Fukushima why i am not worried

So why worry about Fukushima when Chavara in Kerala has higher background radiation? After all, people living there have radionucleides in their body that are times greater and still lead healthier lives than the rest of us.

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Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name. Nuclear scientists are sending up mushroom clouds of disinformation to allay fears The first reaction to this column headline is going to be: is she crazy?

Japanese researchers have discovered layers of sediment that appear to have been deposited by tsunamis and have concluded that the region had been inundated by massive tsunamis about once every one thousand years. For instance, one compilation of historical tsunamis in and around Japan lists twelve events since having a maximum amplitude of more than 10 meters, six of which had a maximum amplitude of over 20 meters.

The challenge of sifting through and evaluating the stream of potentially relevant geophysical studies to extract data important to nuclear power plant safety should not be underestimated. Perhaps not surprisingly, there has been a fairly bitter debate within Japan about whether academia did not provide suitable warnings or whether it did and industry and regulators ignored them.

Nonetheless, Japan has a historical legacy of severe tsunamis; it does appear that heeding this record, especially as it relates to the area around the plant, would have led to an upward revision of the design basis for Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and perhaps consequently to infrastructural improvements to better defend the installation.

Second, there appear to have been deficiencies in tsunami modeling procedures, resulting in an insufficient margin of safety at Fukushima Daiichi. A nuclear power plant built on a slope by the sea must be designed so that it is not damaged as a tsunami runs up the slope. In , the Japan Society of Civil Engineers developed a detailed methodology for determining the maximum run-up of a tsunami. However, in at least one important respect, TEPCO does not appear to have implemented the relevant procedures in full.

In keeping with international best practices, the Japan Society of Civil Engineers methodology requires computer modeling based on detailed site-specific data. However, preliminary results from a study by TEPCO that was not reported to the IAEA and is discussed further below reportedly indicated that a 9 meter tsunami could have a run-up of over 15 meters.

Given that such a tsunami might have run up higher than anticipated, it is possible it could have damaged vulnerable low-lying components such as the seawater pumps.

Improved modeling of tsunami run-up—had it been heeded—might have provided information that could have prompted TEPCO to take mitigating action in advance of the accident on March 11, even if that modeling had assumed a smaller tsunami than the one that actually inundated the plant. Enhanced defenses would have widened safety margins at the plant and might have mitigated the consequences of a tsunami that was larger than the plant was designed to withstand.

International best practices, as promulgated by the IAEA, requires such phenomena to be considered, as does the U. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. To be fair, it appears that there were no suitable tools available in Japan for TEPCO to analyze the full range of effects of a tsunami. But given the prevalence of tsunamis in Japan, NISA should have encouraged the development of such instruments in keeping with international standards.

Since the IAEA mission it has emerged that, in , TEPCO did in fact perform some preliminary computer modeling that tentatively suggested the tsunami hazard to the plant had been severely underestimated. These simulations assumed a repeat of the AD earthquake. Given the new simulations were based on an actual historical earthquake, they should have been followed up on immediately.

Had the results been verified, TEPCO may have been able to take corrective action in time to avert the disaster of March 11, Following the publication of new earthquake safety guidelines and the earthquake that affected the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa station, the seismic design basis for all Japanese nuclear power plants was reevaluated and at some, including Fukushima Daiichi, it was increased. Under a process known as back checking, no work was required at plants—including Fukushima—that already met the revised guidelines.

Indeed, there was clearly some concern about this problem among Japanese utilities. For instance, when Chubu Electric Power Company chose to expand the seismic design basis for its Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant actually prior to , it did undertake physical improvements at the plant, even though they were not required under the back-checking process, in order to widen safety margins and hence mitigate the consequences of a beyond-design-basis earthquake.

Third, a fundamental principle of nuclear safety is the existence of an effective and independent regulator to set safety rules and to ensure compliance with them. By contrast, computer modeling of tsunami safety was called for as early as the first IAEA guide on flooding hazards at coastal nuclear power plants published in In short, NISA appears to have failed in its responsibilities to review compliance with tsunami safety standards and also to update them in light of both emerging new evidence and evolving international standards.

Had international standards and best practices been followed, the scale of the natural disaster on March 11, , might have been predicted, giving TEPCO the opportunity to enhance plant defenses. In any case, the accident sequence dramatically demonstrated that the plant was not equipped to cope with the events of March Could the plant have been better prepared? Just a few weeks before the accident, NISA gave unit 1 the green light to operate for an additional ten years.

Japan is a densely populated, highly industrialized country with few energy natural resources. The assessment is mainly focused on equipment and structures having a safety function and specifically addresses aging issues. The focus is on selected equipment that may suffer age-related degradation and failure, not on safety weaknesses related to the design or configuration of the installation.

Japan is not unique in concentrating attention on the status of aging equipment during reactor lifetime extension examinations. This is also the case in other advanced nuclear programs. In February , just one month prior to the Fukushima accident, NISA granted TEPCO a ten-year operating license extension for unit 1 after a technical review and some modifications that were carried out the year before.

Though Japan was quite slow to adopt firm regulations for protection against the tsunami threat, it was not for lack of knowledge of proper guidelines and review processes. Japan, like many other advanced countries, requires periodic safety reviews to assess and update the safety status of nuclear installations at ten-year intervals. On the basis of this activity, TEPCO and Japanese regulators should have taken well-understood and straightforward engineering measures to better protect the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station before the accident occurred.

According to these experts, on the basis of international knowledge accumulated during the four-decade operating lifetime of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and put into practice at nuclear power plants elsewhere, TEPCO, encouraged by Japanese regulators, could have taken some or all of the following actions to have protected the plants against a tsunami:. When the Fukushima Daiichi station was constructed, the emergency diesel generators and emergency batteries were installed on the floor inside the plant building to afford protection against earthquakes.

Ventilation ducts in the compartments where this equipment was located were not waterproofed. Moving this emergency power equipment to higher ground, safety experts said, would not have increased its vulnerability to seismic shock, provided it was fixed to a platform designed to resist earthquakes.

Prior to the tsunami, JAPC had partially implemented plans to erect a wall to prevent tsunami water from flooding two pits at the plant where seawater pumps were located and to make the pump rooms watertight.

The wall was erected before the tsunami occurred. Water entered one of the pits because spaces where pipes penetrated into the pit had not yet been made watertight before the accident.

In that pit, a seawater pump that provided cooling for an emergency diesel generator was damaged and unable to function, forcing JAPC to shut down the generator. But no flooding occurred at the other pit where pipe penetrations had been made watertight. Had JAPC not carried out these upgrades, it would almost certainly have lost all three emergency diesel generators, potentially resulting in a much more serious accident.

Within just a few weeks after the accident at Fukushima, Japanese nuclear power plant owners began announcing concrete plans to make widespread and significant plant design changes and other upgrades. On site, spare equipment for the seawater pumps will be stored in a bunkered facility and heavy earth-moving equipment will maintained. Some senior Japanese government and industry experts interviewed for this paper privately concurred that, had TEPCO and regulators taken these steps before, a severe accident with significant off-site radiation releases could have been avoided.

But before the accident the will to make these changes was not there. During the four decades that the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station was in operation, nuclear safety authorities and nuclear power plant owners in several countries were establishing requirements and configuring nuclear power plants in ways that could potentially have saved the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear station from disaster had they been heeded. In particular, some regulatory bodies outside of Japan reassessed the safety of installations in the event of extreme flood hazards, a station blackout, and the loss of the ultimate heat sink.

In the view of safety experts participating in such assessments, had Japan acted on these developments, the plant could have survived the tsunami that struck in March Compared to some nuclear power plants in other countries, the units at Fukushima Daiichi were considerably less protected against a loss of internal and external AC power on the site.

In addition to the lack of waterproofing and bunkering that proved fatal to the emergency power supplies at Fukushima Daiichi, most of this equipment was water cooled, not air cooled as is the case for more modern nuclear power plants. The water-cooled diesel generators required a cooling water system connected to the ultimate heat sink.

There are ample instances of international review processes that have led to upgrades that can help protect nuclear power plants against station blackouts. For example, in the United States beginning in , the Nuclear Regulatory Commission required that a nuclear power plant withstand a complete loss of AC power for between four and eight hours, depending on specific conditions. Some senior European nuclear safety experts expressed the view that the Fukushima Daiichi units in fact likely met the U.

Unit 1 featured an isolation condenser and units 2 and 3 were equipped with reactor core isolation cooling systems using turbine-driven pumps. In Germany, the requirements to protect a nuclear power plant against a station blackout are specified in the regulatory document KTA All German plants have at least one additional standby grid connection and more emergency diesel generators, with at least two of them being protected against external impacts.

The situation in some nuclear power plants in some other European countries is similar. Each unit at the three-unit Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Station in Finland, to give another example, is equipped with four emergency diesel generators necessary for a safe shutdown in all postulated conditions. Each emergency diesel generator is in a fireproofed compartment located well above the design-basis flood level calculated for the plant.

There is also an air-cooled gas-turbine power plant backing up the emergency diesel generators. That power plant is located above the design-basis flood level for the station, is in a separate building, and features two separate generator units, each having two gas turbines. Each of the four gas turbines can supply more than enough power for all three nuclear power plants at Olkiluoto.

In the aftermath of the accident at Fukushima, Japanese experts have drafted new, revised, and more stringent requirements for coping with a station blackout at a nuclear power plant. The March 11 tsunami disabled seawater pumps and all associated electrical and mechanical equipment at Fukushima Daiichi. Without an alternate heat sink, the plant was left without a way to cool its reactors. As it turns out, this absence of an alternate heat sink is a problem in other countries as well.

Unlike the case for hardware defenses against a station blackout, post-Fukushima examinations by European Union country regulators testify to an absence of national requirements for providing backup alternate heat sinks to cope with a severe external event.

But several owners of nuclear power plants in these countries, in consultation with regulators well before the accident in Japan, had provided alternate heat sinks that would be available in the case of a severe external event. These include the Borssele nuclear power plant in the Netherlands, which in the case of the loss of the main riverine heat sink is served by a system designed to be redundant and hardened against the impact from external events that vents steam via relief valves.

It is also served by eight deep water wells designed to be seismic and flood resistant. It's not just the onshore windfarms that bother people, but also the new grid connections pylons and power lines. As the proportion of renewable electricity on the grid rises, more pumped storage will be needed to keep the lights on.

That means reservoirs on mountains: they aren't popular, either. The impacts and costs of renewables rise with the proportion of power they supply, as the need for storage and redundancy increases. Like others, I have called for renewable power to be used both to replace the electricity produced by fossil fuel and to expand the total supply, displacing the oil used for transport and the gas used for heating fuel. Are we also to demand that it replaces current nuclear capacity?

The more work we expect renewables to do, the greater the impact on the landscape will be, and the tougher the task of public persuasion. But expanding the grid to connect people and industry to rich, distant sources of ambient energy is also rejected by most of the greens who complained about the blog post I wrote last week in which I argued that nuclear remains safer than coal.

What they want, they tell me, is something quite different: we should power down and produce our energy locally. Some have even called for the abandonment of the grid. Their bucolic vision sounds lovely, until you read the small print.

At high latitudes like ours, most small-scale ambient power production is a dead loss. Generating solar power in the UK involves a spectacular waste of scarce resources. It's hopelessly inefficient and poorly matched to the pattern of demand.

Wind power in populated areas is largely worthless. This is partly because we have built our settlements in sheltered places; partly because turbulence caused by the buildings interferes with the airflow and chews up the mechanism.

Micro-hydropower might work for a farmhouse in Wales, but it's not much use in Birmingham. Even at their most radioactive, bluefin tuna caught in California waters clocked in at just a sliver of these limits, at around 10 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram of body weight. A year after the disaster, radioactive cesium levels in California tuna had slipped to an average of just 2.

Eating a single dish above the U. Tuna caught in Japanese waters after the disaster had around 15 times more radioactive cesium, Fisher said — so, above Japanese government limits, but below U. The good news is that no Fukushima-caught fish have surpassed safety limits since Dozens of health-focused websites, many high up in search engine rankings, spread fake news about the Fukushima meltdown.

Another is a parasite. The last is a type of oral tumor that has been documented in Chinook salmon for decades before the tsunami. Some sites advise their readers to avoid seafood entirely, since any additional radiation exposure boosts cancer risk.