Fukushima: still fucked up

[Dire Wolf]

Remember when we were told not to worry about nuclear power and that people shouldn't unnecessarily worry themselves about the incident at Fukushima?

Well I do.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/...d.php?t=640632

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/...d.php?t=703826

Remember how they prohibited FX from posting further about Fukushima, even in The Pit? Fighting public discussion since 1973.

Well, it's still fucked up beyond all recognition.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6289/1039

tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and might send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo. Thanks to a lucky break detailed in a report released last week by the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, Japan dodged that bullet. But the report warns that spent fuel accumulating at U.S. nuclear plants is also vulnerable. Unpublished modeling presents chilling scenarios for a hypothetical spent fuel fire at the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant in southeastern Pennsylvania.


What I love best about his is that the public is going to have to pay all the costs for clean up and contamination while the profit takers are all long gone.

[Roo]

Hey yeah, where did FX go? Haven't seen him around in a while.

Someone send out the bat signal.

[Dire Wolf]

I suppose he got a life.

[Roo]

So, it worked?!

How can I make your life MY life?

He stole someone else's life! Who would be crazy enough to switch with him?

Nah, couldn't happen.

[Jaglavak]

Oh don't be silly Stonely, nuclear power is our friend.

[-FX-]

Nuclear reactors are a lot like the Space Shuttles. The stats for failure for both are almost the same as well now.

The promises of no catastrophic failure were wrong, the cost was wrong, and while both are great ideas, and both actually did do productive and useful shit, the cost is, was, far higher than anyone would have paid if they knew the actual risk.

Nuclear reactors, and especially decades of spent fuel, actually are in fact the Dr. Strangelove Doomsday Device made real.

Nobody can actually nuke anybody who has reactors. Hell, you don't even want to have a conventional war where reactors might be damaged or worse, you destroy the infrastructure so that the reactors fail. (which means the fuel ponds as well)

As was explained on 60 Minutes by the top nuclear expert for the US, where she said in reply to the question about worst case scenario, "I don't even want to think about it".

It's not that failure of a full fuel pond would destroy the world, it's what happens after one multiple reactor site fails that is the bad thing. The really really bad thing. And it leads to the end of the world as we know it.

No doubt about that.

[pickle berry]

I like peanut butter.

[Jaglavak]

And so therefore it is physically impossible to extract power from nuclear decay in a safe manner. It just can't be done. Far better to just keep right on burning everything we can get our hands on until the climate descends into a 100,000 year steam bath. Yup, that's what to do alright.

[SmartAleq]

You act as though this were a binary equation but it's not. Wave energy, solar and wind power can and do supply as much and more energy than all the nuke plants and fossil fuels combined, the only thing that's holding us back is sufficient buckets to hold the soup raining down on our heads 24/7/365.

Solar spill? Otherwise known as a nice day.

[BJMoose]

Of course, if everything were solar-powered, that would gobble up enough energy from available solar insolation that the atmosphere would get rather chilly. . . .

[SmartAleq]

Too bad it doesn't work that way, we'd be in great shape if we could drop the global temp by a couple degrees Celsius.

[Dire Wolf]

If we use solar, the sun will get darker till it goes completely black.

If we use wind, rich people won't be able to sail their sailboats.

If we use wave power, the tides will stop and all coastal life will die.

It's almost enough to make me wanna be a Koch brother.

[Roo]

Originally Posted by -FX-

. . .

Whew! I thought you might have actually gone and gotten a life.

That would change my whole view of the world. Luckily, it didn't happen.


j/k Nice to see you again, FX.

[Jaglavak]

If we use helium cooled pebble bed reactors, we can enjoy a safe reliable 24/7 source of baseload power.

[Dire Wolf]

If we inhale helium in bed and tell jokes, we can get quite a reaction, although I doubt that is safe for 7 or 24 hours, so I'll go load my power base.

[-FX-]

Diesel invented his engine to run on corn oil, and his original design and concept went along with the idea that farmers could plant the back forty with corn to make the fuel to run the tractors. (rather than oats for the horses) This still works, and farms can actually grow their own fuel to run machinery and provide electricity.

Corn is so productive you can get three crops a year, and not need to buy fuel. Yet you don't see the global warmers supporting this idea, much less other simple solutions to reduce oil and coal use.

Nuclear is very much like global warming, in that the science is never the real factor in decisions and beliefs about it

[-FX-]

Diesel didn't even know that there are other crops that can be raised for fuel.

http://www.hobbyfarms.com/biodiesel-your-farm-has-fuel/

If a fraction of the money spent on a new nuclear plant was used to help farmers grow fuel, the oil industry would start killing people.

[Dire Wolf]

I've always thought that piling 500 tons of refined uranium ore in a design built by the lowest bidder was a stupid idea. The Second Law of Thermodynamics (a physicist's more complicated version of Murphy's Law) says that entropy will tend to reduce each safety element that isn't a cut-corner, so that the energy can spread out. A design that holds a lot of energy to be released in a slow and controlled manner might fail and release it all in a few weeks, rather than over 25 years. 500 tons of uranium in a pile to be release in fission is a hellavu lot of energy.

I recently flew from El Paso to Denver and then from Denver to San Francisco. There is a lot of empty land that could be filled with solar panels and windmills leaving plenty of room for wildlife. Far more than the 100 square miles that would be needed by solar to power the whole US. I did see one very large windmill farm out in the middle of nowhere.

[Dire Wolf]

needs own thread

[Jaglavak]

Originally Posted by Dire Wolf

The Second Law of Thermodynamics (a physicist's more complicated version of Murphy's Law) says that entropy will tend to reduce each safety element that isn't a cut-corner, so that the energy can spread out.

Not even kinda close. Do yourself a favor and stick with lawyering.

Originally Posted by Dire Wolf

There is a lot of empty land that could be filled with solar panels and windmills leaving plenty of room for wildlife. Far more than the 100 square miles that would be needed by solar to power the whole US.

True.

Originally Posted by -FX-

Diesel invented his engine to run on corn oil, and his original design and concept went along with the idea that farmers could plant the back forty with corn to make the fuel to run the tractors. (rather than oats for the horses) This still works, and farms can actually grow their own fuel to run machinery and provide electricity.

The US burns through 19 million barrels of oil every day. There isn't enough land or water to come close to meeting the demand. Not to mention it is morally repugnant to be pouring food into the tank of an SUV when people are going hungry.

Originally Posted by -FX-

Nuclear is very much like global warming, in that the science is never the real factor in decisions and beliefs about it.

Don't ever change, dude.

[Dire Wolf]

Second law

The second law of thermodynamics indicates the irreversibility of natural processes, and, in many cases, the tendency of natural processes to lead towards spatial homogeneity of matter and energy, and especially of temperature. It can be formulated in a variety of interesting and important ways.

It implies the existence of a quantity called the entropy of a thermodynamic system. In terms of this quantity it implies that

When two initially isolated systems in separate but nearby regions of space, each in thermodynamic equilibrium with itself but not necessarily with each other, are then allowed to interact, they will eventually reach a mutual thermodynamic equilibrium. The sum of the entropies of the initially isolated systems is less than or equal to the total entropy of the final combination. Equality occurs just when the two original systems have all their respective intensive variables (temperature, pressure) equal; then the final system also has the same values.

This statement of the second law is founded on the assumption, that in classical thermodynamics, the entropy of a system is defined only when it has reached internal thermodynamic equilibrium (thermodynamic equilibrium with itself).

The second law is applicable to a wide variety of processes, reversible and irreversible. All natural processes are irreversible. Reversible processes are a useful and convenient theoretical fiction, but do not occur in nature.

A prime example of irreversibility is in the transfer of heat by conduction or radiation. It was known long before the discovery of the notion of entropy that when two bodies initially of different temperatures come into thermal connection, then heat always flows from the hotter body to the colder one.

The second law tells also about kinds of irreversibility other than heat transfer, for example those of friction and viscosity, and those of chemical reactions. The notion of entropy is needed to provide that wider scope of the law.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, in a theoretical and fictive reversible heat transfer, an element of heat transferred, δQ, is the product of the temperature (T), both of the system and of the sources or destination of the heat, with the increment (dS) of the system's conjugate variable, its entropy (S)

δ Q = T d S . {\displaystyle \delta Q=T\,dS\,.} \delta Q=T\,dS\,.[1]

Entropy may also be viewed as a physical measure of the lack of physical information about the microscopic details of the motion and configuration of a system, when only the macroscopic states are known. The law asserts that for two given macroscopically specified states of a system, there is a quantity called the difference of information entropy between them. This information entropy difference defines how much additional microscopic physical information is needed to specify one of the macroscopically specified states, given the macroscopic specification of the other - often a conveniently chosen reference state which may be presupposed to exist rather than explicitly stated. A final condition of a natural process always contains microscopically specifiable effects which are not fully and exactly predictable from the macroscopic specification of the initial condition of the process. This is why entropy increases in natural processes - the increase tells how much extra microscopic information is needed to distinguish the final macroscopically specified state from the initial macroscopically specified state.[18]

from Wiki

so, yeah, you should probably give up physics or engineering before someone gets killed.

[Jaglavak]

That's funny. Run along and play, little pup.

[Dire Wolf]

Young man, in this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics.

[Jaglavak]

When you're dealing with heat engines entropy means one thing and one thing only:

s = dQ/T

This formula, in conjunction with several others, will allow you to calculate things like fuel consumption, heat rate, and power output. All that philosophy bullshit won't hang one useful number on anything, so just leave it to the philosophers.

[-FX-]

When people argue about science, everything gets strange

[JackieLikesVariety]

maybe it's different in the box

[socko]

Originally Posted by Jaglavak

The US burns through 19 million barrels of oil every day. There isn't enough land or water to come close to meeting the demand.

But there is enough for a farmer to grow his own fuel.

Hell, if people were serious about using solar, we could make enough fuel for the whole world from sunlight in the US. Of course it would cost more, so it will not happen.

(solar can desalinate ocean water, run pumps, and be used to farm deserts)

But it costs more than harvesting old solar created fuel (coal, peat, gas and oil)

[socko]

Originally Posted by Dire Wolf

I've always thought that piling 500 tons of refined uranium ore in a design built by the lowest bidder was a stupid idea.

A working core is a 100 tons of uranium, with 2% refined uranium for a starter. (or 5% Pu if it's like Fukushima reactor three was)

Most of the fuel is just uranium, unrefined. Which won't do much with out the enriched starter. Even piled together, with out a moderator uranium doesn't do anything.

Used fuel is another matter of course. Putting 20 years of spent fuel together (a typical spent fuel pond) means you have 20,000 tons of very dangerous material all in one place. Plenty of Pu to cause a reaction, even with out a moderator.

[Nonny J. Nonnington III]

I hold out hope for the eventual creation of traveling wave reactors. As I understand it, they only require a small amount of enriched uranium. The rest of the fuel is provided by depleted uranium. This would be great not only for the smaller amounts of radioactive materials, but also for the disposal of spent fuel rods.

[Dire Wolf]

Originally Posted by socko

A working core is a 100 tons of uranium, with 2% refined uranium for a starter. (or 5% Pu if it's like Fukushima reactor three was)

Most of the fuel is just uranium, unrefined. Which won't do much with out the enriched starter. Even piled together, with out a moderator uranium doesn't do anything.

Used fuel is another matter of course. Putting 20 years of spent fuel together (a typical spent fuel pond) means you have 20,000 tons of very dangerous material all in one place. Plenty of Pu to cause a reaction, even with out a moderator.

Fukushima was 600 tons in three reactors that melted out of six reactors. https://www.rt.com/news/344200-fukus...-nuclear-fuel/ You are correct in that most of it isn't "refined". Most is U238, which won't fizz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-235

At least .9 percent is needed to react, so the raw ore is refined to have at least .9 percent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium

[Jaglavak]

Originally Posted by socko

But there is enough for a farmer to grow his own fuel.

True. A well watered acre can yield about 120 gallons of canola oil per year. It has about 10% less heat content than diesel and can be used in most engines with minimal processing, although it may reduce the service life. However, every acre spent growing fuel is an acre not growing market crops so the opportunity cost must be considered. There are other ways to extract fuel from less productive land too. But it must be done carefully to avoid effectively strip mining the soil.

[BJMoose]

Originally Posted by socko

But there is enough for a farmer to grow his own fuel.

Hell, if people were serious about using solar, we could make enough fuel for the whole world from sunlight in the US. Of course it would cost more, so it will not happen.

(solar can desalinate ocean water, run pumps, and be used to farm deserts)

But it costs more than harvesting old solar created fuel (coal, peat, gas and oil)

Also, you won't be able to grow much of anything underneath all those solar panels. Not enough sunlight. . .

[Jaglavak]

It's OK for pasture; the panels typically only cover about 1/3 of the rays at any one time. But probably not for row crops.

[SmartAleq]

Hemp runs about 300 gallons of oil per acre, from about 8000 lbs of seed. After cold pressing you still have about 6000 lbs of highly nutritious hemp flour suitable for feeding animals or people. Then you have a lot of fiber, or biomass for ethanol production. Since hemp is a nitrogen fixing plant it improves the heck out of your soil so using it in crop rotation with hungrier plants is quite feasible. Hemp has a low water requirement too, and if you use the fiber in hempcrete you're sequestering quite a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere.

[Roo]

Originally Posted by -FX-

When people argue about science, everything gets strange

especially when people don't use cites. The OP has the most documentation for his claims.

Originally Posted by JackieLikesVariety

maybe it's different in the box

yes, outside the Box, I probably wouldn't be allowed to make the comment about the cites.

[Borborygmi]

Originally Posted by Roo

yes, outside the Box, I probably wouldn't be allowed to make the comment about the cites.

This is true. No one has ever dared ask for or commented upon cites on any message board, outside the safe confines of The Box.

[Dire Wolf]

I only put in the cites so that people would know what I was referring to. Honest. I did not mean to cloud the discussion with information. I retract it.

[Roo]

Originally Posted by Borborygmi

This is true. No one has ever dared ask for or commented upon cites on any message board, outside the safe confines of The Box.

Oh look! It's another snarky strawman by Borborygmi trying to mislead people about my posts.

Still following me around, I see. What are you so butthurt about that you continue to follow me around?

[Borborygmi]

HAI ROO

If by following you around you mean posting at the same message board as you then you have me dead to rights!

Do you have a cite for probably not being allowed to make comments on cites outside of The Box? I feel comfortable asking you for a cite because we are currently in The Box. [MODS: please don't move this thread out of The Box.]

[socko]

Originally Posted by SmartAleq

Hemp runs about 300 gallons of oil per acre, from about 8000 lbs of seed. After cold pressing you still have about 6000 lbs of highly nutritious hemp flour suitable for feeding animals or people. Then you have a lot of fiber, or biomass for ethanol production. Since hemp is a nitrogen fixing plant it improves the heck out of your soil so using it in crop rotation with hungrier plants is quite feasible. Hemp has a low water requirement too, and if you use the fiber in hempcrete you're sequestering quite a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere.

It's sound good, hence it ill be fought tooth and nail by vested interest.

Nothing really good can come from empowering people. If it doesn't come from the rich to the poor, or from the governing rulers, it must be nonsense.

[Dire Wolf]

Originally Posted by Roo

Oh look! It's another snarky strawman by Borborygmi trying to mislead people about my posts.

Still following me around, I see. What are you so butthurt about that you continue to follow me around?

Maybe he has a crush on you like I do.