I have been doing business in Japan for 20 years, consulting for big and small companies, speaking at conferences, writing for Japanese publications, and helping both American and Japanese companies do business with each other. For years I flew to Tokyo once a month, generally in my role as giver of bad news, which I could get away with as an American. Throughout those 20 years I have been astounded by the energy and discipline of Japanese industry, and by its turgid impenetrability. For a country known for advanced technology, Japan is astoundingly resistant to outside ideas, as the current earthquake and nuclear crisis show yet again.
You’d think they’d want our help, and they do to a certain degree. But it’s like those people I meet on airplanes who find out what I do for a living and tell me they would really like to write a book: what they mean is that they would like to have written a book. The Japanese would like for us to have helped them — to gain the benefits of our assistance without the embarrassment of admitting they need help or the complications of arranging to accept it.
This lesson was learned to some extent during the Kobe earthquake of 1995 when Japan waited several days before even responding to international offers of assistance — days during which Japanese citizens were still dying under rubble. In Kobe what was on offer were mainly trained dog teams to sniff-out survivors. That part of the lesson was learned: when this earthquake happened, Japan was quick to accept such assistance and thousands of lives were probably saved as a result. But the Fukushima nuclear accident is a very different story.
In this nuclear accident the situation is complicated by an extra party — Tokyo Electric Power Company — with its corporate personality and internal agendas. TEPCO is embarrassed by this accident. Embarrassment, either corporate or personal, is a huge deal in Japan. It’s not like they can just give up their corporate face for a few weeks or months while necessary things get done. I saw a similar unwillingness to squarely face reality at General Public Utilities back at Three Mile Island in 1979. In both corporate cultures there was too much emphasis on political damage control — emphasis that often comes at the expense of good engineering.
If a nuclear plant manager is worried too much about his job he isn’t worried enough about his reactor.
TEPCO just this morning announced that four of the six Daiichi reactors can never be repaired. I wrote that right here less than 24 hours after the earthquake and tsunami before the emergency batteries had even run out. It was instantly obvious to even a moderately informed observer like me, yet why did TEPCO take two weeks to come to the same conclusion? Internal politics, which can only increase public danger.
But wait, there’s more! Now we have reports of water contaminated with plutonium at the plant and possible plutonium ground water contamination. Radioactive cesium and iodine are bad enough, though that water can be stored in pools for a few months while the radiation decays then carefully diluted for disposal. But plutonium contamination is forever — at least 10,000 years.
There are right now two plutonium remediation technologies on offer to the Japanese government and TEPCO that I know about — one from Russia and one from the USA. One approach uses nanotech and the other uses biotech but both are novel and unique. Both have been offered to the Japanese through government channels and in both cases the Japanese government or TEPCO have yet to respond.
I know about these technologies because the Russian one is represented by a friend of mine and the American one comes from a Startup America company so I took it straight to the White House myself.
I think it would be smart for TEPCO to adopt both technologies in case one works better than the other. But my sense is that if an answer ever comes from Japan it will be months from now and will probably be “no thanks.”
Think about this as you read about that plutonium-contaminated water, because it is going to be in the news for years to come. If only there had been a technology available to clean up that stuff early in the crisis, the pundits will say, lives could have been saved. There was such a technology available — two of them in fact.
Who’s embarrassed now?
You’re right on the money, Bob. (As usual). I worked for a japanese company years ago, and they were the same way – rigid, stoic, slow to change, and HATED American input. They still believe they are the supreme race on the earth and asking for any help is a sign of weakness. This might be THE wake-up call.
Bob, Roger, you’re definitely right! I consulted for one of the Top 3 Japanese electronics companies during their involvement in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. It was shocking to see how much stubbornness and pride got in the way of progress and innovation, compared to other Global brands. And the amount of money burned, and I mean completely wasted, on their internal bureaucratic processes was shocking!
From this perspective, it’s actually quite apparent why their economy has gone through 4 recessions in the last 20 years, and will continue to slide after the reconstruction blip. The aging population is the cause, not for the reason of an “aging-workforce” but “stubborn idealism” that is threatened like a guillotine on the younger workforce.
This is a generalization; however it’s indicative of their appearance on the world stage: The Japanese value saving-face over cost savings, efficiency, innovation, relationships, and as Bob’s pointed out, the value of human life. If Japan realized that “true saving-face” is accomplished by coming hat-in-hand, and does not result in shame but an outpouring of compassion, support, and good-will, they would gain the respect of the world.
Sadly, their short sided pride will be their downfall, impacting not only their future generations, but us all.
“The Japanese would like for us to have helped them…without the embarrassment of admitting they need help…”
Well, I think this is a bit of misinterpretation of culture.
During the Shogunate, a pattern of governance emerged: at the highest level, the daimyo lords had to leave their extended families as “hostage” in Tokyo and every two years had to pilgrimage to Tokyo to pay homage. This was done to keep the daimyo from conspiring from afar to overthrow the Tokugawa. Louis XIV did the same thing with France’s nobility at Versailles. The Daimyo, for their part, rounded up the local samurai and had them housed in their “castle” towns – where the local Daimyo could keep an eye on the local samuria. The samuria, for their part continued to draw their stipends from the taxation of the local village they were lords over, however, they no longer lived with and amongst the village, but instead afar in the castle towns.
This meant that the villages were relatively free to do whatever they wanted so long as they did not draw attention to themselves and they paid their taxes. Any kind of disruption, at all, would bring the army of the local daimyo upon the village who would then use the occassion to rape, pillage and loot to their hearts content. Villages, where 80% of the population lived, then, learned to keep an exterior ‘face’ of calm to the outside world, even if their was intense dispute going on inside the village. This cultural phenomina cannot be overstated – for the entire time of the Shogunate, Christianity was out lawed (250 years) and for that entire time, some 1800 Japanese villages remained Christian, yet no one outside each respective village knew, until freedom of religion was implemented in post Shogunate Japan. That’s right, entire villages kept the secret. That’s just one aspect – remember in pre-modern Japan, a samurai could kill a lesser being on the hierarchical scale and it wasn’t unlawful. So being self contained is a cultural attribute, and it extends hierarchically out through concentric rings of community.
This is the essence of Japanese communal culture. It also has a hierarchical aspect to it: an individual with a big problem will keep a calm exterior, even though his inner world is falling apart. When the elephant grows to big, the family will keep a calm exterior even though it’s world is falling apart. In corporations this happens at the office level, department level, division level, corporate level and so on.
Of course this cultural phenomina has a lot of confucianism mixed in it, (it defines the hiearchical communal relations) but there are slight variations that can be significant, however, I don’t think it is germane to the point. The point is an ordinary Japanese could have his whole family slaughtered for something he happen to say or act wrong on in the slightest way. It was that way for centuries and permeated the culture. So it is natural for the Japanese to not trust anything coming from outside their concentric rings. The fact is, Japanese have trouble integrating with others. By themselves, they are great, put two or more of them together and you have problems (the same is true with Mormons – and other odd groups, from my experience. I also found my brief time at Andersen Consulting in the mid 1990s to be similar – if you didn’t come up through their system, which I didn’t, you were never truly part of the firm, which was a fairly mutual feeling).
However, there are contravening cultural aspects to this also: like all confucianist there is a strong instinct to assimilate. So east Asians will try to look like the common international order, even if things internally are radically different. This means assimilating ideas from the outside – but ideas tend to come from the top down which in a confucianist society, means coming through academia, which provides a pretty big port hole for a society that is otherwise rather xenophobic. I find the Japanese a great culture, but the fact is, one can never truly integrate with it.
In essence, the Japanese xenophobia is not rooted in pride so much as it is in fear, however, the external face they present rarely matches the internal conditions, meaning it might look like pride, for lack of something better, but most probably it’s rooted in fear from an age that long ago died.
You might think this absurd, but in our own society, religious fundamentalist still adhere to fears, superstitions and archaic teachings eminating out of the bronze age.
“Pride costs more than hunger, thirst and cold.”
Thomas Jefferson
Said All Too Well!
The plutonium was only found in trace amounts comparable to the amounts left behind by nearby nuclear weapons tests: http://mitnse.com/2011/03/30/news-updates/
….so far. Wait a few weeks and post back.
[…] I, Cringely: I have been doing business in Japan for 20 years, consulting for big and small companies, speaking […]
My physics teacher told me in the 80s, actually on the occasion of the Chernobyl crisis, that you would die from plutonium poisoning if you ate one kg of soil (living in Germany), due to contamination from the 60s nuclear weapon tests. Is that possibly true?
This is interesting, because obviously the contamination had no real influence on peoples lives in Germany, and also, it had not influence on the lives of people living much closer to test atmospheric tests either, and where quantities must haven been considerably higher.
I still struggle to get things into any kind of perspective with this crisis.
I don’t know anything about eating soil but I know that in Turkey lots of people died because of cancer in northern part of the country after the Chernobyl incident. Especially the nuts and the tea were contaminated because of the radioactive wind that came from Chernobyl. At that time our president actually said that ‘Radioactive tea tastes better!’, and some other minister (probably minister of health), drank a glass of tea on live TV to make us believe everything was okay. He also died because of cancer years later.
If so I would imagine there would be a lot of dead dirt bike racers in Germany. The media often uses very scary phrases like “Five thousand times the regulated amount of radiation” without mentioning that in many cases the regulated amount is one hundred thousand times or more less than the amount that would be considered potentially harmful.
My favourite statistic is that you get more harmful radiation from eating a single banana than you do from living near a nuclear power plant for an entire year. In most cases despite the scary multiples the amount of radiation exposure even near the plant adds up to less than you would get from a single X-ray.
The problem here is that no-one really knows what amount is harmful. The only real data on links between radiation exposure and fatalities are those based on “immediate administration” (linking death with radiation overdoses). All the rest is mere speculation and (franky, not so) educated guesses.
So as we do not know the strength of the causality between small doses over time and fatalities (or lowered health) the only safe rule is to avoid radiation exposures as far as possible. Interestingly, many governments acknowledge this – they often give nuclear power operators concessions, which limit their legal liability (something which amounts to a “get out of jail free” -card).
“5000 times the recommended amount” is pure unadulterated bogus crap. with a worm on top.
give us the number, and we can figure out what is going on.
for the creaky old minds that can’t look it up, 1 rem = 10 milliSieverts. now you can correlate any old documents you have to today’s news.
plutonium is an alpha emitter. on the skin, no big deal. the nitrate can penetrate, but solid forms are insoluable in water. inhaled, it is believed one atom, it that’s the one the fires before the half life of 480,000 years passes in your body, can be the one that causes cancer.
That seems to be nonsense. Radon is an alpha emitter. If simply breathing in one atom that decays via alpha decay can cause cancer, everyone who lives in a house with a Radon buildup problem should be dead or dying of cancer.
Here, just to follow up:
The water contamination http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/03/25/a-translation-from-the-drudge-speak/ with a link to the actual reports.
My two most recent articles at PJM have covered the accident and the technical terminology: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/author/charliemartin/
Robert, please comment on the web site mitnse dot com, which claims to be affiliated with MIT. An MIT web site does indeed have an old link to the site, adding the color of legitimacy, but it has been reported that the site is actually no longer updated by MIT but instead is now under the control of a graphic designer whose father worked at Siemens in Germany (clearly biased, in other words, since Siemens is a big nuclear industry player). Does the site seem legit to you? They are pooh-poohing the dangers and making it sound like everyone should be buttering their toast with butter from Fukushima. A few Hacker News people have been completely taken in by this.
Type “whois mitnse.com” at a linux command line to see who registered this domain. It was registered by MIT Dept of Nuclear Science and Engineering on March 13 2011.
I don’t say the graphics designer story is not true, but it does not sound too likely either. The site did not have years to drift into obscurity or something like that.
The technical term for that story is “bullshit”. As noted, the domain is owned by the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering; it isn’t being updated as often because, as they note:
“Now that information on the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant is becoming more widely available, we’re reducing the level of activity on our blog somewhat. We’ll continue to monitor your questions and comments and add to the content – posts, responses, and FAQs – but with less frequency than we did initially.
For those of you who have been following our blog please continue to visit or subscribe so that you are notified when new content is available.”
Cs-137 has a half-life of 30 years, so it will not decay away appreciably in a few weeks as suggested above. Still better than plutonium, obviously.
Uh, Bob, what plutonium-contaminated water? Even the spurious “10,000,000 times” report didn’t have plutonium on the isotopes list — just some short-lived isotopes like I-134 that turned out to be mistakes.
The only Pu detected has been in the same order of magnitude as “natural” background contamination — that is, leftovers from above-ground testing, plus perhaps the couple of dramatic above grounds tests in Japan in 1945 — and amounts to 0.5 Bq/kg of soil. That means the activity from plutonium is 0.004 times as much as the activity from k-40 in a kg of bananas.
“the couple of dramatic above grounds tests in Japan in 1945 ” – if it’s an attempt at humour then I am quite frankly appalled. 150 000 (low-end estimate) casualties is really the biggest number of human lives lost due to a single (in this case dual) case of human intervention.
I really cannot find anything to joke about – but I understand if that’s the only way some people can come to terms with the atrocities their state is able to do (and rationalise away).
The Dresden firebombing was bigger, as was the Tokyo firebombing. The Germans did a lot with the camps too. The Japanese did quite a number on Canton also.
Your understanding of History may be a little weak. the two Atomic bombs were a nasty horrible thing, but so was starting the war. All war is horrible. The deaths by the Bomb are bad, but really no more bad that those from the Huns, Mongols, British, French, Muslims, or any other warlike faction throughout History.
The focus on Nuclear as worse than any other environmental hazard is really just superstition. The truth is that nuclear chemicals are all around us, and always were. Uranium is the 8th most common salt in seawater. Thorium is in heavy concentration in many sandstone formations. Radon is in all brick and stone, and finds it’s way out. All of the isotopes that are being identified as leaking in the reactors in Japan have been found in nature, back to Pierre Curie.
Understanding is better than superstition.
Too many cmoplmniets too little space, thanks!
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I have been following the information on the IAEA Web site (www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/tsunamiupdate01.html), the Japanese regulatory agency site (www.nisa.meti.go.jp/english/), and the TEPCO site (www.tepco.co.jp/en/index-e.html). Progressively, the reported information has become more complete. The TEPCO site in particular has gone from useless (during the first few days) to very informative. The Wikipedia page (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident) has been extremely good, and I even think I caught the IAEA copying the excellent Wikipedia tabular presentation of status on each of the reactors, which now everyone seems to be using, with different formatting. I did not check carefully, but I think the Wikipedia article used that tabular presentation first, and it really helps.
I think Bob is right to worry about plutonium. Unless I missed something, the specific detected amounts don’t seem to be reported, only general statements. In the case of this nuclear accident, no news is definitely not good news. I will feel better when the specific measurements are reported.
The amounts are reported in Becquerel here: https://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110327e15.pdf including the “normal background”.
The number I quoted is really 0.54 Bq/kg of soil.As I noted, a kilogram of bananas has 241 times as much activity.
Sorry, wrong link: https://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110328e14.pdf
Plutonium’s radioactivity doesn’t impress me nearly as much as its toxicity.
That’s an urban legend. It’s not near as toxic as some common things.
How is it possible that a corporate entity is allowed to make decisions that affect the health and security of an entire nation? Why is BP, er TEPCO, in charge?
Why are corporate entities in charge? Because our governments have no balls. Where is Teddy Roosevelt when you need him.
You’d rather have politicians and government bureaucrats in charge?
Or single individuals?
Corporations are legal structured collections of people; saying “corporations are making decisions” has no cognitive value.
Red herring.
I would expect to see the nation’s __MILITARY__ in charge. And if a “corporations making decisions” has “no cognitive value” for you, perhaps the issue is a cognitive tin ear …
Electing qualified individuals for government service is the best way to run our society. Civil servants also have to go through a qualifying process in most cases. Any crook or fool can start a corporation. What is really bothersome is the question of how much, if any, influence a group like the Bernie Madhoff gang had on the SEC, allowing him to steal billions. Another scandal in the making is a well know stock-broker whom was busted, served his time and is now in charge of a fund-raising medical charity and other groups that influence medical research funding. THAT’S scary. A proven felon handling money intended to cure disease.
But I digress. Its difficult to blame TEPCO I think. The only way to be sure to prevent catastrophic damage to reactors in a 9.0 earthquake is to not build one in the first place. The Japanese government made a decision for nukes based on calculated risk. They had many good years with nuclear. Maybe now they can rethink their situation and shore up their reactor safety.
Solar energy is waiting in the wings. Good time to own solar tech.
Any crook or fool can be elected to office. And that’s been proven.
It is worth noting that the Fukushima plants used Mixed Oxide fuels, but I can find no information as to the composition ratio. Plutonium isn’t great for eating, but the primary means of problems with it aren’t radiation.
On corporate insularity: Japan is noted for being a leader in robotics, yet there are no robots involved in the work at the power plants. Yes they are not designed for robots, but at least you could send the robot to take samples, if indeed it could not do more, if you got the more advanced robots out of the Sony Toshiba and the likes labs. If you consider some of the designs such as the small robots DARPA is working on they would be ideal. So its not just the US its other companies in Japan that TEPCO does not fully interact with.
A robot is ideal in this case in that the worst you do is set it aside. (Plus with a metal case around the computer it probably is reasonably radiation resistant)
So what would be the best case outcome of Fukushima?
The reactors encased in concrete like Chernobyl, or what?
It doesn’t seem like it’s possible to get this under control in any other way if there have been partial meltdowns, and at least one of the reactor vessels is cracked.
“But plutonium contamination is forever — at least 10,000 years.”
Plutonium-238, the type used in reactors, has a half-life of 88 years and primarily emits alpha particles. Alpha particles are extremely dangerous and have complex shielding requirements like… oh… a piece of paper. Besides, anything with a half-life of 10,000 years can not be a high-energy emitter.
Come on, Bob. If you’re conversant with the subject, then you should know these things. Here’s some more:
“Several populations of people who have been exposed to plutonium dust (e.g. people living down-wind of Nevada test sites, Hiroshima survivors, nuclear facility workers, and “terminally ill” patients injected with Pu in 1945–46 to study Pu metabolism) have been carefully followed and analyzed.
These studies generally do not show especially high plutonium toxicity or plutonium-induced cancer results. “There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during the 1940’s; according to the hot-particle theory, each of them has a 99.5% chance of being dead from lung cancer by now, but there has not been a single lung cancer among them.””
In short, I have no doubt that we’ll hear more about it in the years to come. Unfortunately, it, like this article, will be more sensationalism.
Very interesting, if Pollyannish.
I’ll stand by my 10,000 years, thanks. At what level of Plutonium decay are YOU comfortable? Certainly 80 or 160 or 240 years from now it will still be toxic as Hell. I’d say 10,000 years is about right.
Forget for a moment that Plutonium is radioactive. Plutonium is very toxic, is chemically reactive, and it accumulates in bone marrow. It is a poison that can easily get into the environment and in living tissue. Now, add the fact it is radioactive. If you are exposed to it, it will really mess you up.
On Monday I heard an interesting radio interview with an MIT nuclear expert. He raised some very interesting points. While plutonium was detected outside the plant, they did not know its isotope. The technology is now capable of detecting individual atoms on plutonium. At that level and without knowing the isotope, one can not just assume it came from the power plant. It probably did, but it could have come from other sources. In order to assess and manage a problem you need to work with facts, not assumptions. The MIT expert had a number of issues with the recent information from the accident site. To little fact, too much gibberish.
Bob, that’s not the way the numbers work out. First of all, the urban legends about plutonium toxicity are way overstated. See https://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf15.html
which says:
“Despite being toxic both chemically and because of its ionising radiation, plutonium is far from being “the most toxic substance on Earth” or so hazardous that “a speck can kill”. On both counts there are substances in daily use that, per unit of mass, have equal or greater chemical toxicity (arsenic, cyanide, caffeine) and radiotoxicity (smoke detectors).”
In any case, the amount of plutonium is extremely small: the interesting one, which is to say the only one above normal background plutonium, is the 0.54 Bq/kg of Pu-238.
I think I did the wrong link earlier, the right link is:
https://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110328e14.pdf
Now, the “banana equivalent activity” is 241 times greater — 130.2 Bq/kg. Looked at another way, they’re detecting roughly a billion atoms of Pu-238 per kg or soil. (To figure that, use the specific activity of Pu-238, and apply Avogadro’s number.)
And then remember, it’s not the isotope, it’s the dose. If you’re going to worry about 0.54 Bq/kg, then *definitely* stop letting bananas into the house.
I don’t think the arsenic – plutonium comparison is appropriate. Arsenic while being carcinogenic can be chelated using the drugs DMPS, DMSA, EDTA and a bunch of nutritional substances like lipoic
acid, reduced glutathione, vitamin c, and of all things, kelp. I’m not sure I’d want to try to chelate plutonium as I don’t think there have been many studies on how effective the above mentioned drugs would be.
But if I WERE poisoned by plutonium I’d try chelation and nutritional replacement therapy. Lots of organic food and clean filtered water. What else could you do?
“At least 10,000 years?” With a half life of 88 years, a mole of PU-238 will become a single atom of PU-238 in 6951 years. That’s the beauty of compound interest in reverse.
Then 10,000 years is more than enough.
Why are we arguing a bout lengths of time that exceed not only our own lifetimes but probably that of our culture?
Plutonium is bad stuff that remains bad stuff for a long, long time.
Ever heard of The Long Now Foundation Bob? It was set up to counter the kind of short termism and pessimism that is endemic in your thinking.
Let’s imagine we are living 10.000 years hence. What percentage of the deaths in Japan due to the tsunami is history going to record were due to the tsunami itself, and what percentage due to damage caused to the nuclear facility? Also, whose names are going to be in the hysterical journalists column?
I haven’t done the calculations and maybe there will not be a single atom of Pu238 left in 7000 years from one mole. I also don’t know how bad Uranium234 is but this is what it decays to and this has quite a long half-life 245500 years. I don’t really want this on my sushi in 200000 years if I get to live that long.
If there is more Pu239 in the mix, this takes a little bit longer (half-life 24500 years) and this decays into a particularly time sticky substance of U235, half life of 703,800,000 years. If I am still alive to eat hot sushi when most of the atoms of this have gone I’ll consider that a good innings and be happy.
Plutonium 238 is used in radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which are used to power some spacecraft. Plutonium 239 is used in nuclear reactors… Pu-239 has a half-life period of 24,100 years.
“If a nuclear plant manager is worried too much about his job he isn’t worried enough about his reactor.” But if he’s not worried about his job, why should he care about his reactor?
We should ALL care about his reactor. If he doesn’t then we are all in trouble.
We do care. That’s precisely why he needs to be concerned about his job and his job security.
What ever the half life of Pu the answer is not to go to the Japanese offering help but to ask them to assist you in proving these clean up technologies as there are very few opportunities to test them in the wild. This then becomes the Japanese assisting you rather than taking a handout and loosing face.
If the politics can be made positive so TEPCO is leading the way by utilising new technologies to achieve a better result (or however the spin doctors want to frame it) then this is a win for everyone. I think Bob is right on the money!
Brilliant! There’s a future for you in arms negotiations..
“Who’s embarrassed now?”
its beyond embarrassing.. its down-right criminal.
and the world sits back to wait for those in charge to potentially kill thousands, before the deciding the honourable thing to do is commit suicide.
This may sound paternalistic AND imperialist, but in light of danger, couldn’t Russia and U.S. engineers w/ backing of say, the U.N., jointly say, “FUCK PROTOCOL” and move in and take charge?
Let the diplomats sort out the mess, this IS an emergency and Japanese corporate and cultural customs and protocol are endangering people’s lives and the environment for centuries to come. I mean c’mon. If you happened along a person who has obviously been in a terrible accident, is barely conscious, speaks another language, needs life saving assistance right away, but is embarrassed by you finding them this way, do you act quickly and do what can be done to alleviate their suffering, or wait until they get over their embarrassment and invite you to help them?
Taking charge implies taking responsibility for outcomes. Politicians are quite possibly the worst people on the planet at doing this. Diplomats are a special case of politician and are an order of magnitude less inclined to take responsibility. Nice try.
We all have to take a deep breath and say “you can’t help someone without their permission.” Neilo (above) had the best idea I’ve yet heard.
Bob — Why on Earth don’t you provide some links to the two Russian and US remediation technologies?
Spread the word, get discussion going, etc.?
It appears the Japanese have in fact been asking for help with the reactor:
https://www.seattlepi.com/national/1104ap_as_japan_earthquake.html
“I have been doing business in Japan for 20 years…”
Is there anything that you haven’t done? Please keep the posts about the situation in Japan coming.
What really shits me (sorry but strong words are needed) is that its leaking into the Pacific Ocean from underground. 3 mile and Chernobyl were both “contained” and only (OK OK lots) went into air. Particles dropped out due to air lightness.
Water can dissolve reconstitute and move tons and for ever and to USA in 10 years time!
Imagine the ‘No Swimming’ signs in California!! NO FISHING FOR NEXT 50 years in Pacific!
A Chernobyl sarcophagus in Japan has to contend with earthquakes typhoons and the Japanese mentality when they finally think of it! Good luck!
On Libya the UN Security Council made resolutions for human safety.
A greater danger in Japan and all let it fester with NO UN DEMANDS!
It is a rather LARGE ocean. Nor are we talking about tons of the stuff moving around in that ocean at this time. Panic will not help.
Bring back Douglas MacArthur and Allied Government of Japan!
If the Japanese don’t like to accept help, then why don’t we sell them what they need?
Bob,
In the interest of accuracy … radioactive cesium has a much longer half life than radioactive iodinel that cesium contaminated water will not be at safe levels for about 200 years. Yes, plutonium does have a ridiculously long half life, and iodine releases it’s harmful radiation for a couple of months, so we should all be concerned about the release of thousands of gallons of contaminated sea water back into the oceans which has plutonium.
I am still wondering how much MOX fuel is used in American reactors, and why even use something with such potential for poisoning and irradiating us — aas bad as the radiation potential of plutonium is, it is also very toxic.
radiation spreading
https://www.montrealgazette.com/Japan+radioactive+water+million+times+legal+limit/4558476/story.html
In the years 1945 to 1953, there were about 300 atmospheric and oceanic nuclear bomb tests conducted around the world. I suspect that these tests dumped a lot more radioactive waste than the Japanese power plants will. If anyone has a quantative comparison it would be interesting.
There is nothing Americans and French can do to solve the current nuclear crisis. They are trying to help, but that is an unfortunate fact.
I do not know where you are getting information, but Americans and French from relevant government branches, experts from IAEA, and GE and Areva are somewhere in Fukushima or Tokyo from almost day one. Face saving does not seem to have anything to do with what is going on at Fukushima Daiichi. The crisis, I heard, has followed a logical sequence and developed in a way that nuclear experts anticipated once the type of neclear power plants at Fukushima Daiich lose electric power to run their cooling systems.
Some journalists seem to blindly believe somehow that there are solutions out there somewhere outside Japan, but the Japanese government and TEPCO are not seeking enough help. But the fact is that there is no silver bullet other than fixing and reinstalling a new cooling system which engineers and mechanics from TEPCO, Toshiba, and other supporting companies are working hard on, while others are trying to cope with troubles newly arised along the way.
I wonder why U.S. military does not publicize the fact that there is nothing much it can do to control, specifically, the situation at Fukushima Daiichi in termes of resouces, experience and knowlege.
Here is a quote from a newspaper article that illustrates a case of U.S. government’s support activities at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. This is not part of the solution to the crisis, which is to keep cooling those troubled feul rods for about 10 years until 5000 Fahrenheit degree comes down to managable heat level. But some of commenters here may feel somewhat relieved to hear that American experts are informed, consulted, and actually involved in this desperately critical project.
________________________________
The government intends to use a small U.S. remote-controlled aircraft to check radiation levels around spent nuclear fuel pools at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, sources said.
Use of the T-Hawk drone, which is capable of hovering and moving vertically, was proposed by the U.S. government, the sources said. The U.S. military has employed it in reconnaissance operations in Iraq and other countries.
Man you guys are bad at nuclear stuff!
Plutonium as an alpha emitter with a long half-life means that the rate it emits radiation is *low*, which is why it takes a *long time* for a set number of atoms to decay. This slow decay rate means that it takes a long time before a lump of Plutonium has changed to another isotope or atom (depends on the pathway). A lump of something with a short half-life will have negligible radiation sooner, but during the decay time (several half lives) the radiation emission rate will be higher than that of Pu.
Now, as each atom decays it changes from Plutonium to some other atom, which may or may not be radioactive (depending on a probabilistic decay pathway). Each Pu-238 atom can do an alpha decay *only once*. It is not like each Pu atom keeps emitting for the duration of its half-life (although if it was a beta or gamma emitted it would be different, but alpha emitters are pretty much one-shots).
For the poster that talked about having a *single* Pu atom inside you then there is a 50% chance in the 88 years it would emit a *single* alpha particle and change to a different atom or isotope. Probably not fatal. I think they were getting confused about how alpha emitters are easily shielded by paper, but getting them inside you is dangerous. The danger comes from having billions of alpha emitting isotopes in you (a tiny quantity still) but not a single atom.
So the slow decay rate (eg. long half-life) of Plutonium means it mostly does nothing from a radiation perspective (we’re ignoring the bad chemical aspects, which deal with the electrons and not the nucleus). The problem is that a large number of Plutonium atoms will not be safe for a long time, even if they emit their radiation relatively slowly compared to Caesium or Iodine isotopes.
Mr Cringely, your writing is excellent and entertaining, but it is clear you are little fuzzy on the physics of radioactive decay – hence the panicked tone in your responses in this thread (which a physcist like myself consider irrational, since they don’t follow the facts of radioactive decay). Plutonium is bad in high concentrations, but we have very little information on the concentration and total volume released. At low concentrations its long half-life means it is safer (decays more slowly) than many other substances (those bananas!) that the media ignore – when a comparison might restore a sense of perspective.
This is a bad accident for sure, but the tsunami has far worse direct and indirect (eg. toxic chemical fires and spills) effects than the sensationalist radioactivity reporting.
Finally, to the poster who took umbrage at the joke about the use of nuclear weapons. Why are you so irrational about that particular use? Would it be better if bows and arrows had been used instead? Not all wars are bad, illegal or unjustified. All are tragedies. Being irrational about it not helpful and loses credibility.
See also the rejection by the Japanese government of US military help in rescuing survivors of the crash of JAL flight 123 in 1985. US helicopters arrived over the wreckage within 20 minutes, but were ordered away by Japanese officials, and untold number of survivors died of exposure during the night before JSDF members arrived 12 hours later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Airlines_Flight_123
When I taught a basic electronics course in collage I used to start by asking the class, what kills a person Volts or Amps? Invariably the class would be split in their answer. I then would explain to them, that as a former Marine and therefore an expert at killing people, that the act of killing was work and therefore it was Watts that killed. This was my intro to the course. My point here is, that the media loves to hype the story for the attention that it garners and unfortunately the average person dose not know if it’s hype or not. Show me the facts, just the facts.
there can only be 1 TW Helwig who is a former Marine…Tommy ?
Can you comment on today’s news? :
Fukushima has been raised to a level 7
I do not understand what’s behind it.
thanks
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[…] that started last year in Japan following the tsunami. But unlike those previous columns (1,2,3,4,5), this one looks forward to the next Japanese nuclear accident, which will probably take place […]