I'm certain that the recent earthquake, Tsunami & the subsequent damage to the Fukushima Nuclear power plant, will have far reaching consequences, both in Japan & Globally.

This thread is a search for all of the issues arising from these events, including purely environmental issues, but also the human consequences of these events.

To start the ball rolling, I have just come accross the following article, which provides one insight


One consequence of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami that is not receiving as much press as the ongoing struggle to cool the damaged reactors, but which continues to influence more people, is the lack of fuel.

Nine of the Japanese refineries were damaged and put out of action, and this dropped the amount of fuel being refined from 4,500,000 bd down to 3,100,000 bd.

The lack of fuel for transportation affects not only those in the disaster area, but also those away from it, since food and fuel itself depend on transport to move it to customers around the country.

"What we urgently need now is fuel, heavy and light oil, water and food. More than anything else, we need fuel because we can't do anything without it. We can't stay warm or work the water pumps," said Masao Hara, the mayor of Koriyama city, in Fukushima prefecture.

Fuel needs are not just gasoline and diesel for vehicles. With the bitter cold that remains over much of the north of Japan, and no electric power, kerosene is also needed for heating. For domestic heating many homes rely on kerosene stoves to heat individual rooms in use, rather than using central heating. Stocks had been falling before the earthquake, due to the severe winter this year. And with stocks being sent to help refugees, there are now shortages in other parts of Japan.

While there are some indications that the nuclear problems may be being brought under control, the problems of fuel shortage and the cascading problem of food, fuel, and other resource distribution that it brings with it are likely to remain in Japan for several weeks as the crisis continues.

Link -
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7697
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So, not only has electrical power been possibly permanently knocked at the Fukushima plant by this event, but nearly one third of Japans fuel supply capacity has also been knocked out by the same event and that capacity will take a lot longer than a few weeks to sort out.

With Nuclear power likely to be greatly reduced, there are now suggestions of building new Fossil Fuel powered stations, but many of these will have long gestation periods and that process may be further exacerbated by the need to rebuild a great deal of infrastructure, such as roads & ports.

In addition, if Japan does shift further away from Nuclear power and closer to Fossil Fuels, then the Global costs of Oil, Coal & Gas, will undertake a further substantial rise, as a result of that increasing Demand, particularly at a time when the Supply of Oil & Coal is going to be in Decline!

As this event recedes and, in particular, the final outcomes on the Fukushima power plant are realised, attention will shift to the future of what to do with the Fukushima plant & other Japanese reactors.

The outcome of those discussions will reverberate around not only Japan, but the entire world!

That said and by way of caution, in all of those discussions we should bear in mind that we are in a period of expanding Demand, which is likely to continue for some time yet, barring a complete breakdown in Global Economics.

We are also in a period, where the Supply of sources of Energy, for Power & Fuels is set to contract and that contraction when set against a greater Demand will drive Energy Prices thru the roof, thereby drastically affecting the Global Economy.

So, in the short to medium term, whether we like it or not, whether we want it or not, Nuclear power may well be something we may find impossible to discard?    

That is but one of the consequences of the recent Japanese earthquake, Tsunami & Fukushima Nuclear site events, there are many more, what's yours?

It's really hard to imagine any one substance willingly in use by humans that could take months to be artificially cooled and around 15 years to be mostly cleaned up after a single industrial accident...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

Quote:



3 decades later, and the reactor site still hasn't been fully cleaned up...

Foolosophy wrote on Mar 22^nd, 2011 at 10:28pm:


Yes, but the Chernobyl accident was much more serious. The design was such that when the building blew up, the reactor core was visible from the air, and the helicopter crews reported seeing the bright light from the exposed fuel rods, just before they died. (most of them). They did not manage to retract the control rods at Chernobyl. I've read just about every report that came out of Chernobyl. It was a sobering example of what can go wrong with bad management. 

The question is that of cleanup of the area around Fukushima.  The most badly contaminated area is about 20-30km North of the plant.  The main issue will be Cs isotopes. Iodine is more of a problem for the first month or so, and it is relatively volatile anyway (for a solid).

It's unlikely that either Uranium or Plutonium will be found any distance from the plant, or even outside the immediate plant area.

Equitist wrote on Mar 22^nd, 2011 at 11:13pm:


I can imagine emissions of carbon dioxide killing more people over the next 200 years than all the radioactive accidents in history.

Foolosophy, which do you think has the most serious far reaching consequences?

Fukushima or the burning of fossil fuels.

March 23 (Bloomberg) -- Early morning earthquakes rattled Japan’s crippled nuclear plant as engineers restored lighting at a control room and endeavored to connect power cables needed to cool the reactors.

Four quakes of 5-magnitude or greater struck eastern Honshu, Japan, within an hour starting at 7:12 a.m. local time, according to the U.S. Geological Survey website. There was no impact on the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant itself, the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said in a statement.

Restoring power is key to ending the crisis at four unstable reactors that have leaked radiation into the ocean and forced the government to evacuate thousands of local residents.

Lights are on in the control room at the No. 3 reactor and there is some lighting working at No. 4, the company said today. Reactors No. 5 and 6 are already supplied with electricity.

“They’ve made considerable progress bringing equipment to the plant and restoring power,” David Lochbaum, director of nuclear safety at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Union of Concerned Scientists, said on a conference call with reporters. “But they’re not out of the woods yet. They are working with razor-thin margins.”

Decaying Fuel Rods
Seventy percent of the fuel rods at the No. 1 reactor may be damaged and 33 percent at the No. 2 unit, Tokyo Electric said on March 16.

The first four reactors at Fukushima will likely have to be decommissioned after being damaged by seawater brought in to keep them cool, Lochbaum said. It’s unclear whether reactors No. 5 and 6 will be able to operate again, he said.

“On March 10 they had a multibillion-dollar asset that generated a lot of electricity,” Lochbaum said. “On March 11 they had a multibillion-dollar liability that’s going to cost a lot to clean up.”

Food Screening
Five kinds of radioactive materials released by damaged fuel rods were detected in the sea, including iodine-131, cesium-134 and cobalt, according to Tokyo Electric. Radiation in food is measured in Becquerel, a gauge of the strength of radioactivity in those materials. The prescribed safe limit for I-131 in vegetables is set at 2,000 Becquerel (Bq) per kilogram and 500 Bq/kg for radioactive cesium.

Screening food for radiation is being stepped up as Japan seeks to calm a population that eats more fish than any other nation except China. Shih-Yew Chen, a researcher at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, said the levels found so far in milk and vegetables could cause a slight increase in the number of cancer cases.

Contaminated Vegetables


The death toll from Japan’s worst postwar disaster climbed to 9,199 as of 11 p.m. yesterday, with 13,786 people missing, according to the National Police Agency in Tokyo.

Link -
http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ap4eMTkFcXrI&pos=9
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perceptions_now wrote on Mar 23^rd, 2011 at 12:57pm:


On ABC National this morning they had several crates of spinach from Ibaraki prefecture at the main vegetable market in Tokyo. Nobody would buy them.

To put the highlighted section in perspective, the natural background radiation in Japan is 0.1-0.3 uSv/hr which corresponds to a dose over 10 days of 72uSv. Over a Year, the total natural dose is 0.8- 2.6mSv.

Now half of that is roughly 1mSv. Dividing that by 240 hours gives us 4uSv /hr. If I was faced with the choice of eating that spinach or starving, I would carefully wash the spinach, since most of the Cesium will be in the form of Cesium carbonate dust on the leaves. I would then cook it with spices and paneer (Indian cottage cheese) and serve it with some freshly prepared biryani(which is coincidentally what I'm making tonight) , comfortable in the fact that  my dose was significantly less than 1/10 of the radioactive dose rate of the average inhabitant of La Paz, Bolivia or Denver Colorado, and considerably less than the average intercontinental frequent flyer.  

Incidentally, the radioactive dose from sleeping next to a human for 8 hours every night is around 0.02 mSv/yr, so that's relatively safe too.  

The concern of course is pockets of higher concentration in the vegetables, but I'd still prepare them the same way and eat them if they were ten times that dose rate.

By the way, the other element not mentioned so far is Strontium 90. After a month or so, Cs-137 and Strontium-90 will be the major contaminants. Cs-137 is a gamma emitter and Sr -90 is a beta emitter. The worst form of radiation for ingestion or inhalation is alpha particle radiation by a factor of 20.

The worst conseuqence is that we now have to listen to nuffies saying that this non-meltdown is somehow 'proof' that nuclear power is unviable in australia. 

Not too many 9.0 earthquakes or 40 year old reactors in australia is there?

see what I mean?