You do realize that despite multiple major earthquakes and a huge tsunami we are still several orders of magnitude away from a Chernobyl like disaster right?

lol are you kidding? how about huge cracks in the physical structure?

if you are so sure its safe why dont allow some guys from guantanamo to do whatever they like in a nuclear plant? no better proof than that.

they could even order explosives to try to xcrush it. if they fail we could end the discussion once and for all.

http://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com/20...lear-reactors/

going relatively in-depth into what went wrong and what will/could happen at Fukushima. i think it's roughly conform with what will1530/ddunc have been saying ITT (thanks for that btw). im still not 100% convinced it's that harmless but that article (and the posts in here) are certainly way more convincing than anything on the news.

Barring using several bunker buster bombs or a tactical nuclear weapon I don't see that much of a threat. If you think they are going to launch a few RPG's at the reactor building and cause a meltdown you are sadly mistaken.

I'm enjoying the goal post shifts, shall we continue?

Well, building 54 nuclear reactors on the beach of the most earthquake/tsunami vulnerable ground in the world doesn't sound like a great idea after all, no matter what you guys say.
Actually, it sounds pretty stupid.
Easy to criticize after the fact I know but still...

damm it would be so much fun to watch them try!!!

the CV of the only Josef Oehmen Google revealed: http://lean.mit.edu/index.php?option...845&Itemid=816
so it looks like his knowledge comes from a "father with extensive experience in Germany’s nuclear industry". meh.

So you're claiming that there are huge cracks in the physical structure that will contribute to something (that you couldn't produce through pushing buttons/turning valves?)

You don't think that these nuclear facilities were built in such a way that are resistant to being damaged by earthquakes.

But just assume away that there are huge cracks, and laugh at the people not making wild assumptions and getting their 'expertise' from Wikipedia. (oh wait, you did claim that you didn't know what you were talking about earlier)

i still dont believe its safe but i cant proof it. but actually i dont care. may it all go to hell, i will die soon anyway (i hope).

When I first started here I didn't even know what a nuclear panner plant was!

Seek professional help.

I've never been in an earthquake, so I'm pretty sure they don't really exist and are merely part of a vast conspiracy to keep people from moving to California, since it's already so overpopulated.

This is really good and well worth reading.

One caveat though, someone in comments posting as "Daniel" who claims to work for the JAEA and seems well informed says that the old-design Fukushima 1 reactor does not have a "core catcher" as described in the post. So if a complete core meltdown had occurred there would likely have been a large release of radioactivity (but localised unlike Chernobyl).

So Japanese markets were down 5% in less than an hour after opening. BOJ pumping 80 billion US into their market. This disaster just gets worse by the minute.

I was listening to CNBC on my way home tonight and they had Cramer on and he was like "now I don't want to profit from this terrible tragedy but here's how to profit from this terrible tragedy" lulz

I concur.

I supposedly slept thru one while vacationing there.. And I'm a light sleeper.

I don't buy it!

On Friday? whoa sool ctarry bra

Not really, no. Name one. Name a type of heavy industry where an accident can make a ~1200 sq. mile area uninhabitable to humans for 25 years and counting, ala Chernobyl. I can't think of a single one.

Now -- allow me to continue with a slight red herring, since we were specifically talking about public health dangers leading to direct deaths due to acute radiation poisoning or cancers. But I'd ask, for the sake of the argument, to name a heavy industry where an accident would require costs to:

- seal off a reactor and create a ~20 mile radius exclusion zone, including the total loss of property, and then costs of resettlement of people
- health care costs to the population exposed
- all that "testing" that ddunc referenced earlier -- research on environment, water, livestock, agricultural safety, probably over a huge radius. Factor in all the indirect costs to related industries within a much larger radius than however far the real effects are felt.
- continued monitoring for a half a century or so

I'm guessing that's hundreds of billions, easy, if it worst-case-scenario meltdown in someplace like the Plymouth plant ~40 miles outside of Boston or the Waterford plant in Connecticut. I can't imagine any kind of accident at any other "heavy industry" facility costing anything close to that, but maybe I'm not imagining well.

Risks still completely misunderstood by declaring nuclear just-so-similar to all other forms of heavy industry, imo. Notice how your resident experts aren't refuting any of this, just saying it's very unlikely to happen.

I haven't read through this thread closely but I have been following the news:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/wo...imes&seid=auto

This is bad, correct? How bad?

The wiki for this lists the economic costs. Cleanup is still going on 25+ years on. More than 1 million compensation claims have been levvied & more than 1/2 have been awarded.

Again you're not wrong, but simply saying that nuclear accident = catastropic disaster is not useful on its own. You need some sort of risk % to accompany it. Experts believe that CERN might create a black hole which will destroy the earth, which sounds pretty scary until you learn it has a 1/99999999999999999999999999999 chance of happening. I'm not suggesting that the chance of a catastrophic nuclear meltdown is in this order of magnitude but I bet it's a lot less than the 1% that someone quoted itt.

I think it's time to define unlikely. Note that these estimates are for frequency of core damage, not the frequency of a massive release of fizzle material and fission products.

* The US NRC requirement for calculated core damage frequency is 1x10^-4, most current US plants have about 5x10^-5 and Generation III plants are about ten times better than this. The IAEA safety target for future plants is 1x10^-5. Calculated large release frequency (for radioactivity) is generally about ten times less than CDF.

A level 6 nuclear incident would be considered a large release of radioactivity. Dvault is talking about a Chernobyl type release (level 7).

Frankly i'm much more scared of a biological weapon facility having a problem. There's a story that goes around my university (dunno if its true) that smallpox was discovered in deep freeze in the back of a Bio lab freezer. There was a couple of incidents in the USSR of anthrax & other nasty **** being found in the water supply near a bio weapons factory.

This stuff gets out and the problems are much worse than at Chernobyl. And as far as I can tell, the benefits of the research are meh

Yeah that Union carbide disaster was way way worse than Chernobyl.