Very cool. Japan doesn't have much of their own in terms of energy resources, so I applaud both the commitment to help our ally and the R&D in terms of new and especially SMR nuclear.
Japan is the perfect use-case for nuclear. Even when disaster strikes, they're extremely safe. Only 1 person ever died of radiation in Fukushima. Thousands to tens of thousands died from the tsunami that caused it.
> Only 1 person ever died of radiation in Fukushima.
While I tend to agree with your point, there's also the couple hundred square miles and 165k people worth of exclusion zone as a side-effect. That's not small, but it's potentially something you can mitigate by picking sites carefully.
If the U.S. shared similar concern for environmental health a good portion of urban areas would be in exclusion zones from other sources of industrial contamination too. Instead we tolerate these people having elevated rates of diseases such as cancer or asthma and generally shortened lifespans, and let companies responsible go bankrupt with their executives absolved of all responsibilities while we spend time today scratching our head figuring out what to do.
Nobody bothered to clean up Chernobyl because the whole town's existence was to support the plant and plant workers. With no plant, the city had no value and thus no incentive to spend money on remediation. By comparison, Japan showed us what occurs when places with value are contaminated: effort is made to clean them up. Half of the exclusion zone was reopened within 5 years, and the most intensely irradiated locations were cleaned up in just over a decade.
This doesn’t fully track, the Chernobyl popwerplant was in operation for many years after the catastrophe. I think the sinister truth is that the soviet union just cared a lot less than the Japanese government, not to mention the slightly bigger scale of damage.
More specifically: Pripyat and the original exclusion zone evacuated. Slavutych [1] was subsequently constructed to support the nuclear power plant after the disaster. Because again, Pripyat had no harbors, and no real economic value other than supporting the power plant. So it was simpler to just construct a new city.
It's been a while since I looked, but I think the claim here is that the evacuation of elderly and infirm people from the parts of the exclusion area that were otherwise not seriously affected by the tsunami resulted in a large loss of disability-adjusted life years.
I'll have what he is having, in fact, Ill have a double.
"Because of the plant’s location along the coast, much of the water washed into the Pacific, resulting in the largest accidental release of radiation to the ocean in history. Additional airborne radioactive material from the explosions and fires at the plant fell onto the sea surface, where it too mixed into the water, as did subsequent leaks from tanks on the site holding treated water."
This is from Woods Hole, you probably do not know or recognize their expertise.
"the largest accidental release of radiation to the ocean in history."
And it is is just a drop in the ocean when you consider the natural radioactivity from ⁴⁰K.
It may be a local, time-bounded problem in the first few years after the accident in that certain isotopes may bio-concentrate and affect fishing and agriculture in that region.
So far as the ocean as a whole goes I'd be more concerned about chunks of styrofoam.
For some perspective: I don't have a full breakdown of the release materials on hand, but according to Wikipedia of the 45 PBq you quoted something like 20 PBq of that was Iodine-131 and 5 PBq of Cs-137. That's about 4.3 grams of I-131 and 1.6 kg of Cs-137. In radiological terms that's a LOT if they were concentrated in a small area, not so much when diluted into the entire ocean. Note that estimated releases to the atmosphere were about 10x that IIRC (but don't quote me on exact numbers).
Not to downplay the risks or consequences, people need to decide that for themselves and the dynamics of how this material ends up dispersed in the environment are complicated, but talking in terms of mass helps put things into perspective.
This takes decades. The plume was largely concentrated over a few dozen km and couple hundred m deep when it hit california five years later. And actually significant spill would be orders of magnitude worse.
This is also why mass expansion of reprocessing facilities is completely untenable.
Which is why any next-gen nuclear should be doing near-complete fuel consumption. Solid fuel rods aren't going to cut it.
Liquid / molten salts can be reprocessed "online" and the fission products extracted (yeah, handwaves a LOT of chemistry), so you don't get these partially transmuted solid rods.
Even if you have solid rods or solid pebbles doing the primary power, maybe you can have a secondary on-site molten processor to take care of the waste without it shipping.
One of the annoying aspects of arguing with pro-nuclear people is their blind spot for reprocessing/waste. It just gets shrugged/handwaved away, but to the voting public, having a reactor that produces no waste in the traditional solid fuel sense would be a political boon.
The real issue is that nuclear simply isn't price competitive, it barely beats coal. I would like it to be otherwise.
This is presumably being downvoted for the unnecessary “gotcha” phrasing, but it is an interesting point of distinction. I have an intuitive guess as to the principles at work, but I don’t really know the actual physics.
I don’t think that explains it at all. So garbage floats (more or less), so can be modeled as a 2D plane. But why do patches form? Why isn’t the garbage distributed uniformly across the plane? And why doesn’t that same mechanism apply in 3D?
These comparisons—except for Chernobyl—are disingenuous. Nuclear weapons testing has been outlawed and has mostly stopped, natural Uranium and—even more so—Potassium don’t release radiation in nearly the same concentration as Fukushima (or Hanford to that extent). Radiation is dangerous when it concentrates.
Radiation deaths? Lol guys, I get it, but please don't try to make a bigger fool out ouf you by ridiculing about a point noone ever made.. it is like someone would tell you that our lethargic sitting life styles makes us sick and you stand up and shout: "But noone died from sitting, while tons of people die from sports a lot!!!"
Japan is the perfect use-case for nuclear. Even when disaster strikes, they're extremely safe. Only 1 person ever died of radiation in Fukushima. Thousands to tens of thousands died from the tsunami that caused it.