Get a grip. About 20,000 people died in the tsunami but there may be no statistically observable radiation caused deaths from the nuclear event. The part about the fuel rods catching fire could be true but it could also be true that jumbo jets full of happy families will plunge into the ground when the engines fail. It's called managed risk.

Meanwhile coal fired power stations that do the same job as nukes continue to spew not only low level radiation but respiratory hazardous particles and greenhouse gases. Let's have some equal alarmism on them.

I'm with Taswegian.

There's at least 20,000 people who don't give a damn what the power station does, & a few hundred thousand who reckon nature is a damn site more dangerous than any nuclear power plant, even old ones.

I'm also with Taswegian!
Yes one of the holding tanks is leaking. It could be managed with a few catchment containers, pumps and membrane filter technology, that even filter out the radioactive particles, until the affected tank is finally empty.
The filtered particles can then be safely stored in special containers, designed specifically to store nuclear waste safely.
The ground water can be managed by the creation of a lateral tunnel uphill above the power station.
This will allow the authorities to interrupt all the underground critical water flows and reroute it/them around the damaged facility.
The ex filter water safely relived of its nuclear load, can then be safely disposed of back into the environment or reused as cooling water?
As per usual, the antinuclear industry continue to beat up a still manageable situation, which needs to be managed for a few years, or until the fuel rods are finally cool enough to be removed and safely stored.
Rhrosty.

Rhosty:

...Pack your bag son, there’ll be a big black “Limo” arrive at your front gate shortly bearing Japanese flags on the front fenders; out will step a couple of oriental looking gentlemen dressed in “spick” suits and wearing dark shades; they will escort you directly to Tokyo: You’ve got yourself a job.

The exclusion area around the plant is excessive.

Studies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors have shown that subsequent deaths due to Leukemia and solid cancers were not higher for those who had been exposed to less than 200mSv of instantaneous radiation. For solid cancers the cancer rates for survivors who received radiation doses between 200 and 500 mSv the cancer death rate was about 11% higher.

There are many places in the world where natural radiation levels are multiples of the likely nuclear fallout from a further Fukuyama event and the people in those naturally high radiation locations are every bit as healthy as people in low natural radiation areas.

The variable costs of nuclear disasters and fixed but very high costs of spent fuel make nuclear power an undesirable energy option for Australia.

Coal, oil and gas are far less dangerous and also cheaper.

Nuclear power has value if its part of a dual-use option in the direction of nuclear weapons choice. But that's another medium-long term debate for Australia.

The author has written "The real trouble starts when radioactive particles get out into the environment. Then, they very quickly end up in living creatures where they wreak their damage directly. Once they've escaped and been scattered by wind, water and rain, the deed is done, much of it irrevocable."

Well perhaps it has already happened.

This is sober reading: http://rt.com/news/fukushima-apocalypse-fuel-removal-598/

and additionally, the so called easy removal of spent fuel rods now sounds somewhat more difficult than purported in the original article.

Worth thinking about, especially noting the current progress to date and the continued evasive nature of reporting the truth from TEPCO.

Geoff

Foyle,

As I said in the article, this is mostly new to me so whatever thoughts I offer come from careful (but nonetheless potentially misinterpreted) recent research.

So, with that caveat.

I don't think you're taking sufficient account of the difference between the amount of radioactive fission products created at Hiroshima and Nagasaki compared to nuclear plant accidents.

Taking caesium-137, the amount released at Fukushima was apparently about 160 times that released at Hiroshima, and at Chernobyl it was over 800 times as great. If a plant accident got out of hand, the potential release could be many multiples larger again.

There's also a difference between these fission products getting inside living creatures and concentrating the radiation in a small area as opposed to general background radiation. I don't think the effects are all that comparable.

Geoff,

It's a truly scary article, isn't it.

I read it before doing the post and in the end decided not to refer to it, solely because Christina Consolo seemed such a radical voice. Doesn't mean she isn't right in part or in whole, of course.

plantagenet,

Yes, the known costs are high enough, but with all the unknowns it doesn't seem to make much sense at all, even ignoring safety issues.

Fukushima is the worst environmental disaster in our history and they are covering it up.300 tonnes of radioactive water is being released into the ocean every day and they have not a clue on how to stop it. This have been happening for 2.5 yrs.

It is not the background radiation that is the danger but the hot particles that mimic elements in our bodies that are the real danger.

There is no need for the great human cull via war and disease. Fukushima will probably do it silently.

Plantagenet wrote;

"Coal, oil and gas are far less dangerous and also cheaper".
You should look up the studies before you make such a statement.
The OLO system will not accept a typed chart but in his book "Thorium, Energy Cheaper than Coal" PhD physicist, Robert Hargraves, lists the number of major accident in each fuel supply chain, the number of fatalities in each chain and the fatalities per GW Year. Below I quote the figure in the sequenced above.

Coal - 185 - 8,100 - 0.35

Oil - 330 - 14,000 - 0.38

Nat. Gas - 85 - 1,500 - 0.08

LPG - 75 - 2,500 - 2.9

Hydro - 10 - 5,100 - 0.9

Nuclear - 1 -28 - 0.0085

Nuclear is by far the safest fuel industry in the world of the order of one order of magnitude better than any other.

Foyle, the pollution from fossil fuels is temporary. These new elements from nuclear fission never existed before and have half lives of millions of years.

The technology goes back to the 1970's and they have failed to update it. Perhaps Nuclear Fusion of the Sun is the answer,but Nuclear Fission with our low technology, will exterminate much of the life on this planet if plants like Fukushima are allowed to propagate.

Thank you Foyle.

Don't coal fired power plants release quite high radiation?

Not that I'm against coal fired power. It really does make the most sense in Oz. From all the latest evidence we are descending into a Little Ice Age, as we speak, that or the full glaciation now somewhat overdue.

That quiet sun is a bit of a worry, at least for my grandkids.

We are likely to be hoping that CO2 does actually have some of the warming the IPCC has been touting, & we may need every bit of ash produced from coal, to spread around to try to keep the advancing ice at bay.

Hasbeen,

A power station of 2.6MW output capacity (the size of Eraring or Bayswater, NSW,) feeds about six tonne of Uranium through its boilers every year. How much goes into the atmosphere and how much to flue dust, and then partly to blended cement, I don't know.

Lake Macquarie during a drought would contain about 3 tonnes (the amount in all ocean water) plus whatever enters from Eraring. But it is not dangerous. The half life of U^235 is 700 million years and for U^238 it is about 5 times that.

Because of those long half lives neither in very dangerous unless concentrated in a pure form. Pure yellow cake is 98.28% U238 and only 0.72% U235 so is virtually harmless.

From a decay point of view the carbon 14 in your body is possibly a greater risk as the half life is only 5750 years but it depends on the decay reaction and carbon is a beta decay whereas U^235 is a neutron and I am not across the relative danger but suspect the neutron.

Basically the shorter the half life the greater the initial problem but the faster the problem fades away. Almost every cubic metre of the earth's surface contains a couple of ccs of Thorium but because of the long half life it is not a problem. Thorium converts to U^235 if bombarded with neutrons and therefore can be to used to replenish the U233 which decays and is lost as it produces the heat from fission in a nuclear power station.

The thorium reactor starts with a U^233 core which is replaced as it decays as it produces energy and by neutron bombardment converts Thorium 232 to Uranium 233. That is why a thorium reactor is not a significant hazard.

Even plutonium in small quantities is not all that dangerous. One physicist challenged Ralph Nader to eat as much caffeine as the physicist was prepared to eat plutonium. Nader was no mug, knew the relative risks