Japanese Ice Wall To Stop Reactor Leaks 225
minstrelmike writes "Japan is planning to install a two-mile, subterranean ice wall around the Fukushima nuclear plant. 'The ice wall would freeze the ground to a depth of up to 30 meters (100 feet) through a system of pipes carrying a coolant as cold as minus 40 degrees Celsius (minus 40 Fahrenheit). That would block contaminated water from escaping from the facility's immediate surroundings, as well as keep underground water from entering the reactor and turbine buildings, where much of the radioactive water has collected.' The technology they're using has not been used to that extent before, nor for more than a couple years. An underground water expert said, 'the frozen wall won't be ready for another two years, which means contaminated water would continue to leak out.' But at least they have a $470 million plan ready to present to the Olympic committee choosing between Madrid, Istanbul or Tokyo."
The short; (Score:5, Informative)
The prohibition on armed forces is written into Article 9 the Japanese Constitution of 1947, which states that Japan forever swears off war as a mechanism of foreign policy to resolve disputes. This was an article that was pressed in in order to ensure that Japan could never rise up militarily again - the Pacific campaign was incredibly brutal, and the Americans didn't see the worst of it (the Chinese and Koreans were treated worse). To this day China and both Korea's are still angry with Japan for what they perceive as a failure to sufficiently apologize for what the Japanese did earlier this century, and they would massively oppose any move by Japan towards returning to that state (i.e., getting a real military instead of the Self-Defense Forces they currently have).
Plus, the majority of the Japanese population supports Article 9 - the long-term suffering of the Japanese population via Allied air raids (read about the Tokyo firebombings that killed more people directly than the A-bomb attacks) punctuated by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has provided an inherent anti-war sentiment in subsequent generations of Japanese people.
In short, the US cannot decide for Japan whether to allow them to have an actual military - the US does not have the legal power to do so, and no one involved wants to eliminate this situation. (copy pasted from Yahoo)
The long;
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/89apr/defend.htm [theatlantic.com]
Re:This needs to be taken out of their hands (Score:4, Informative)
possibly prevent people from moving back in to a small city for a while - all effects localized in a single country.
A lot of this water is escaping into the ocean, making this a global problem.
No, because by the time it gets to global extent, it's so dilute it's not a problem any more.
At this point, we have the tragedy of the commons [wikipedia.org].
No, the tragedy of the commons happens when negative consequences are externalized, creating an incentive for a rational, self-interested actor to exceed optimal use of a resource.
While certain negative consequences are externalize in this case, there's already ample disincentive from the local effects to make nuclear power incidents such as the recent troubles at Fukushima very undesirable to the state they occur in. If a state could be accurately modeled as a single rational, self-interested actor, they'd have prevented this leak from happening in the first place, because the cost of decent regulation is less than the harm of the local effects only -- that it happened anyway is not because they needed more disincentive from the further (and comparatively slight) harm done to the world's oceans at large, but because of regulatory capture and other effects that can't be explained without recognizing that real government consists of multiple actors, many of whom, through serving their own interest, frequently end up working against the state's interest.
Chernobyl? Re:So Just So I'm Seeing This Clearly (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.globalresearch.ca/new-book-concludes-chernobyl-death-toll-985-000-mostly-from-cancer/20908 [globalresearch.ca]
we can dance around the word "proven", but deaths there certainly have been.
What's really dumb is that you could have made your point without including that stupid statement as your first paragraph. Fossil fuels are currently killing people in fairly large number and have the potential, through climate change, to kill millions. Nuclear accidents are killing people, but improved technologies have the potential to limit this and nuclear power need not be "dirty" in normal use. None of that means we should decrease our investments in renewables.
Re:as cold as what? (Score:3, Informative)
They are the same temperature. That is the crossover point of the two scales: (-40C * 9/5) + 32 == -40F
Not a person? An utter whitewashing. (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear accidents have not been proven to have killed a single person.
Not a single person. Not a one? I mean, if you had led with "the numbers are vastly inflated," and then provided a supporting link debunking the inflated estimated cancer statistics, you would have sounded reasonable -- though a bit biased in being willing to accept similar loose causation for deaths from coal. Instead, you have revealed yourself as someone who is willing to disregard facts that are inconvenient to your worldview, regardless of how ridiculous the end result may seem.
At least 40 staff members and rescue workers died [wikipedia.org] directly as a result of Chernobyl. 4 died in a tragic helicopter crash attempting to extinguish the fire, but the vast majority died with in a few days or months from acute radiation poisoning. That's just the people on site during the disaster and its aftermath. It doesn't count the 9 children who died of thyroid cancer or the IAEA's estimate of 4000 additional cancer deaths out of 600,000 exposed.
That also doesn't count the Soviet K-431, K-27, and K-19 nuclear submarine reactor incidents (28 acute radiation fatalities and many more radiation injuries between them) or the two radiation deaths in Tokimura in 1999. It also doesn't count non-radiation deaths like the Mihama steam pipe explosion that kill 4 workers in 2004 or the 3 killed by the SL-1 reactor explosion. It doesn't count cancer deaths from those and more incidents such as the Windscale fire or those caused by the Rocky Flats Plant (which, admittedly, was used to create bomb materials and not simply civilian power generation).
One can argue about whether coal is more dangerous in the long-run than nuclear (which I think is true), but one shouldn't do so by making up nonsense about nuclear accidents never once causing harm.
Re:This needs to be taken out of their hands (Score:3, Informative)
Plus, a lot of men KNOWINGLY worked those shifts, knowing they would die slow painful deaths, to protect others.
I've often though the Russians who worked on the containment vessel for Chernobyl are as close to heroes as we get.
Re:This needs to be taken out of their hands (Score:5, Informative)
There was also a radiocative fish [huffingtonpost.com] caught near California, but it wasn't deemed dangerous
That's the kind of report I was talking about. The fish caught away from Japan haven't registered above background radiation, depending on where you live. The cessium radiation in the fish referrenced from that HuffPost article was 40 times lower than the natural level of radiation present in the fish from natural potassium. Of course, HuffPost would never mention that little tidbit, let alone link back to the source document [stanford.edu]. :)