Fukushima studies show wildlife is doing nicely without humans, thank you very much Studies of biodiversity around the former Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan have shown that a decade after the nuclear incident there in March 2011, the local wildlife, at least, is mostly thriving. The incident at the Fukushima Daiichi site – in which three of the site's six reactors suffered meltdowns due to damage from …
Even in those conditions, our planet will do just fine. It will keep turning around the Sun as usual minding its own business. As for lifeforms ? Oh, well, Earth may start everything from scratch allover again. If it feels the need. However something tells me it might like to take some time off.
The sun has about 1-1.5 billion years left before it gets too hot for this planet (though still a ways before swallowing it up).
That's 3 full Cambian cycles! From near nothing, through several extinction events (with 90%+ and 70%+ wipe out rates), to today.
So even a full shutdown and re-install should be fine, because it's still a perfectly located planet with lots of water and an atmosphere with useful gasses around a mild G sun.
Can prolly squeeze even more cycles in there if you only hit crtl-alt-del.
Big numbers are very hard to grasp and that goes for time too.
I found one way of visualizing time quite good.
Assume you have a measuring tape in your hand and it is say 4.5 Km long ( 4.5km= 2mi 1401.260yd) to make it so much easier to grasp for those who find the metric system difficult.
That 4.5 km 4500m represents the age of the planet 4.5 billion years.
Looking down at that tape, 1mm represents 1000 years so that 5mm is when the pyramids were built.
Looking down that tape a bit further, some 70m will represents 70 million years, that is when the dinosaurs went extinct.
And behind that 70m is still 4430 meter, 4430 million years, 4.43 billion years.
PS. I suggest you check your numbers.
Or multi-cellular life emerged (according to the fossil record) 500m years ago. That's 1/9th of the life of the earth. So for 88% of the life of the earth there was no multi-cellular life.
So even looking back an incredibly long time, to life before the dinosaurs there is still an unimaginably long time before that to consider.
I think I'll go and lie down. Thank god there is no Total Perspective Vortex!
the earth did that ctrl+alt+del thing at least once, maybe even a couple o' more times, one of course being the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. The Cambrian era also had a LOT more variety of mollusks and so there are theories about extinction events then, too.
as in "what killed the trilobites" ?
(it is my general opinion that without extinction level events, there would be no REALLY SIGNIFICANT evolution, for without a stresser, there is no need to evolve)
About half of Fukushima prefecture is further away from the nuclear plant site than parts of other neighbouring prefectures. Yet the word "Fukushima" seems to cause fear. An equivalent in the UK would be an accident at the Hartlepool nuclear power plant, and the problem being labelled "Durham".
Fukushima is big. So are wild boars, on a different scale. If the locals are smart, they'll start exterminating boars before the population explodes. Because boars are not good for agriculture - they'll eat just about anything, and they'll root around in the dirt to get more of it. Since these ones are radioactive, they can't or won't be eaten, so they're a total loss, foodwise. They destroy crops and ruin land.
The problem with nuclear power is the push to make it "cheaply". That's exactly what went wrong at Fukushima - cost cutting corners. Just as in the USA, in Japan the nuclear industry cannot find anyone willing to insure them, so it becomes the governments job to be the insurer.
Fukushima shows the insurers were right, as far as staying solvent.
The Japan Center for Economic Research (JCER) estimate total cleanup cost of between ~300 billion to 700 billion US over 40 years.
https://www.jcer.or.jp/english/accident-cleanup-costs-rising-to-35-80-trillion-yen-in-40-years
And there still seems to be no political solution to the problem of nuclear waste. Even casing it in glass - a process known for decades, is never done because it is too expensive.
I think it would be reasonable to have nuclear as part of a portfolio of energy solutions - conditional on being willing to pay for safety and proper waste disposal.
Finland will get its fifth nuclear plant beginning next year and for the wast problem for all five, probably six, plants a wast storage has been built.
More on that in this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYpiK3W-g_0
Finland Might Have Solved Nuclear Power’s Biggest Problem
Company greed yes, they had been warned about the poor emergency power availability but did nothing about it.
Had they had that power available to calm down the reactors nothing "radioactive" would have happened.
Their power production from their local electric generators was destroyed by water due to the tsunami, they had been warned about that too.
To be fair, there was plenty of geographical evidence and written human accounts of pre-1900 disasters to know with near 100% certainty that such a tsunami was more likely than not to occur over any 200 year period.
Ordinary villagers from pre-modern times had even gone to the trouble of planting obelisks with the message "never build houses below this height".
But "EvilDrSmith" I think you knew that! :)
Dealing with spent LWR (light water reactor, most nuclear reactors out there) fuel is easy. The French have been reprocessing their spent LWR fuel rods for decades now and as a result have only a small volume of nuclear 'waste', of which many isotopes are actually darn useful for everything from medical and other sciences as well as medical treatments.
The Russians are well-progressed with fast neutron reactor tech, with their BN reactors (active since the 1970s) and new BREST-300 reactor that's under construction currently. All of these are capable of burning up spent LWR fuel after pyroprocessing.
The main reason why reprocessing of spent fuel isn't done more, and not more fast reactors already exist isn't because it's tough, but because the once-through uranium fuel cycle is so goddarn cheap that the extra expense of reprocessing or pyroprocessing & using it as fuel in FRs just isn't that attractive, economically speaking.
That is, until recent improvements in these technologies that are bringing the cost down hard. That's why Russia's BREST-300 and similar FRs stand a good chance of chewing up spent LWR fuel soon. TerraPower's Natrium reactor is another FR like the BN-series that will happily use up the spent LWR fuel in the US once the first plant comes online in a few years.
Nuclear waste only exists in the head of those who are victims of propaganda, or those with an anti-nuclear agenda.
"The problem with nuclear power is the push to make it "cheaply". That's exactly what went wrong at Fukushima - cost cutting corners"
No, not really. What went wrong was the Japanese culture that prevents junior members of a team contradicting senior members - a senior bod decided that the tsunami wall was quite high enough, thankyou, and that there was no need to site the backup diesel generators any higher up. Engineers knew this was a disaster waiting to happen but couldn't say anything.
Interestingly a direct result of Fukishima was the redesign of Hinkley point's backup systems, as there was a tsunami in the Bristol channel in the 17th century.
Actually I would put it down to critical mission decisions being made by finance rather than engineers. It's not just a Japan problem - take a look a Boeing, which used to be an ace engineering company, but metamorphosed into something else.
Overall, Japan has a number of fantastic engineering companies. Engineering is how they maintain their export surplus. Obviously, TEPCO was an exception. That's rooted in it's being a domestic electric supply company, a closed market, with success not defined in terms of export sales.
> That's exactly what went wrong at Fukushima - cost cutting corners
Are you confusing Fukashima for Chernobyl?
Fukashima was a state of the art 70's reactor design shortly to be retired for is newer brethren on the same site.
Poor design however failed to protect the cooling system from extreme flooding.
Because waste reprocessing necessarily makes the material better able to be used in weapons. In fact, this is the big problem of more-efficient fusion plant designs: the dual-use conundrum. The thought is if it can produce weaponizable material (and even thorium plants can produce weaponizable uranium-232), someone out there's going to be desperate enough to exploit it.
>>so places like Sellafield have more or less stopped because they can't ship the results back out
To be fair its not just the shipping the products out that is the problem.
A large chunk of the rerpocessing system at Sellafield/Windscale/whatever the flip they call it these days, never started reprocessing fuel in the first place.
IIRC millions were spent on a new enclosed system that failed at a weld carried out by, presumably, the cheapest bidder; tons of radioactive material now fills the location/containment. Trouble is that weld is in a place never designed to be visited by a human and now too radioactive for a human to visit to effect the repair.
As always, its cost cutting and/or corporate/government intransigence that ruins the safety record of nuclear power/reprocessing.
Sounds similar to Chernobyl in terms of local natural recovery. Remove the people, nature regains control and the wildlife thrives.
It's a shame it takes catastrophic events like this to show and get people to understand how the world could/should be.
I guess all will be forgotten again once the selfie generation tourists start returning.
Also some people decided to remain in Chernobyl and when people had to leave and could not take their cows with them they let them loose so that now they have "wild" cows living a "free and happy life" in mother nature.
There is a video on YouTube about that.
One could however add that no species come back, what comes back is what already is there or moved there, they are just given a better chance to multiply, or well get "wild" again.
I am all for green and nuclear power.
"Like the two-headed calf, the three-eyed fish and the four-legged chicken (besides the mentioned, probably fluorescent, nuclear pig-boar)?"
So that's what they mean by biodiversity.
I wonder if the Razor toothed hogs turn green if you make them angry?
Though the only thing that really bothers me, is the man eating rice grass.
Doesn't he knoe how to thresh it and cook the seeds?
There was an old lady that swallowed a bullfrog;
What a hog, to swallow a bullfrog!
She swallowed the bullfrog to catch the cat,
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her!
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly;
I don't know why she swallowed a fly - Perhaps she'll die!
> This inexplicable, gormless invasive species, which has turned up in South America, Europe, China, South Korea and just about everywhere else it isn't wanted, has a voracious appetite, a prodigious reproduction rate and few predators in most of its adopted new homes.
"Gormless"?
Given its high and global success, its blithe equanimity in the face of futilely ravening predation, and of course its prodigious sex life, I question your questioning of its gorm, sir. I would say that it DOES have gorm. Much gorm, in fact. Indeed, it could be said that its gormosity stands as a shining example to others, an example to all species, of how to live a life of mindful gormfulness.
It may be that your gormometer requires calibration.
The disaster that wasnt. Fukushima had so much going for it to be a complete catastrophe and refused to do so, it is a great advert for nuclear power. Old design, backup generators in the wrong place, hit by both earthquake and tsunami which caused incredible damage and killed many and yet the power plant kept safe.
I am hoping at some point soon there is a massive backlash against the green lobby in the UK for our current issues around gas and energy supply. Where is all this plentiful cheap energy from the monuments to the sky gods that was promised? Instead the green dream brings gas shortage, high prices and lack of supply. Along with knock on effects of a gas shortage. Its a shame labour chickened out of its plans to build more nukes.
"I am hoping at some point soon there is a massive backlash against the green lobby in the UK for our current issues around gas and energy supply."
Exactly. Better to scapegoat and point fingers rather than fix the UK's very real energy problems. It's much easier. At least with smart meters we can now have pinpoint accurate rolling blackouts for the plebs.
@AC
"Exactly. Better to scapegoat and point fingers rather than fix the UK's very real energy problems"
Eh? The real energy problems is that after tonnes of investment and growing reliance upon extremely unreliable and under-performing methods of generating electricity which requires gas backup has left the UK reliant on gas. Then we ban fracking which would give us a reliable source of gas. The fix is simple, stop subsidising the monuments to sky gods and switch back on the coal plants (as is being done in limited fashion because its necessary).
"At least with smart meters we can now have pinpoint accurate rolling blackouts for the plebs."
Probably the plan. Government refuses to build energy generation and so dictates a way to knock off the demand. All stuff pointed out way back when labour were doing this (cons continuing with it).
>has left the UK reliant on gas.
Yes indeed. The UK is reliant on something it no longer has reserves of, after the the ludicrous "Dash for Gas". Sad to see the world's foremost civil nuclear country brought low by energy carpet baggers and successive dogma driven governments. Still at least France will bail us out with their nuclear electricity scraps. Merci. (Oh dear did we just blow half the interconnect to the continent?! Light out everyone!)
Funny that when we run for the hill because of "scary radiation" the local flora and fauna dont seem to have a problem with such low radiation levels.
Funny that...
I'm often confused why we are allowed to fly in planes. You get more radiation from a flight than you would if you lived for a year at Fukashima or Chernobyl, excluding living in the reactor itself obviously.
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