the planet got was 670mSv. American Nuclear Society (March 2012). "Appendix B" (PDF). In Klein, Dale; Corradini, Michael (eds.). Fukushima Daiichi: ANS Committee Report.
I think I'll believe Professor Kevin blanch thank you very much have a nice day
What does he say that contradicts or differs from Budnitz?
@@tricotdiko1435 you will have to look him up and see he is the only biologist that does the fieldwork
@@timmelcer3094 What a passive aggressive, lazy bullshit response. Trollish in the extreme. I checked out Blanch and living in Utah I sympathize with his voice. You however, based on your comments are a clod. NOTHING Blanch says directly contradicts the video you “commented” on. You didn’t show the decency of providing a link, searchable term, article title or even a direction to go in. Lame way to make a point dude. Thanks for introducing me to Blanch though. You didn’t actually need to be an asshat to do that though.
@@timmelcer3094 He's not a biologist, nor does he have a PHD. He is a compete scammer.
The 3 G.E. Mark-One Reactors that were in use (Numbers 1,2 and 3) all had total meltdowns of their cores. The top 80 to 90 feet of Buildings 1, 3 and 4 were totally blown into small pieces and were gone. The only reason Reactor Building 2 did not blow up was because all of the highly radioactive steam and hydrogen was vented directly into the atmosphere, and it was a vast amount of highly radioactive gasses (VERY DEADLY). Reactor Building 4 was offline, but it was where a large number of spent fuel rods from ALL of the reactors was stored including the core form reactor 4. All experts agreed that if Building 4 caught fire, 35 million people would have to evacuated from Tokyo, and the populations of the west coasts of Canada and the US would also have to be moved hundreds of miles inland to be safe (or as safe as they could be - although not totally). Spent Fuel Rods must also have huge amounts of cooling water pumped over them for a long time before they can be moved to dry storage or they will go Critial (again) and catch fire. And THAT IS WHAT HAPPENED since no cooling water could be pumped into building 4 for the still dangerous spent rods and the heating rods boiled away what water there was left in the pool. Thick, acrid black smoke began to pour out of small openings in building 4, and on March 15th, 2011, building 4 exploded violently blowing the top 70 to 90 feet off, and blowing all of the walls out away from the steel containment framework. The rods had already burned and a large part of them were blown up into the air with the plume reaching 20,000 feet (4 miles high). Look for the video of the explosion dated March 15th - THAT is building 4. I sure don't remember Tokyo being evacuated. Spent rods contain large amounts of Uranium plus the Reactors create Plutonium as a by-product. Last year CNN and ABC PRETENDED to be inside of Reactor Building 4 where they claimed they were recording Spent Rods being "safely" removed for decommissioning. The video of the inside of the building was "Pristine" - it looked brand new. The videos were obviously done with Green Screen Video technology ionce the pool is GONE, ans NO HUMAN can get within 500 feet of any of the 4 reactor buildings for more than about 1 minute or they will die within hours (or sooner).
The following agencies and groups MUST be in on the cover up:
All MSM News Agencies (CIA Mockingbird controlled), the Japanese Government, Tokyo Electric Power Company (a.k.a. TEPCO, now owned by the JP Gov't), The Nuclear Power Industry, itself, and all Colleges and Universiites who have Nuclear programs since there is NO WAY they do NOT know what really happened. The 3 fully melted cores burned through the 3 reactor containment vessels and they have also burned down through the Buildings which are also part of the containment system. TEPCO got a very short video of part of the one of the cores hanging on the side of a gaping hole in the bottom of one of the buildings, and it took over 6 years to get a camera shielded enough to last 3 or 4 minutes to take that picture before dying. The 50 prior attempts all failed due to radiation levels so high they have never been seen or measured before. These molten blobs of still burning Uranium and Plutonium (i.e., STILL experiencing fission) are down under the buildings "SOMEHWERE" - and they know that groundwater is pouring over them and becoming super-radioactive then washing out into the Pacific ocean. Their Ice Wall idea (that I thought might actually work) has failed miserably and only stops a small percentage of the deadly water. In 2011, Dana Durnford spent 6 month on a Marine Estuary Survey and counted over 7500 species of marine life in Canada's West Coast estuaries. He conducted the same survey in 2017 and 2018 and could only find just over 550 species in those same estuaries. 7000 species are GONE.
Folks, when the world finds out the TRUTH about Fukushima (and the coverup) and what it is doing to the Pacific Ocean, the Japanese people, the US and Canadian populations along the west coast of North America, after the initial fear, anger and depression, the demand from the world's population will be so loud, so angry and so powerful, that ALL nuclear plants will be shut down and dismantled, IF WE LIVE THAT LONG. I suspect the world will find out soon. They can't keep this secret much longer...
Unit 4 SFP never boiled dry, the fuel remained covered.
The reactor buildings did not blow up; the blast panels designed into the structure blew out. The designers anticipated a scenario where hydrogen gas could accumulate in the building and ignite, and designed the blast panels to fail to protect other components housed in the building.
@@maus92 have you seen the pics from reactor 4? The whole top half got blown to shit including the spent fuel pools.
Does anyone know where the food court is?
@@tommcd527 That's so dumb. Some building damage to Unit 4 occurred on 3/15/11, TEPCO dismantled top of building to the operating 5F level by 7/5/12, then the top of building was rebuilt by 7/23/13, and all fuel assemblies removed by 12/22/14,. The rebuilt structure can be clearly seen in present day satellite photos, and hundreds of photos of the damage, dismantling and reconstruction of the Unit 4 building are all over the internet.
MY PHONE " NOT RINNIG YET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm sure this guy knows what he's talking about, but he is a terrible presenter. Not only the chaotic slide presentation, but so many "in no time at all", "in a very short space of time" type vague statements. Not to mention the repetition - I think we know they lost power, no need to keep telling us. Virtually unwatchable.
Bankrupt lute the poor
This is a TERRIBLE SPEAKER to explain anything
He's pretty bad at this. I'll describe that in a minute.
He came off as a little defensive and callous.
Plus, his presentation looks like he hasn't got the slightest clue of computers...
Did anyone even watch this whole video?
GE cheated round them up Monsanto Bayer
Remember all nuclear and biocnuclear experts agree THERE IS NO SAFE LEVEL OF RADIATION EXPOSURE!
Yes and now if you add context you understand that this statement is mostly worthless. You cannot escape radiation exposure no matter what you do.
Ever heard of natural background radiation? If not...just you know that currently you are bombarded by radiation from everywhere.
@@WH40KHero Exactly. Even your very own body is radioactive. Man people cody, that blindly post contextless drivel should stop and learn something before posting.
I literally just watched a nuclear expert explain the theory of threshold doses, which states that there is a safe level of radiation that life is adapted to dealing with (cause you know background radiation, surface uranium deposits, bananas, etc). So no the experts don't agree, the science is nowhere near settled one way or the other.
@@WH40KHero background comes from elements outside of living things and irrradiates them evenly all over. It comes from elements that are of no intrest to biology... Like uranium
Alpha radiation outside the body can't penetrate skin
1
Fission produces radioactive versions of elements that living things use as food so you accumulate lots of radioacivity in localised areas so those areas get irradiated intensely
Iodine thyroid
Strontium bone
Alfa deep in the body isn't detectable from outside so a quick scan with a geiger will read nr zero despite a small group of cells inside somewhere are being hammered 24/7
2
Artificial sources produce radioactive particles eg Dounreay, Windscale + other recent events... Hardly detectable outside the body but they may sit somewhere hammering a few hundred cells
It is possible to have something under a fingernail or fold of skin that can't be detected by a geiger or any measurement device if it is a pure alpha emmitter
Get it inside your body and your body will tell you it is there... About 3 years too late though
job chores and circumcision join islam and help turkey and syria.
You cannot clean this up!
jay whitlok Of course we can, and they are. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Now when there are 4 radioactive elephants, it's going to take even longer.
***** clearly you don't realize how big Jupiter is.
Actually, if they could think outside the box a little, they could quickly & safely remove the 3 melted cores and complete the decommissioning in a fraction of the projected time & cost.
***** I can clean it up in 10 years for 1/10 the budget they have allocated. My JOB is based on NUCLEAR PHYSICS.
***** ever hear of the [REDACTED] at the [REDACTED]?
That's where I work. Where do you work?
Actually, it doesn't really matter where I'm working right now, the fact of the matter is that I have over 30 years of experience dealing with radiological cleanup, and everything I say can be backed up by solid SCIENCE.
If you could do what you say you can you`d be there already doing it... They cant even find the Cores & have no idea of what condition they`re in. They don`t even plan to attempt to manually remove the spent fuel rods until post 2020 after the Olympics. They have to store 400 tons of leaking radioactive water every day. Which is going to leak right back into the ground... This mess is pretty much unfix able & they`ll likely get another earth quake between now & the next 50yrs which they have estimated it`ll take to fix.
this is only candy to help save nuclear
ATHEIST ERASER Nuclear power is the future, it doesn't need saving. We aren't going to be able to go beyond this planet with windmills and solar panels. We'll need nuclear, because it converts mass to energy, and since your mass approaches infinity as you approach the speed of light, you'll need a power source that's also going to approach infinity, otherwise you'll never be able to reach/exceed the speed of light which is necessary to span the huge distances between solar systems.
+Tod Karlson "otherwise you'll never be able to reach/exceed the speed of light"
You can never exceed the speed of light. Special relativity says so.
Whether your actual velocity exceeds "c", or the fabric of space-time is actually bending towards you, the effect is ultimately the same: you go from point A to point B & it takes a HUGE amount of energy, the magnitude of which will only be obtained using nuclear power, and the power has to come from conversion of mass to energy to cancel out the mass increase phenomenon as you approach light speed.
+Tod Karlson "it takes a HUGE amount of energy, the magnitude of which will only be obtained using nuclear power"
Agreed, but you will need a pretty long extension cord.
***** Obviously the extension cord is a joke, but you're missing my point. Your power source has to be on the ship, so the mass of your nuclear fuel will increase as the speed and mass of your ship increases. The energy from a nuclear reaction comes from "mass defect", the difference between the mass of the original atom, and the sum of the masses of all the fission products. E=mC^2
The energy from burning a chemical wouldn't change as your speed increases, so you couldn't approach light speed. But, with a nuclear reactor, its mass defect will increase exactly the same way the ship's mass will increase, so it will cancel out.
He reminds me of a certain religious zealot I know. He's more self aware and honest than most of them, but at the end of the day he acts like a true believer.
I am not a rocket scientist but surly even though there was a terrible tsunami, it would have been top priority to scramble generators, cables and workers to the reactors. Probably top managers and government procrastinating??
how is this allowed? i want him to have his own children attend school in Fukushima Prefecture. ..NOW
Huh?
He's just explaining what happened......nothing is pointing to him as being responsible......
Japan's payback for Hiroshima & Nagasaki ??
How does this disaster “payback” for atomic bombs dropped on Japan???
You had atomic bombs dropped on you so you need to be paid back by a natural disaster???? What do you mean?
A tsunami caused an earthquake no I think you got that backwards an earthquake cause a tsunami what a nervous individual he is lying that is why he is nervous
When did he say that the tsunami caused the earthquake? I think you might have misheard.
there is no such thing as a safe nuclear reactor
The Sane Environmentalist there's no such thing as a safe car, or a safe house, or safe anything. Reactor designs have gotten much safer since the Chernobyl, 3 mile, and Fukushima plants were built. They are much safer to the environment than fossil fuels, which constantly puke out toxic chemicals and radioactive particles as well. Batteries have an environmental cost as well.
The RBMK reactor was an “engineering” Shit show and I wouldn’t even classify it as proper engineering. It was an abomination. It was hardly a reactor. It sucked. It never should have happened.
In this case, engines don’t compress water. What the hell did the expect? Honestly, probably the same as Louisiana. The levees/walls can’t fail, right?
We humans like to think we are in control. Many times in past we are were wrong but we still learned nothing.
Says you. Demonstrably untrue but whatever I guess.
1 death credited from radition according to the WHO
hes not a good speaker
Half-truth coverup
Show what is covered up.
Lies
Show where they lied.