You just reminded me of something else that happened back then, there was a farmer that lived about 8 miles away from me, he thought that if everyone wasn't able to sell the sheep the price would go up and if he could sell his he'd be well in profit so when the order came for people to kill and freeze a sample sheep, he took one from the deep freeze that had been killed before and sent it off, the results came back that it was over the limit.........since then we have learned of undisclosed leaks at trowsvennidd and sellafield. How many more??
this just seems so sensible and obvious to me, japan, like the uk and ireland, are island nations, and even if you consider that most of the population of oz is near the coast, why isn't there more being done to get power from the oceans currents?
I can think of 2 main reasons, firstly the big energy companies have a vested interest in keeping the status quo. secondly one doesn't get plutonium for bombs from wave power. I don't know to what extent but I have heard there have been some good proposals for prototype generators and transport that never get to see the light of day because the oil companies buy the copyright and quash them to keep us dependant.
yesterday the tapwater, milk and other food products were found to be radioactive.
I was living on a farm up in the welsh hills when chernobyl happened, the tv companies sent out a news crew to interviewsome of the local farmers who's sheep had been banned from being sold because they were too radioactive to enter the food chain. One local farmer said on the dinner time news in a live interview "well if the grass is radioactive and the sheep eating it are radioactive then the water we're drinking and batheing in comes from the reservoirs on the land, that has to be radioactive, there for we have to be radioactive, but there's nobody checking us......"
I think that the people who will be affected by this would rather that the country was a little poorer than see the death toll rise and the suffering of those who it will not kill but who's life will be shortened by it, if you look at the lifestyle of the people of tokyo and their national obsession with slot machines and bright lights and stuff, they have plenty of places they could make economies without hurting things.
One of the things that gets to me about the economy that I live in is the way they spend money on things like bedding plants in big flowerpots and things but then say they don't have enough money for proper facilities in hospitals. the amount of money wasted on christmas decorations alone by the council here is obscene and shoule be redirected into health care.
for you (or your lecturer) to say that nuclear power was "needed" is wrong and I'm sure the last generation over there would never have wished this disaster on their children. The fact is that the ordinary people don't get a choice.
You say that nuclear power is safer now than it was 20 yrs ago, well it's not much more than 20 yrs ago that chernobyl happened, now we have japan here in the uk we have nuclear facilities that have been under construction for 30 yrs and still not finished, can you imagine the technology is well out of date by now and once they get it finished (at ginormous cost)they are supposed to have a lifespan of 25yrs, but how soon do you think they will want to bear the cost of shutting it down?.
Again I will say that the bad effects of these radioactive substances last for 1000's of years, and with all the best will in the world nobody is perfect (not even nuclear facility designers)and accidents will happen, the only way to avoid them is to not mess with the stuff.
I used the contact us thingy and then filled out the feedback form.
It's not like we don't know what she did and it was us she intended too play the joke on, I didn't get that it was a joke at the time but it didn't make me want to see her banned when I did, up untill then her posts had always been very fair and good natured, I told them we missed her and was honest about it being more boring here without her. My attendance has "dropped off" significantly since she went as it has been a factor in the bigger picture, she's not the only one I notice is absent a lot lately and the site just isn't the smae anymore, really we can't afford to lose a single "good" one.
great Idea, I'm up 4 it, lets all do it at the same time so that they all come in, in a row like a petition. appeal to their better nature.....or alternatively we could start a thread appealing to their better nature, and all put our names to it?
The workers used scaffolding poles to direct their hoses into fuel channels about a meter above the heart of the fire. As the cooling and ventilating air were shut off, Tuohy ordered the evacuation of everyone except himself and the fire chief. Tuohy scaled the reactor shielding one final time and ordered the water turned on. As the hoses sprayed the charge face, he listened carefully for any signs of a hydrogen reaction as the hoses sprayed the graphite core. Several more times he scaled up and down the reactor and reported how the flames slowly died away, “I went up to check several times until I was satisfied that the fire was out. I did stand to one side, sort of hopefully, but if you’re staring straight at the core of a shut down reactor you’re going to get quite a bit of radiation.”
Removing a canister from the charge faceAfter twenty-four hours, the fire inside the reactor was finally extinguished. Astonishingly, only about 20,000 curies of radioactive material were released into the environment. It was determined that the amount of harmful radiation would have been far greater were it not for the “Cockcroft’s Folly” filters. While no citizens were evacuated from the surrounding areas due to the accident, there was some worry about milk from nearby dairy farms becoming contaminated with Iodine-131, which the human body will collect in the thyroid and which can result in thyroid cancer. As a safety precaution, for about a month all milk from the surrounding 500 square kilometers was diluted and dumped into the sea.
Though some radiation was leaked over the countryside, it didn’t lead to any immediate death or injury to any of the reactor staff or members of the surrounding community. Reactor Manager Tom Tuohy– thought to have been exposed to the most radiation during the event– is now in his mid-80s and is living with his wife in the USA. One study conducted in 1987 estimated that as many as thirty-three people may eventually die from cancers as a result of this accident, though the Medical Research Council Committee concluded that “it is in the highest degree unlikely that any harm has been done to the health of anybody, whether a worker in the Windscale plant or a member of the general public.” In contrast, Chernobyl caused forty-seven immediate deaths and as many as 9,000 may die from related cancer.
Today, some areas of Cumbria still prompt a few clicks from Geiger counters due to lingering caesium-137 isotopes. While the Windscale reactors have been in the process of being decommissioned since the 1980s, the core of Windscale Pile 1 still contains roughly fifteen tons of warm and highly radioactive uranium, and the cleanup is not expected to finish until 2060.
Unsure of how to deal with a fire of this nature, operators tried turning the cooling fans to full power in order to bleed off heat, but the oxygen provided by this effort only fueled the fire. Tuohy suggested removing fuel cartridges from the heart of the fire manually by forcing them from their channels and into the cooling ponds using scaffolding poles. The effort was valiant, but the poles were unable to withstand the punishment. They were red hot as as they were withdrawn from the nuclear furnace, and the ends were dripping with molten radioactive uranium. As one of the men battling the unique fire described the exposed fuel channels, “It was white hot, it was just white hot. Nobody, I mean, nobody, can believe how hot it could possibly be.”
Next the men borrowed twenty-five metric tons of liquid carbon dioxide from the newly-built gas-cooled Calder Hall reactors next door. Equipment was rigged to deliver the carbon dioxide to the charge face, but the heat from the fire was so intense that the oxygen was liberated from the carbon atoms upon contact, feeding the blaze into a renewed intensity.
By the morning of Friday 11 October, eleven tons of uranium were burning. Equipment was registering temperatures of 1,300 degrees Celsius in the reactor, and climbing at a rate of 20 degrees per minute. The cement containment around the burning reactor was in severe danger of collapse due to the extreme heat. Having no other viable options, the operators decided to attempt to extinguish the fire with water. This was a very risky proposition, as molten metal oxidizes when in contact with water. The oxidation would create copious amounts of free hydrogen in the highly heated environment, possibly creating an explosion upon mixing with incoming air.
On 7 October of that year, the operators of Windscale Atomic Pile Number 1 began what would turn out to be its final annealing cycle. After the initial heating of the reactor core, the control rods were re-inserted to slow down the fission process and allow the reactor to cool. The temperature monitors, however, indicated a premature dwindling of temperature in the core, leading the operators to believe that the annealing had not been successfully initiated. Unbeknowsnt to the workers, the readings produced by their equipment were inaccurate due to a combination of improperly placed instruments and uneven heat distribution caused by higher-than-normal pockets of Wigner energy.
Based on this misleading information, the operators made a fateful decision– they restarted the annealing process by heating the reactor once more. When the control rods were withdrawn to allow the fission reactions to increase, the temperature inside the graphite stack increased to dangerous levels. The heat became so extreme within the core that one of the canisters containing uranium or magnesium/lithium isotopes ruptured, spilling its contents and causing oxidation. The blocks of graphite– a substance which cannot burn in the air except under extreme conditions– began to smolder.
Early in the fourth day of the annealing process, operators felt that something was amiss when some instruments indicated the core temperature was not slowly falling as expected, but actually increasing. Their fears quickly compounded as they realized that the needles were pegged on the radiation meters at the top of the discharge stacks. The shift foreman declared an emergency. When the operators attempted to examine the pile with a remote scanner, much to their frustration the mechanism jammed. The reactor manager’s deputy Tom Hughes and another operator then made their way to the charge face of the reactor wearing protective gear to make a visual inspection of the core. A fuel channel inspection plug was opened, and as Hughes later recounted, “We saw to our complete horror, four channels of fuel glowing bright cherry red.”
The reactor had been burning for nearly forty-eight hours. Plant manager Tom Tuohy climbed eighty feet to the top of the reactor building clad in full protective equipment and breathing apparatus, and examined the rear discharge face while standing on the reactor lid. He saw a red luminescence lighting up the space between the back of the reactor and the rear containment wall.
It was not understood during the plant’s construction that graphite which is subjected to neutron bombardment has a tendency to store that energy within dislocations in its crystalline structure. This stored energy is called Wigner energy, named after physicist Eugene Wigner who discovered the effect during his own experiments. Left unchecked, graphite has a tendency to spontaneously release its accumulated Wigner energy in a powerful burst of heat. This was made apparent after two years of operation, at which time unexpected temperature increases were observed in the cores. On one occasion this occurred while the reactor was shut down.
Charge face of a Windscale reactor coreTo combat the Wigner energy buildup, the operators at Windscale instituted a process whereby the accumulated energy was allowed to escape by heating the graphite bricks to 250+ degrees Celsius, a process called annealing. At such temperatures the crystalline structure of the graphite expands enough to allow the displaced molecules to slip back into place and release their stored energy gradually, causing a uniform release which then spreads throughout the core. These annealing cycles were executed every few months, and they were performed while the reactor was fully loaded with its 35,000 cannisters of metallic uranium.
For a time, annealing succeeded in preventing the excessive buildup of Wigner energy. But the reactors and their attendant instrumentation were not designed with annealing in mind, therefore the monitoring equipment tended to provide misleading feedback to the reactor operators. The cycles were also notoriously unpredictable, releasing the pent-up energy at temperatures which varied from one instance to the next. In 1957, Windscale operators modified their procedures to require annealment every 40,000 Megawatt-days rather than every 30,000. They were growing concerned with the observation that higher temperatures were required each time, and that unexpected pockets of excessive Wigner energy were lingering in the graphite piles between cycles.
windscale is what sellafield used to be called before they had to rename it to get away from the bad image. The Windscale Disaster Written by Gerry Matlack on 07 May 2007 In the wake of World War 2 the United States government enacted legislation which prohibited any other nations from receiving the scientific bounty derived from the Manhattan Project. This meant that despite the participation of British scientists in the project, Britain recieved none of the benefits of the research. The year after the United States’ first successful nuclear bomb test in July of 1945, the British government decided that they too must develop a nuclear program in order to maintain their position as a world power. This pilot project eventually developed into the Windscale Nuclear plant.
In October 1957, after several years of successful operation, the workers at Windscale noticed some curious readings from their temperature monitoring equipment as they carried out standard maintenance. The reactor temperature was slowly rising during a time that they expected it to be falling. The remote detection equipment seemed to be malfunctioning, so two plant workers donned protective equipment and hiked to the reactor to inspect it in person. When they arrived, they were alarmed to discover that the interior of the uranium-filled reactor was ablaze.
Windscale’s two nuclear piles had been constructed in concrete buildings just outside of the small village of Seascale, Cumbria to produce Britain’s bounty of weapons-grade plutonium. The fission reactors had a straightforward air-cooled configuration which allowed each one to exhaust its excess heat through a tall chimney. Breeder reactors such as those at Windscale create plutonium by bombarding the most common isotope of uranium (uranium-238) with neutrons. Any uranium atoms which happen to absorb a neutron briefly become uranium-239, an unstable element which rapidly decays into neptunium-239. Having a half-life of only 2.355 days, this element also soon decays, resulting in the desired plutonium-239.
Each of the heavily shielded Windscale reactors was comprised of a stack of massive graphite bricks. A series of vertical boreholes through these blocks acted as channels for the reactor’s control rods which were used to absorb loose neutrons and thereby govern the fission rate. Hundreds of horizontal channels were carved into the blocks in a octagonal pattern for inserting canisters filled with whatever substances the scientists wished to bombard with neutrons. Many contained uranium to convert into plutonium, but others were special isotope cartridges for producing radioisotopes.
The canisters were pushed into place through the front of the reactor– known as the charge face– and once the neutrons had worked their magic and turned a good portion of the metallic uranium into plutonium, they were pushed out through the back into a water duct for cooling. The reactor itself was cooled by way of a fan-driven air duct which forced air over the reactor core and out the 400-foot-tall discharge stacks. As a last-minute modification, and at a great effort and expense, a filtering system was added to the top of each chimney at the insistence of a physicist named Sir John Cockcroft. These filters came to be known as “Cockcroft’s Folly” due to their engineering difficulty and questionable value.
Tens of thousands of litres of highly radioactive liquid leaked unnoticed for up to nine months from a ruptured pipe in the controversial Thorp reprocessing plant at Sellafield in what the IoS can reveal was Britain's worst nuclear accident for 13 years.
Tens of thousands of litres of highly radioactive liquid leaked unnoticed for up to nine months from a ruptured pipe in the controversial Thorp reprocessing plant at Sellafield in what the IoS can reveal was Britain's worst nuclear accident for 13 years. Sunday, 29 May 2005
SELLAFIELD LEAK LASTED 50 YRS Sunday Mirror, Jun 21, 2009 by JIM CLARKE 1 2 Next A LEAK at the Sellafield nuclear plant has finally been plugged - after 50 YEARS.
The problem, caused by a crack in a waste tank, was first discovered in the 1950s when the Cumbria site was still known as Windscale, and the British public were informed about it in the Seventies.
But British Nuclear Fuels maintained for years the leak could not be fixed because the technology to do so did not exist.
But Sellafield bosses revealed last week they had managed to plug the hole simply by removing the radioactive sludge contained in the decaying tank.
And they also disclosed that this is the second such tank they have managed to empty - the first having been cleaned out in 2005.
Related Results Sellafield leaks worse than feared; Fears for drinking supply as New Sellafield leak is not radioactive Fears over Sellafield's 'dirty' pond; Leaked report reveals SELLAFIELD: TOXIC SPILL WAS IGNORED This latest concrete tank is one of four which held radioactive waste for processing before being discharged into the Irish Sea. This week, Sellafield's management hailed the plugging of the leak as a great environmental breakthrough.
Head of manufacturing for Sellafield's effluent plans, Ian MacPherson said: "This is a milestone achievement, we have successfully reduced one of the primary environmental hazards associated with Sellafield.
"The tank has held waste for more than half a century. It was gradually degrading and presented a known environmental risk."
this is a typical "school" aproach, in school they teach you to try and find solutions to "problems", real life however teaches us that sometimes there is no solution, it's all very well asking for statistics on how many people have died from nuclear power plants but the fact is we'll never know, a lot of the people who have died from the effects of these things never know themselves, just read the post of the lady on the previous page. The internet is full of information (as you say) but also a lot of mis-information and if one goes for the "official party line" one has to realize that "the officials" discovered the power of propoganda long ago.
The accident at 3 mile island happened in 1979, over 30 yrs ago, I dare say it's possible that there may be someone still working there who was around back then but the likelyhood of the numbers being significant is very small, even without the accident and the release of reactor coolant and iodine 131, there would have been a lot of retirements and people moving around in that time and I dare say deaths of the people who worked there back then have happened since too.
Most people who are opposed to nuclear power view 3 mile island as the "lucky warning" and had the view that we may not be so lucky next time, they were right, as we all know chernobyl was / is much more serious.
figures on how many people the chernobyl disaster has killed ranges from the fifty odd people who died at the plant, to millions of people worldwide, we here in Ireland have an ongoing project to bring kids from there to holiday here and it's estimated that their radiation levels drop so profoundly whilst they are here that each week spent here puts years on their life expectancy.
what happens is that the thyroid gland gets filled up with contaminated iodine, what they recommend it taking large quantities of iodine regularly to keep the thyroid gland flooded with "good iodine" but that is preventantive, not cure. what they did with the chernobyl kids was to remove the thyroid gland altogether.
I'm very sorry to hear what you just said but feel that you are absolutely correct in what you say. :(
there have been nuclear tests done in most of the oceans, america, australia etc; all for bombs, I think china was the last one I heard of, I stopped listening to it all because it depresses me so much, people eating fish because it's supposed to be healthy don't know what they are ingesting these days, In germany, after chernobyl they scraped 3 inches of topsoil off from places where they grow vegetables, in the uk peeps were advised to "dig in" to a depth of 2 feet to dilute (spread)the radiation to acceptable levels....the fact is that it won't go away for thousands of years. I sometimes think that the amish have something good in the way they try to live lightly on the earth, I don't agree with everything they do/say but I do respect the fact that even in the modern world they do very little damage to the environment. the amount of impact we have had in the last 200yrs has been so bad and a lot more than in 2 thousand yrs before, and most of the inovations have been directly for the purpose of war.
quite rightly stated, our future relatives will bear the brunt of our generations stupidity and greed, I'm ashamed, I tried when I was younger to protest about all this as I could see where it was/is inevitably heading, I should have tried harder.
SUNSHINEB0Y Forum Posts (2,259)
yesterday the tapwater, milk and other food products were found to be radioactive.
RE: nuclear plant
You just reminded me of something else that happened back then, there was a farmer that lived about 8 miles away from me, he thought that if everyone wasn't able to sell the sheep the price would go up and if he could sell his he'd be well in profit so when the order came for people to kill and freeze a sample sheep, he took one from the deep freeze that had been killed before and sent it off, the results came back that it was over the limit.........since then we have learned of undisclosed leaks at trowsvennidd and sellafield. How many more??