Fukushima Disaster Quotes

Every unmeasured system is assumed to be critical. It is the same as finding a pistol sitting on a table. Assume that it is cocked and loaded.

As long as nuclear engineering can strive for new innovations and learn from its history of accidents and mistakes, the benefits that nuclear power can yield for our economy, society, and yes, environment, will come.

The Fukushima nuclear complex went on to become the worst man-made engineering disaster in all of human history, outside of war.

Fukushima, Japan. The disaster involving the three General Electric–built reactors on the northeastern coast of Honshu followed a now familiar course, this time played out live on television: a loss of coolant led to reactor meltdown, a dangerous buildup of hydrogen gas, and several catastrophic explosions. No one was killed or injured by the immediate release of radiation, but three hundred thousand people were evacuated from the surrounding area, which will remain contaminated for decades to come. During the early stages of the emergency cleanup, it became clear that robots were incapable of operating in the highly radioactive environment inside the containment buildings of the plant. Japanese soldiers were sent in to do the work, in another Pyrrhic victory of bio-robots over technology.

Perhaps the most remarkable elder-care innovation developed in Japan so far is the Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL)—a powered exoskeleton suit straight out of science fiction. Developed by Professor Yoshiyuki Sankai of the University of Tsukuba, the HAL suit is the result of twenty years of research and development. Sensors in the suit are able to detect and interpret signals from the brain. When the person wearing the battery-powered suit thinks about standing up or walking, powerful motors instantly spring into action, providing mechanical assistance. A version is also available for the upper body and could assist caretakers in lifting the elderly. Wheelchair-bound seniors have been able to stand up and walk with the help of HAL. Sankai’s company, Cyberdyne, has also designed a more robust version of the exoskeleton for use by workers cleaning up the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in the wake of the 2011 disaster. The company says the suit will almost completely offset the burden of over 130 pounds of tungsten radiation shielding worn by workers.* HAL is the first elder-care robotic device to be certified by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. The suits lease for just under $2,000 per year and are already in use at over three hundred Japanese hospitals and nursing homes.21

demonstrating that the first of these, the integral fast reactor, was safe even under the circumstances that destroyed Three Mile Island 2 and would prove disastrous at Chernobyl and Fukushima. The liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), an even more advanced concept developed at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is fueled by thorium. More plentiful and far harder to process into bomb-making material than uranium, thorium also burns more efficiently in a reactor and could produce less hazardous radioactive waste with half-lives of hundreds, not tens of thousands, of years. Running at atmospheric pressure, and without ever reaching a criticality, the LFTR doesn’t require a massive containment building to guard against loss-of-coolant accidents or explosions and can be constructed on such a compact scale that every steel mill or small town could have its own microreactor tucked away underground. In 2015 Microsoft founder Bill Gates had begun funding research projects similar to these fourth-generation reactors in a quest to create a carbon-neutral power source for the future. By then, the Chinese government had already set seven hundred scientists on a crash program to build the world’s first industrial thorium reactor as part of a war on pollution. “The problem of coal has become clear,” the engineering director of the project said. “Nuclear power provides the only solution.

from a distance of 50 miles, were brought down in 10 seconds by demolition explosives, and that was that. The fuel-reprocessing industry in the UK has reported only one criticality accident in which fissile material managed to come together accidentally in a supercritical configuration. Just about every other country that has tried to separate plutonium from uranium in spent reactor fuel has experienced at least one such excursion, and this was Britain’s. This incident at the Windscale Works on August 24, 1970, is described by the criticality review committee at

The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers, introduced in February 1955, have been in service for an impressive 58 years, and they will probably be phased out around 2045. The grandchildren of people who flew the original batch of B-52s could be flying B-52s today. The last B-52H was built in 1962, and this last group of 85 planes still in service has been modified and improved several times. These bombers can go 650 miles per hour and climb to 50,000 feet with a range of 10,145 miles, and they have broken many flight records. They have flown around the world non-stop in 45 hours 19 minutes with in-flight refueling, and can fly from Japan to Spain with one load of fuel. A B-52 can land sideways in a heavy cross-wind, using its in-board landing gear with coupled steering.

Chuck Hansen was wrong about one thing. He counted thirty-two “Broken Arrow” accidents.192 There are now sixty-five documented incidents in which nuclear weapons owned by the United States were lost, destroyed, or damaged between 1945 and 1989.

In major commercial reactor accidents, there always seems to be a single operator action that starts the downward spiral into an irrecoverable disaster.

In 56 years of commercial nuclear power generation in the United States, there has never been a steam explosion, and not one life has been lost.4

but everything else in the history of nuclear accidents has happened for what seem to be the most insignificant, unpredictable reasons,

Flying in a modern jet airplane doses the human with levels of radiation comparable to those found in nuclear disaster zones.

In all, it killed fewer people than the coal industry, it caused less unhealthy pollution than the asbestos industry, and it cannot be blamed for global warming.280

THE RADIUM WATER WORKED FINE UNTILE HIS JAW CAME OFF.

male workers were thought incapable of sitting still for hours at a time to do anything useful.

Isotopes of radium, the first nuclear radiation sources to be commercially exploited, are probably the worst examples out of thousands of radioactive isotopes.

Ivan Pulyui, a college professor at the University of Vienna from the Ukraine, is sometimes credited with having sold the first x-ray tubes, before the x-ray was discovered. The claim is semi-true. His Pulyui Lamp was available perhaps as early as 1882, but it was sold as a light bulb, and Pulyui did not realize that it was streaming x-rays along with a blue glow until he read Röntgen’s paper in 1895. Pulyui immediately saw the medical diagnostic use of x-rays, and his lamps became quite useful.

it is correct to remind them of the British Blue Peacock nuclear weapon, in which the batteries were kept warm by two chickens living in the electronics module aft of the warhead.

The utter wildness of the nineteen-fifties, a decade in which 100 new religions were formed, psychedelic drug experimentation was on an industrial scale, and vast scientific experiments outstripped science fiction, makes the sixties a wind-down.

Nuclear rockets capable of sending a fully equipped colony to Mars in one shot were designed.

Castle Bravo

For a human, the lethal dose is about a tenth of a gram.

However, in very low doses strychnine can act as a nerve stimulant, and I can see how Bailey, and most likely others, saw it as a clever treatment for erectile disorder. Known for both its poisonous and medicinal uses in ancient China and India,

An arsenic compound is still used to treat promyelocytic leukemia, and the isotope arsenic-74 is used as a radioactive tracer to find tumors.

Seeing the value of publication shown by Röntgen’s disclosure, he wrote three articles for the Electrical Review in 1896 describing what it felt like to stick your head in an x-ray beam. The effects were odd. “For instance,” he first wrote, “I find there is a tendency to sleep and I find that time seems to pass quickly.” He speculated that he had discovered an electrical sleep aid, much safer than narcotics. In his next article for 1896, after having spent a lot of time being x-rayed, he observed “painful irritation of the skin, inflammation, and the appearance of blisters … , and in some spots there were open wounds.” In his final article of 1896, published on December 1, he advised staying away from x-rays, “… so it may not happen to somebody else. There are real dangers of Röntgen radiation.

In general, nuclear workers are allowed to absorb 5 rem per year, and civilians are allowed 0.5 rem per year.

Care was supposedly taken in the building’s design to ensure that no enriched uranium would ever be in a critical-sized or -shaped container, so no criticality alarms were called for in the license. An accidental criticality of any kind in this facility, run by highly disciplined Japanese laborers, was not a credible scenario.182

High-profile accidents at Three Mile Island in the United States, Chernobyl in the former U.S.S.R., and Fukushima in Japan put a spotlight on all these risks. There are real problems that led to those disasters, but instead of getting to work on solving those problems, we just stopped trying to advance the field.

The concept was elegant, very lightweight, appealing to engineers, mechanically complex, expensive, and notoriously subject to random failure.

Carlton Church: Australia in Doubt on Building Nuclear Plant With the continuous trend of nuclear proliferation, the nuclear-free Australia is in critical dilemma on whether to start the industry in the country or not. On one end of the coin, the negative effects of nuclear generation will surely cause skepticisms and complaints. On the other side, nuclear fuel industry is worth exploring. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has been reserved when it comes to nuclear talks but he did admit that “Australia should ‘look closely’ at expanding its role in the global nuclear energy industry, including leasing fuel rods to other countries and then storing the waste afterwards”. South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill set up a royal commission in March to undertake an independent investigation into the state’s participation in the nuclear fuel cycle. Carlton Church International, non-profit organization campaigning against nuclear use, says there is no need for Australia to venture into nuclear turmoil as they already have an extensive, low cost coal and natural gas reserves. Other critics has also seconded this motion as it is known that even Turnbull has pointed out that the country has plentiful access to coal, gas, wind and solar sources. During an interview, he also stated, “I’m not talking about the politics. We’ve got so much other affordable sources of energy, not just fossil fuel like coal and gas but also wind, solar. The ability to store energy is getting better all the time, and that’s very important for intermittent sources of energy, particularly wind and solar. But playing that part in the nuclear fuel cycle I think is something that is worth looking at closely”. A survey was also conducted among random people and a lot of them have been reluctant about the nuclear issue. Some fear that the Fukushima Daichii Incident would happen, knowing the extent of the damage it has caused even to those living in Tokyo, Japan. Another review also stated, “We only have to look at the Fukushima disaster in Japan to be reminded of the health, social and economic impacts of a nuclear accident, and to see that this is not a safe option for Australians.” According to further studies by analysts, 25 nuclear reactors can be built around Australia producing a third of the country’s electricity by 2050. But it also found nuclear power would be much more expensive to produce than coal-fired power if a price was not put on carbon dioxide emissions. Greenpeace dismissed nuclear power as “an expensive distraction from the real solutions to climate change, like solar and wind power”. - See more at: carltonchurchreview.blogspot

Carlton Church: Japan Finally Acknowledges Negative Nuclear Effects One of the leading sources of news and information, Thomson Reuters, has just reported about Japan’s acknowledgement of casualty caused by the Fukushima nuclear power plant wreckage. However, it may be too late for the victim as the young man, an unnamed worker in his 30s working as a construction contractor in Tokyo Electric Power Co’s Fukushima Daiichi plant and other nuclear facilities, is already suffering from cancer since 2011. The ministry’s recognition of radiation as a possible cause may set back efforts to recover from the disaster, as the government and the nuclear industry have been at pains to say that the health effects from radiation have been minimal. It may also add to compensation payments that had reached more than 7 trillion yen ($59 billion) by July this year. It can also cause a lot of setbacks from a lot of nuclear projects which were supposed to be due in the succeeding years. A streak of legal issues and complaints are also to be faced by Tokyo Electric, mostly on compensations for those affected. According to further reviews, it is estimated removing the melted fuel from the wrecked reactors and cleaning up the site will cost tens of billions of dollars and take decades to complete. Despite the recognition, a lot more people are still anxious. The recognition would mean acknowledgment of possible radiation effects still lingering in Japan’s boundaries. When it was once denied, the public are consoled of the improbability of being exposed to radiation but now that the government has expressed its possibility, many individuals fear of their and their families’ lives. Hundreds of deaths have been attributed to the chaos of evacuations during the crisis and because of the hardship and mental trauma refugees have experienced since then, but the government had said that radiation was not a cause. Yet now, it is different. The trauma and fear are emphasized more. Anti-nuclear organizations, on the other hand, are happy that their warnings are now being regarded. Carlton Church International, one of the non-profit organization campaigning against nuclear proliferation, spokesperson, Abigail Shcumman stated, “I don’t think ‘I told you so’ would be appropriate but that is what I really wanted to say”. She added, “We are pleased that at last, we are being heard. However, we continue to get worried for the people and the children. They are exposed and need guidance on what to do”. - See more at: carltonchurchreview.blogspot.com

We had therefore invented the perfect weapon for blowing up an entire sky full of multi-engine aircraft in one swat, so we could have defeated ourselves two wars back.

The AEC was tasked with promoting world peace and improving the public welfare while developing weapons that could return civilization to low-population Stone Age conditions in a few seconds.

The purpose is to make you aware of the myriad ways that mankind can screw up a fine idea while trying to implement it. Don’t be alarmed. This is the raw, sometimes disturbing side of engineering, about which much of humanity has been kept unaware.

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If you find yourself cornered by a force of Brits who rib you mercilessly about the SL-1 explosion, it is correct to remind them of the British Blue Peacock nuclear weapon, in which the batteries were kept warm by two chickens living in the electronics module aft of the warhead.

An x-ray machine was not necessary to take a cross-sectional picture of his teeth. They would light up a photographic plate with their own radiation output.

Young women were hired to do the meticulous manual work of applying the paint, as male workers were thought incapable of sitting still for hours at a time to do anything useful. The workers were paid generously, at $20 to $25 per week, when office work was paying $15 a week at most. By 1925, there were about 120 radium-dial factories in the United States alone, employing more than 2,000 women.

Painting the numbers on a watch face was not easy. The 2, 3, 6, and 8 were particularly difficult. You had to have paint mixed to the right viscosity, a steady hand capable of precise movement, and good eyesight. One woman did about 250 dials per day, sitting at a specially built desk with a lamp over the work surface, wearing a blue smock with a Peter Pan collar. The brush was very fine and stiff, having only three or four hairs, but it would quickly foul up and have to be re-formed. All sorts of methods were tried for putting a point on the brush. Just rubbing it on a sponge didn’t really work. You needed the fine feedback from twirling the thing on your lips. Some factory supervisors insisted on it, showing new hires how it is done, and some factories officially discouraged it while looking the other way. Everybody did it, sticking the brush in the mouth twice during the completion of one watch dial. The radium-infused paint was thinned with glycerin and sugar or with amyl-acetate (pear oil), so it didn’t even taste bad.

The practice of tipping a paint brush started contaminating everybody and everything in a watch dial factory. Painters noticed that after sneezing into a handkerchief, it would glow. You could see the brush twirlers walking home after dark. Their hair showed a ghostly green excitation, and they could spell out words in the air with their luminous fingers. Some, thinking outside the box, started painting their teeth, fingernails, eyelashes, and other body parts with the luminous paint, then stealing away to the bathroom, turning out the lights, and admiring the effect in the mirror. There was no problem finding gross radium contamination in a factory. There was no need for a radiation detection instrument. All you had to do was close the blinds. Everything glowed; even the ceiling. Most workers were each swallowing about 1.75 grams of radioactive paint per day. By 1922, things started going bad in the radium dial industry. In the next two years, nine young radium painters in the West Orange factory died, and 12 were suffering from devastating illnesses. US Radium, the biggest watch-dial maker in town, strongly denied that anything in their plant could be causing this. No autopsies were performed, and the death certificates recorded anemia, syphilis, stomach ulcers, and necrosis of the jaw as causes. The dead and ailing, however, had dentists in common, and these health professionals had noticed unusual breakdowns of the jaws and teeth in all of these women. It was beginning to look like another case of an occupational hazard, following closely behind tetraethyl lead exposure at General Motors and “phossy jaw” from white phosphorus fumes in the match industry. Could it be the radium?

Radium has nearly absolute body burden, or a tendency to stay in the metabolism forever, and there are few ways it can escape the biological systems. Its radiations cover a wide spectrum, from alpha to gamma, with unusually energetic rays, and it targets many essential organs. It destroys everything around it, so quickly that cancer doesn’t even have time to develop.

Radium dial watches were still being made until 1963, when finally they were banned in the State of New York.

After Hiroshima was annihilated on August 6, 1945, the Japanese knew better what was going on, and a commando raid on the F-31 “Fat Man” implosion weapon assembly hut on Tinian was organized immediately.

The World War II bombs, the only nuclear devices ever used as weapons so far, were airbursts, detonated at about 1,900 feet above the ground.31 The air surrounding the bomb instantly heated to incandescence. This feature is called “the fireball.” This rapidly expanding sphere translated a percentage of the thermal energy into blast energy, or a destructive wave of compressed air moving outward at high speed, capable of knocking over concrete buildings.

The burns that injured many survivors of the A-bombs were not caused by gamma or beta rays, but by light.

The first thing hit by this airwave was the ground directly underneath the bomb, or “ground zero.” This was a hard thump, and it resulted in an earthquake-like shock energy traveling outward through the ground. The total energy from the detonation was thus distributed as 50 percent blast and shock, 35 percent thermal radiation, 10 percent residual nuclear radiation, and 5 percent initial nuclear radiation. The scientists had not been wrong in predicting small damage due to nuclear radiation, but they had been way off in considering the damage done directly and indirectly by the intense thermal energy.

The heat and initial nuclear radiation portions of the event were over in about 60 seconds, but the bomb effects continued to develop for 6.3 minutes. The rapidly expanding fireball created a large vacuum in midair, and as the heat dissipated, air from the surrounding territory started to be sucked in. The blast thus blew air both ways: first outward, a pause, then inward, back toward ground zero. This effect is called the “afterwind.” Meanwhile, the residual heated air rose in a strong updraft, like a hot-air balloon. Solid material on the ground, now pounded to dust, was drawn up into the rising column, making a dirt-cloud. In thirty seconds, the cloud reached a height of three miles. When the ever-rising cloud reached an altitude where its density matched that of the surrounding air, at the base of the stratosphere, the cloud started to spread out horizontally. The sight of this feature became an icon, a dreaded emblem of the atomic age—the mushroom cloud.

Incredible as it seems, the difference between the subcritical neutron population in a uranium mass, making no fission, and supercritical, making wild, increasing fission, is a very small number of available neutrons out of trillions: all it takes is just one neutron.

By December, the Americans had caught up with the Germans and passed them with a self-sustaining chain reaction. Security was so tight, the Germans did not even know they had been beaten. At the end of the war, their only accomplishment had been the world’s first nuclear reactor accident, caused by water leaking past an inadequate gasket.

Harry Daghlian was the first person to die accidentally of acute radiation poisoning.

By 1870 there were competing formulae, and luminous paints were selling briskly. Most used strontium carbonate or strontium thiosulphate. It had been found, probably accidentally, that strontium compounds would seem to store sunlight and would then give it back after the sun went down. We now know this phenomenon as a “forbidden energy-state transition” in a singlet ground-state electron orbital. The strontium, like everything else, absorbs and then returns a light photon that hits it, but in this case the return is delayed. The strontium atom, excited to a higher energy state by the absorption of light, “decays,” as if it were radioactive, reflecting the light back with a half-life of about 25 minutes. After four hours of glowing, the strontium compound needs to be re-charged with light.

The steadfast rule of working in a high radiation field still applied: use a large force of men with each individual given a small slice of time under hazard.

Enriched uranium dissolved in water or an organic solvent will become an active nuclear reactor, increasing in power, if a specific “critical mass” is accumulated. The hydrogen in the water or the solvent acts as a moderator, slowing the fission neutrons to an advantageous speed, and even a fairly low U-235 enrichment level, like 3%, will overcome neutron losses by non-productive absorption in the moderator. This has been realized since the earliest days of reactor engineering, and those who work with uranium solutions are quite aware of the possibility.

A jet engine is basically a large metal tube, mounted with one open end pointing toward the front of the aircraft and the other end at the back. With the plane moving forward, air blows into the front of the tube. An axial compressor spinning at high speed at the front acts as a one-way door, encouraging air to come into the tube while preventing anything from escaping out. In the center of the tube is a continuous explosion of jet fuel mixed with the compressed incoming air. The mixture, burned and heated to the point of violence in the explosion, instead of blowing the airplane to pieces finds a clear path out through the back of the tube. The escaping explosion products create a reactive force, just as would be made by a rocket engine, pushing the engine and the vehicle to which it is attached forward. On its way out, the expanding gases spin a turbine, like a windmill, and it is connected forward to the spinning compressor wheel.

Be that as it may, the problem of human squeamishness at having an A-bomb explode overhead could be addressed. Simply explaining to soldiers that a nuclear detonation at 10,000 feet was not the same as having it go off at 1,000 feet was true but insufficient. To the soldiers it was a matter of degree. At the high altitude there would be no ground disturbance. No radioactive dust kicked up into a mushroom cloud, no neutron activation of the ground, and negligible fallout. It was all a function of range. The fission neutrons could not travel that far in air before they decayed into hydrogen gas, and the gamma ray pulse would be short-lived and dissipated in a spherical wave-front with a diameter of four miles when it hit the ground.

Just about any country having some physicists and engineers could figure out how to build an A-bomb, but producing the materials for this bomb was where the secrets lay.

After the war was over, the British were very disappointed to learn that all the camaraderie and warm feelings of brotherhood were blown away by the United States Congress Atomic Energy Act of August 1946, forbidding any sharing of atomic secrets with anyone, even close allies.

Alpha radiation consists of a large clump of nuclear particles, or nucleons, and it represents a sudden, radical crumbling of an atomic nucleus, just happening out of the blue. The resulting alpha particle is a helium-4 nucleus, complete, and when hurled at anything solid it can cause damage on a sub-atomic level. The beta “ray” or “particle” (either term is correct) is actually an electron or its evil twin, the positron, banished from a nucleus and hurtling outward at high speed. It is the result of the sudden, unpredictable change of a neutron into a proton or a proton into a neutron down inside an atomic nucleus. This decay event also completely changes the atom’s identity, its chemical properties, and its place in the hallowed Periodic Table of the Elements. Meanwhile, the traveling beta particle, while much lighter than the alpha particle, is still an “ionizing” radiation. If it is a particularly energetic beta example (they come in all strengths), it can hit an atom that’s looking the other way with enough force to blow its upper electrons out of orbit, break up molecular bonds, and bounce things around, causing the matter in its way to heat up. On

The gamma ray, yet another form of nuclear radiation, is an electromagnetic wave similar to ultraviolet light or x-rays, only it is far more energetic. A gamma ray of sufficient energy can penetrate your car door, go clean through your body, and out the other side, leaving an ionized trail of molecular corruption in its path. It is the product of a rearrangement or settling of the structure of an atomic nucleus, and it naturally occurs often when a nucleus is traumatized by having just emitted an alpha or a beta particle. Gamma rays can be deadly to living cells, but, unlike the clumsy alpha particle, they can enter and leave without losing all their energy in your flesh. It’s the difference between being hit with a full-metal-jacketed .223 or a 12-gauge dumdum. Both hurt.

A case in point is Castle Bravo, the code name for the first test of a practical H-bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands archipelago. The concept of a nuclear fusion weapon had been resoundingly confirmed on November 1, 1952, with the explosion of the Ivy Mike thermonuclear device on what used to be Elugelab Island in the adjacent Enewetak Atoll. That bomb weighed 82 tons, sat in a two-story building, and required an attached cryogenic refrigeration plant and a large Dewar flask filled with a mixture of liquefied deuterium and tritium gases. It erased Elugelab Island with an 11-megaton burst, making an impressive fireball over 3 miles wide, and the test returned a great deal of scientific data concerning pulsed fusion reactions among heavy hydrogen isotopes, but there was no way the thing could be flown over enemy territory and dropped.59