Prepare for a slow and agonizing death

[jlprk]

What caused it? Too much hiccups? They all swallowed their gum before the exams?

 

[Denny Crane]

Ever consider that the Tsunami washed a bunch of actual shit into everyone's homes, flooded the sewers and waste systems, knocked down houses and washed all the crap inside those (mold, etc.) all over everything?

 

[MARIS61]

From your own link:

“We do not know that cause of this, but it is hard to believe that is due to the effects of radiation,” she said. “This is an early test and we will only see the effects of radiation exposure after four or five years.”

That's nonsense, radiation exposure can show effects from instantaneously to decades later, depending on amount and method of exposure.

 

[MARIS61]

Maybe you get it, jlprk. Without radiation, there'd be no life on earth. The sun warms us. The molten core is molten because it's radioactive. Mutation in evolution is caused by radiation. We age and die because of natural radiation. And so on.

Same with water, salt, and like radiation too much of those (more than natural exposure) can kill you.

 

[jlprk]

Ever consider that the Tsunami washed a bunch of actual shit into everyone's homes, flooded the sewers and waste systems, knocked down houses and washed all the crap inside those (mold, etc.) all over everything?

It's well-known that the thyroid is sensitive to radiation.

Can you find any natural disaster in which shit, crap, mold, sewers, waste systems, or other non-radiation incident gave 36% of the province's children thyroid problems?

Not including your dude ranch next to those stinky Chicago stockyards.

 

[Denny Crane]

http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2012/03/11716/radiation-risks-fukushima-are-likely-be-less-chernobyl

One of the causes of thyroid nodules is "Hashimoto's disease." Fungal infection of the mouth and nails is one of the common causes.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000371.htm

 

[jlprk]

Merkel announced plans to shut all nuclear power plants in Germany in 10 years, but that isn't fast enough for the voters, so her conservative party is going down.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/...uclear-election-merkel-politics-economy-video

 

[Haakzilla]

...nuclear butterflies?!

Japan Nuclear Accident: 'Abnormalities' in Butterflies Traced to Fukushima Plant

Japanese scientists say "abnormalities" detected in the country's butterflies may be a result of radioactive fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year. In a study published in Scientific Reports, an online journal, researchers say "artificial radionuclides" from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant caused "physiological and genetic damage" to pale grass blue butterflies.

--> READ MORE

 

[jlprk]

Remember how the tide of garbage will arrive late this year? Remember the dock that washed up in Oregon? Here's the cost to state taxpayers. Local enclaves can't afford it. A fishing boat landed in Washington State.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_1...each-northwest-coast-who-will-pay-for-cleanup

 

[Denny Crane]

So where's that garbage at?

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/...ill-one-may-cripple-global-diaper-output?lite

 

[BrianFromWA]

bump for this story about nuclear plants during large-scale emergencies/flooding/etc.:

Parts of two nuclear power plants were shut down late Monday and early Tuesday, while another plant - the nation's oldest - was put on alert after waters from Superstorm Sandy rose 6 feet above sea level.
One of the units at Indian Point, a plant about 45 miles north of New York City, was shut down Monday because of external electrical grid issues, said Entergy Corp., which operates the plant. The company said there was no risk to employees or the public, and the plant was not at risk due to water levels from the Hudson River, which reached 9 feet 8 inches and was subsiding. Another unit at the plant was still operating at full power.

One unit at the Salem plant in Hancocks Bridge, N.J., near the Delaware River, was shut down Tuesday because four of its six circulating water pumps were no longer available, according to PSEG Nuclear. The pumps are used to condense steam on the non-nuclear side of the plant. Another Salem unit has been offline since Oct. 14 for refueling, but the nearby Hope Creek plant remains at full power. Together, the Salem and Hope Creek plants produce enough power for about 3 million homes per day.

The oldest U.S. nuclear power plant, New Jersey's Oyster Creek, was already out of service for scheduled refueling. But high water levels at the facility, which sits along Barnegat Bay, prompted safety officials to declare an "unusual event" around 7 p.m. About two hours later, the situation was upgraded to an "alert," the second-lowest in a four-tiered warning system.

Conditions were still safe at Oyster Creek, Indian Point and all other U.S. nuclear plants, said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees plant safety.
In other parts of the East Coast, nuclear plants were weathering the storm without incident.

 

[Denny Crane]

^^^ Fair enough.

meanwhile, the wreckage described in the link below will drift across two oceans to the Oregon coast, where it will then migrate to Lapine and end up infecting people. Causing a slow and agonizing death.

http://updates.jalopnik.com/post/34669789863/more-than-a-dozen-fisker-karma-hybrids-caught-fire-and

 

[MARIS61]

Speaking of nuclear fallout, libertarian principles active in our government actually encourage and reward companies to run nuclear power plants far past their safe life. They also have made sure that future taxpayers will end up paying trillions of dollars for decommissioning old plants and for "disposal" of spent nuclear waste that the LLC's running nuclear power plants will refuse to pay as they take their enormous profits and hide behind "bankruptcy".

The US and their aging reactor fleet has been the subject of much discussion including the safety of running these old plants far past their original lifespans.

The issue of the massive stockpile of spent nuclear fuel has been discussed more post-Fukushima. The NRC’s current plan appears to be storing casks in nuclear power plant parking lots for 200 years. This long term problem that has recently become an even more urgent problem isn’t the only nuclear mess the US is facing.

The New York Times examined the situation of nuclear power plant decommissioning. Each power plant is required to set up a trust fund that they put rate payer money into for future decommissioning costs. These trust funds are allowed to invest as they see fit, including in the stock markets. The 2008 stock market crash eroded many funds that were already deficient for covering the cost of cleaning up a reactor site. If many funds have more than enough money to cover decommissioning the power company gets to keep the rest. If the fund runs short the public makes up the difference. The cost to decommission a plant ranges from $400 million to $1 billion dollars.

Scenarios where power companies profit from any excess in the trust fund encourages cutting corners and delaying decommissioning as long as possible to try to gain more excess profit in the fund. This also encourages risky investing where profit can go to the power company. If the fund falls short the public is stuck with the bill. There is also the possibility of a nuclear power operator simply filing for bankruptcy or going out of business, dumping the insufficient trust fund on the public to deal with the abandoned nuclear plant. Since most nuclear power plants and their operators divert each plant into its own LLC, a company could close or abandon a plant and the LLC company without any recourse to the larger private company that operates multiple facilities.

A prime example of how these power companies can easily scam the public and shirk all responsibility for the plant decommissioning was seen with the Zion nuclear plant in Illinois. Exelon sold the plant to ZionSolutions including the trust fund. The trust fund was intended to send excess back to rate payers. With the slight of hand where the fund was given as an asset to “Zionsolutions” rate payers lost oversight, access and refunds. Zionsolutions, oddly named specific to the plant appears to be a company created just for decommissioning Zion and is related to a company called Energy Solutions. A private company that has a nuclear waste dump in Utah. They intend to take the entire Zion facility and dump it in the Utah desert. The discount “decommissioning” by dumping the entire plant in the desert would net ZionSolutions about a 20% profit. No word on what happens to it then when ZionSolutions evaporates.
There are many ways for these current nuclear reactor owners to not just cut and run on a facility but do it and make a profit at it.

The problem the NYT mentions, that many of these funds do not have nearly enough money to cover the expected decommissioning costs is even more worrisome. The proposed solution from the plant operators is to just let reactors sit for about 60 years and hope the money in the fund will have exceeded the increasing costs of decommissioning by then. This along with the proposal to put spent fuel casks in plant parking lots for up to 200 years and the industries habit of selling off plants to shell corporations, the result is rather obvious. Abandoned decaying nuclear plants with massive amounts of spent fuel sitting near populated areas. While this is more towards the worst case scenario this is exactly what the current system allows and is setting as policy.
The Other End Of The Fuel Cycle.

Spent fuel and languishing reactor sites are not the only problem. The government fuel manufacturing facilities are coming back to haunt the US with a very large bill in hand. Two facilities, one in Ohio and another in Kentucky originally belonged to the US government by way of the Department of Energy. These nuclear fuel factories are massive complexes. The one in Kentucky is the largest single energy consuming facility in the world and uses as much electricity as the city of St. Louis. These two factories have long histories of contamination problems and worker exposures.

The decommissioning of both plants could be as high as 46 billion dollars, the trust fund to clean up these fuel factories only has 4.4 billion currently. The government has kicked this issue around for years refusing to fund the ongoing work needed at the plants while they hemorrhage cash. Adding to the problems, the plant has become a political football. Politicians have been delaying, obstructing and then wanting more money put into the plant as a “jobs program” that would lose even more money. In 2011 USEC lost half a billion dollars along with a $50 million mystery payment from the US govt.

These two plants sit with no clear plan for decommissioning, draining public funds.

http://www.simplyinfo.org/?p=5572

 

[Haakzilla]

...it's coming! :MARIS61:

*UPDATE: in other news, more earthquakes hit Japan today! --> http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/

[video=youtube;MW3TGQCTH0E]

 

[jlprk]

http://www.examiner.com/article/m7-3-quake-hits-fukushima-area-tsunami-hit

 

[jlprk]

A second dock slams into the Northwest. Like the last one, this one is full of slimy vermin from Japan, but this time the windy rainy waves are pulverizing them before they can invade our homeland.

http://www.seattlepi.com/news/scien...mbles-one-from-Japan-found-in-Ore-4151850.php

 

[jlprk]

Every other disaster comes to an end, but a nuclear error is an Energy Bunny.

http://www.naturalnews.com/041800_Fukushima_radiation_leaks_desperation.html

It just keeps getting worse and worse and worse...

 

[MARIS61]

Chernobyl continues to spew decades later.

http://nuclear-news.net/2013/04/26/27-years-later-chernobyl-still-leaking-radiation-still-dangerous/

 

[Denny Crane]

How's the agony coming along?

 

[MARIS61]

How's the agony coming along?

It appears it is and will forever be, far worse than I predicted. Chernobyl has killed millions and permanently poisoned all life in close to 1/4th of Europe, but at least it was landlocked and Russia made serious attempts to attempt to contain the radiation.

Japan has refused all help and basically lied to the world repeatedly while the contamination spews relentlessly into the world's food supply.

 

[jlprk]

A few hours ago, Japan nationalized Tepco!!!!!

http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/05/10/putting-tepcos-nationalization-in-context/

Wall Street Journal says this is the 2nd-biggest nationalization in world history. It disproves conservative economics concerning privatization and regulation. Denny, Maxiep, and all you lesser William F. Buckley intellects...you are now part of this thread. Governments are better than corporations.

 

[bluefrog]

A few hours ago, Japan nationalized Tepco!!!!!

http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/05/10/putting-tepcos-nationalization-in-context/

Wall Street Journal says this is the 2nd-biggest nationalization in world history. It disproves conservative economics concerning privatization and regulation. Denny, Maxiep, and all you lesser William F. Buckley intellects...you are now part of this thread. Governments are better than corporations.

I've heard these rumors for months (I used to work in nuclear). Tepco has really mismanaged this whole disaster. Lying to the government, lying to the press, lying to it's own employees, the company was living on borrowed time.

I think nuclear power is something that is best left to governments. There's too much risk, the costs are too large and there is too long to wait for ROI

 

[Denny Crane]

I've heard these rumors for months (I used to work in nuclear). Tepco has really mismanaged this whole disaster. Lying to the government, lying to the press, lying to it's own employees, the company was living on borrowed time.

I think nuclear power is something that is best left to governments. There's too much risk, the costs are too large and there is too long to wait for ROI

Chernobyl was a government run nuclear reactor.

 

[BrianFromWA]

Personally, I'm fine with private plants that must comply with engineering and safety standards and regulation. Look at how many of the current plants have had inspections that they can blow off, or don't get inspected and have things (relatively) fall apart.

First, single-loop plants are dumb, and were known to be dumb in 1970. I don't think any reactor built in 2013 would be single-loop (mixing the water that touches the hot rock with the water (in steam form) that goes through the turbines).

Second, when problems are noted, they should be fixed or the plant shut down. This happens with airlines, with stadia, with homes that don't meet code, etc.
'
But if it were to be nationalized, that would require government workers to run it. We barely have enough qualified electricians, mechanics, reactor operators and officers in the navy to run our fleet of submarines, and many of those who do leave the service after their commitments and get paid much more by industry to do the work. Would you be comfortable with the reactor operator next you making 30k a year because that's what the federal guidelines say they're capped at? What caliber of people would those wages draw?

 

[SlyPokerDog]

Fukushima Leak Upgraded To Level 3 Severity

TOKYO — Japan's nuclear regulator on Wednesday upgraded the rating of a leak of radiation-contaminated water from a tank at its tsunami-wrecked nuclear plant to a "serious incident" on an international scale, and it castigated the plant operator for failing to catch the problem earlier.

The Nuclear Regulation Authority's latest criticism of Tokyo Electric Power Co. came a day after the operator of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant acknowledged that the 300-ton (300,000-liter, 80,000-gallon) leak probably began nearly a month and a half before it was discovered Aug. 19.

In a meeting with agency officials and experts Tuesday night, TEPCO said radioactivity near the leaky tank and exposure levels among patrolling staff started to increase in early July. There is no sign that anyone tried to find the source of that radioactivity before the leak was discovered.

On Wednesday, regulatory officials said TEPCO has repeatedly ignored their instructions to improve their patrolling procedures to reduce the risk of overlooking leakages. They said TEPCO lacked expertise and also underestimated potential impact of the leak because underground water is shallower around the tank than the company initially told regulators.

"Their instructions, written or verbal, have never been observed," Toyoshi Fuketa, a regulatory commissioner, said at the agency's weekly meeting Wednesday.

TEPCO acknowledged recently that only two workers were assigned to check all 1,000 storage tanks at the plant during their twice-daily, two-hour walk without carrying dosimeters, and their inspection results were not adequately recorded. TEPCO said it will increase patrolling staff to 50 from the current eight.

Earlier this week, Japan's industry minister, Toshimitsu Motegi, said the government will take over cleanup efforts and allocate funding for long-term contaminated water management projects.

The nuclear authority originally gave a Level 1 preliminary rating – an "anomaly," to the tank leak. Last week the authority proposed raising that to Level 3 – a "serious incident" – and it made that change after consulting with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The IAEA's ratings are designed to inform the international community, and changing them does not affect efforts to clean up the leak by the government and TEPCO. The 2011 Fukushima disaster itself was rated the maximum of 7 on the scale, the same as the 1986 Chernobyl accident.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/28/fukushima-leak-upgraded_n_3826890.html

 

[jlprk]

But if it were to be nationalized, that would require government workers to run it. We barely have enough qualified electricians, mechanics, reactor operators and officers in the navy to run our fleet of submarines, and many of those who do leave the service after their commitments and get paid much more by industry to do the work. Would you be comfortable with the reactor operator next you making 30k a year because that's what the federal guidelines say they're capped at? What caliber of people would those wages draw?

Salaries in the corporate nuclear industry (either utilities or military use) are practically set by contracts with government, which subsidizes it. Private salaries could easily be brought down to government salaries.

Hey Denny, notice he says that government salaries are lower than private, in this industry? Is government more efficient than overpaid privateers?

 

[Denny Crane]

Salaries in the corporate nuclear industry (either utilities or military use) are practically set by contracts with government, which subsidizes it. Private salaries could easily be brought down to government salaries.

Hey Denny, notice he says that government salaries are lower than private, in this industry? Is government more efficient than overpaid privateers?

Taken from http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/01/chart-day-federal-government-pay-vs-private-sector-pay

I think you completely misunderstood or twisted what Brian wrote.

There's a difference between military pay scale and what the rest of government pays. He asked if you want guys attracted by the military pay scale wage to control the reactor near your house.

FWIW, I am quite sure that guys who passed freshman physics class at the UofI where I went in the 1970s were perfectly qualified to work on reactors.

 

[jlprk]

FWIW, I am quite sure that guys who passed freshman physics class at the UofI where I went in the 1970s were perfectly qualified to work on reactors.

I didn't know you are from Iran.

 

[BlazerCaravan]

FWIW, I am quite sure that guys who passed freshman physics class at the UofI where I went in the 1970s were perfectly qualified to work on reactors.

To be fair, you don't need to be a mechanical engineer to drive a truck for a living, or need 1,000 hours of piloting experience to be a stewardess. Paralegals don't have law degrees. Dental assistants attend dentists. In fact I'd avoid hiring phd's at most positions because they are insufferable assholes, anecdotally speaking.

 

[Denny Crane]

To be fair, you don't need to be a mechanical engineer to drive a truck for a living, or need 1,000 hours of piloting experience to be a stewardess. Paralegals don't have law degrees. Dental assistants attend dentists. In fact I'd avoid hiring phd's at most positions because they are insufferable assholes, anecdotally speaking.

Sure. But I'm confident that those who passed freshman physics understood the inner workings of a reactor and all the math (calculus) involved. It's not like you need to be a rocket surgeon to be able to run one.