Spring RTS Engine

The soviets were horrendously negligent, and if anything were driven more by secrecy and the wish to hide the reactor and the event from the rest of the world, than the healthcare and integrity of the surrounding area.

At least the Japanese helicopters were dropping water, the soviets dropped sand from helicopters directly above an exposed reactor core. They then failed to give any protection to the civilians against iodine isotopes, causing the vast majority of deaths and casualties, completely preventable.

What's more is people are utterly ignorant that this Japanese reactor is leaking, whereas in Russia there are lakes ( Lake Karachay ) that can give you a fatal dose by just standing at its shore for an hour. That never went away.... nevermind soviet nuclear satellites breaking up over other countries, or nuclear submarine leaks..

Anyways, all fearmongery, your happy to get large radiation doses, just so long as its from conventional mining and coal burning, all hell breaks loose if a tiny bit of it's from a nuclear power plant.

Sand and not water was needed because RBMK reactors (as used at Chernobyl) work much differently from the "boiling water reactors" (as used at Fukushima), their "normal" working temperature is way higher and so water (at least those amounts of it which helis could lift) would be useless (it would create even more smoke and steam => more bad stuff would come out of the reactor). Sand, otoh, would melt and block the radioactive smoke from coming out. Core overheating and falling down into the ground wasn't a problem as the rooms under the building were filled with concrete shortly after the blast (this part of containment "works" till now). So that part isn't comparable between the two disasters.

Generally it looked a bit like the Japanese were trying to save the reactor at first (so that it could be repaired) instead of trying to shut it down from the start, and started serious containment work only after it was clear that the thing isn't going to work anymore.

Lake Karachay is a relic of the 1950s (not that it's any less dangerous now though), and is generally far away from population centers. And nuclear satellites, well... USSR did pay Canada some millions when one of those crashed over there afaik.

And I completely agree that nuclear plants aren't the only source of radiation. Every industry that works with fossils (coal, metal ores, granite, etc) is going to increase radiation level near it (I live in a town near a big steel working plant, and we have giant slag mountains and waste ground heaps from coal mines there, go figure...). If anything, nuclear plants allow to concentrate bad stuff in one place instead of throwing it up into the athmosphere like coal plants and steel factories do.

We must remember that these japanese stations are older generation plants.
The ones getting built now are way more advanced.
Nuclear fission stations are the future at least until they figure out a way to properly construct a nuclear fusion plant that will be worth it.

Gota wrote:We must remember that these japanese stations are older generation plants.
The ones getting built now are way more advanced.
Nuclear fission stations are the future at least until they figure out a way to properly construct a nuclear fusion plant that will be worth it.

Yes, because what we need is more nuclear plants over earthquake country.

Reckless yakuza policy..just look at how Tepco is now suing the government for loss of income.

Japs deserve electricity as well...I know they sucked during WW2 and all but let bygones be bygones.

Fusion technology exists already, it's just widely ignored. It exists. Fission is very ineffective and nearly useless.

the technology does not exist for a fusion reactor..
The most optimistic projections are of a positive energy reactor by the 30's.

Fission reactors exist and are used for energy, research and as breeding reactors.

now i know why world still runs on oil. all nuclear energy experts sit on spring forum !

Gota wrote:the technology does not exist for a fusion reactor..
The most optimistic projections are of a positive energy reactor by the 30's..

Actually Low Energy Nuclear Reactions exist. There is a different term, skeptic people would call it "cold fusion". Everyone laughs when they hear this term but it is real, hundreds of experiments have proved it.

Recently a lot of progress has been made, supporting the process with a theory. (warning complicated quantum physics stuff here).

To simplify it, the process kind of works by capturing heavy water in a grid with 15nm spacing. Then it is stimulated with a special frequency (read below). The frequency makes the heavy water molecules think they react with a photon, while they actually react with another heavy water molecule, and voila! Helium is created, and a lot of energy comes free!

The frequency:

a = 2Vt/c

Where a is the fine structure constant
Vt is the frequency
(Vt = the speed of quantum transition)
c is the light speed

a = 1/137 so this means our frequency is 2/137 * c

So now you think, why the hell does this work? To understand that, click all my links, read and learn :)

I end my post with a little story.

Many, many years ago there was a very smart man. He had a theory. An idea. What was his idea? His idea was that everything that lives is made out of cells. Microbiology! Bigger life forms are made out of millions of cells, and diseases are caused by small cells like bacteria and viruses.

Right now, we all know that this is true. But when this man lived, he was declared a fool. All scientists spread rumors about him, expelled him from organisations, stopped talking to him. The church expressed their 'gratitude' as well. Nobody accepted his theory.

But some years later, people discovered something. The existence of small cells, bacteria and more. What a miracle! Amazing!

The reason I wrote this is because most people are not going to believe or even objectively look at and consider the existence of these low level nuclear reactions. To those people: please learn from the past mistakes of humanity, we once thought the earth is flat, we once thought flying is impossible, we once thought microbiology is incorrect. Don't make the same mistake!

I laughed at the comment that fission is useless......

I laughed at the comment that fission is useless......

Laughed twice even

Yup.

There's dozens of advancements in the field of nuclear science both on the fission and fusion side of things. Bill gates is working on something that burns nuclear waste to create energy, another company is developing thorium based fission reactors that produce a fraction of the crap that makes uranium/plutonium reactors bad, cannot be weaponized, and are safer to run than fossil fuel based electricity generators. And ya There's the guys Hoi is pointing out, starting to make nuclear fusion work.

I think there's a good chance we could be on the cusp of solving the energy crisis safely and efficiently.

Irregardless, none of this is relevant to the Fukushima plant, as it's not a modern nuclear plant either way. It's 40 years old.

Although it is worth saying, it's impressive that a 40 year old nuclear plant that was slated for decommission by the UN nuclear safety board, got smashed by a 20 foot wall of water, and a 9.0 earthquake, and still didn't blow up catastrophically. If the plant had one or more total meltdowns the disaster would have been much worse.

Hoi wrote:Fission technology exists already, it's just widely feared for irrational reasons. It exists. Fusion is very ineffective and nearly useless.

FTFY.

Cold fusion is widely derided in the scientific community, because all attempts to this day that have 'proved' it are from experimental errors. Show me a cold fusion technique that has been proved to work, in a peer-reviewed journal on nuclear physics.


As for the earthquake/tsunami, have you read about Onagawa? That plant is a much more recent BWR that was also much closer to the epicentre of the quake. You know what happened to it? It shut down correctly. A fire broke out in the turbine hall, but they put it out quickly. This is why countries need to build new nuclear power plants - they are much safer than the 1970s-era relic that is Fukushima Daiichi.
Nuclear power still makes sense for Japan - more than any other power source in fact. Why? Because Japan has little natural resources and a huge population on a relatively small landmass. They are faced with two options - import natural gas, or use nuclear power. Nuclear power is safer, and the events in Japan recently have only affirmed this.

I like how you throw words like "frequency" and "quantum" to sound intelligent, all the while achieving the exact opposite effect.

zwzsg wrote:I like how you throw words like "frequency" and "quantum" to sound intelligent, all the while achieving the exact opposite effect.

Why target Hoi?

Why not?

Japan, like all nations, has enough potential solar, wind and tidal energy to live comfortably. Like other nations though it took the cheap approach, accepted industry assurances of safety, and left the problems for a future generation.

Modern Japan is that future generation. They will suffer the effects of this for generations - as the radiation released accumulates through the food chain and spreads through tidal and other natural forces.

If you look at history, what happened after Chernobyl, you'll see that rather than deal with the reality of the harm, nations willed it away by increasing the allowable levels of radiation in food.

That's right, they simply changed the meaning of "safe" in the interests of protecting European trade.

The problem with this whole discussion is everyone is throwing out statistics as if they have any meaning. They don't! Radiation is not something that spreads evenly and consistently. It will form pockets and concentrations. Different people will have different health effects based on age, general heath, type of radiation, amount of radiation, location of particles, genetic disposition, etc.

Nobody has "all the data" and even those who do cannot be trusted. There's a pretty high likelihood that anybody taking the time and expense to collect data has an agenda of some sort.

The only safe way forward is renewables, and that means people have to learn to switch off mainstream news and goverment "information" and dig deeper into whose interests the nuclear and fossil fuel industries really serve. They need to realise that commercial tv, print and radio (especially "talk-back") serve hidden agendas more important to them than public safety.

Nuclear power is not the solution to global warming, the solution is to make better sacrifices. Use less power. Ban neon, hallogen and phosphorescence lighting. Increase adoption of LED lighting. Reduce air and sea travel. Replace fossil fuels with hydrogen based power. Reduce packaging. Buy less of everything.

None of these things are really as taxing as they sound. They increase costs and reduce luxuries - but generally only in the short term. People need to learn to live with that and stop bitching about the economy like it's the only thing that matters in life.

To put it bluntly I'd rather be "poor" than unhealthy. It seems like most Western people have the opposite view (more than 50% of people I see now are visibly overweight). I learnt to live with "less" a long time ago. I realised it didn't require difficult sacrifices, just smarter choices.

If Japan want to learn from this they'll reduce their dependency on power in general and nuclear power in particular. Tokyo doesn't need to be lit up like a fucking Christmas tree 24-hours a day. I suspect these rolling blackouts will teach them how to be frugal and one day their power efficiency will put us all to shame.

da govment is hidin cold fuzion from us. damn liberals...

On a serious note, even if cold fusion were theoretically possible, as you seemed to prove, that's all it is: theoretical. There has not been an actually accepted cold fusion reactor ever. Fission, on the other hand, is making thousands of TWh every year worldwide. That is neither ineffective nor useless. In regards to fusion, of course the technology exists - it just has yet to create a positive yield. And of course it isn't cold fusion technology.

Let's face it. Fission is occasionally dangerous. Fusion won't be used for power for at least tens of years. Cold fusion might not ever be used. But what can we do? Nothing but deal with the fact that shit happens. I'll try not to sound like I don't have a soul right now, but people really deserved this crisis. People wanted to use a lot of energy, they decided to use fission, and now they deal with the effects. They decided to use fission because it was the most feasible; technically, there was no alternative. If they had used other methods, they would have spent more money to produce less power. If people are going to complain about nuclear power, they better be prepared to lower their energy usage. To many, this means lowering their standard of living. And that simply isn't happening.