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NEWS: Hakuryū Legend Manga's Nuclear Power-Themed Arc Dropped from Mag




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Mohawk52



Joined: 16 Oct 2003
Posts: 8202
Location: England, UK
PostPosted: Thu Mar 17, 2011 3:11 pm Reply with quote
Ouch, a prime example of fiction becoming, or getting too close to fact. 'Tis the reason nobody's buying the NEA dogma that " there's no need to worry". Then why pull the manga? Wink
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edzieba



Joined: 13 Dec 2006
Posts: 704
PostPosted: Thu Mar 17, 2011 3:34 pm Reply with quote
Or too far from fact to be plausible (and in very bad taste): Several nuclear reactors have been hit with an earthquake 10 times their designed limit, then hit by a 6 metre high wall of water. Then blown up a few times.
Outside of the Fukushima Daiichi complex itself, no more radiation has been exposed to the general public than you'd get from eating a bunch of Bananas, or smoking a pack of cigarettes (yes, most cigarettes contain elevated levels of Radon).

And these are 40 year old designs. I think if anything, this is a demonstration of the safety of nuclear reactors, not the danger.

Not to say lessons can't be learned: you can be reasonable certain that new reactors built (and older ones retrofit) will feature a tertiary backup gravity-fed water store, a contained + covered storage pool, and probably a dedicated hydrogen filtration system and/or blast suppression chamber. Note these mainly apply to BWR designs, and not necessarily to PWR, molten sodium, molten salt, pebble bed, breeder/fast breeder, and numerous other designs.
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Mohawk52



Joined: 16 Oct 2003
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Location: England, UK
PostPosted: Thu Mar 17, 2011 4:14 pm Reply with quote
And then there's " Oh BTW reactor 3 is really a plutonium reactor and we now think the containment vessel is cracked as well, but there's no need to worry as we've raised the safe level boundry from 100 msv/psec to 250msv/psec". Yeah thanks guy's, I feel safer already. Rolling Eyes
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edzieba



Joined: 13 Dec 2006
Posts: 704
PostPosted: Thu Mar 17, 2011 5:09 pm Reply with quote
Mohawk52 wrote:
And then there's " Oh BTW reactor 3 is really a plutonium reactor
No. That is so utterly incorrect, I can't even imagine how the mistake could be made. MOX fuel has a different concentration of oxides to 'fresh' fuel, but both contained Uranium oxide and Plutonium oxide. A Plutonium fuelled fast reactor is something completely different.
Quote:
and we now think the containment vessel is cracked as well
Nope, that worry passed rather rapidly (i.e. within a few minutes of the explosion in the torus being detected). The pressure vessel is intact, the containment vessel is intact, the torus is breached but onto the wetwell (i.e. the torus now joins the containment vessel by a breach in addition to the regular piping).
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but there's no need to worry as we've raised the safe level boundry from 100 msv/psec to 250msv/psec". Yeah thanks guy's, I feel safer already. Rolling Eyes
The 100m Sev level is an order of magnitude below that which would cause any symptoms of radiation sickness (i.e. 1 Sievert). The reactor crews are cycling in and out in order to keep cumulative exposure times down. Remember the mSev are cumulative units, not rates, and this applies to workers at the complex itself, not civilians living around the complex in outlying areas.
Exposure to those outside the reactor complexes themselves so far has been minimal, nowhere near enough to cause lasting effects.



Media fearmongering is rampant, even the venerable BBC are rather off base whenever TEH TERRIBLE NUCULARS are mentioned. MIT and WNN have reasonable coverage, as does the IAEA update page
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mdo7



Joined: 23 May 2007
Posts: 6492
Location: Katy, Texas, USA
PostPosted: Thu Mar 17, 2011 6:37 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
The current storyline by writer Dai Tennōji and artist Michio Watanabe began last month and focuses on the "dark side of the nuclear power industry." In particular, the characters deal with the danger of a "Chernobyl-level nuclear accident" at facilities run by "Tōto Denryoku."


After seeing what's going on at Fukushima Nuclear Plant, I think it's a good idea not to create an arc at the same time this situation is unraveling in Japan. So I think it's fair.
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The Xenos



Joined: 29 Mar 2004
Posts: 1519
Location: Boston
PostPosted: Thu Mar 17, 2011 9:05 pm Reply with quote
I'm torn here. I think the issue of nuclear power is very topical. Yet this manga seems to be full of nimby fear mongering and anti-science paranoia. I don't know how wide spread it is in Japan, but I'm rather sick of it in America. Of course the thing that bothers me is that it's the Republicans who had been for it and the Democrats and so called liberals and is called environmentalists that are against it. They're a bunch to anti-science nut jobs. I thought it was the Republicans who are the anti-science fear mongering party. Yet when it comes to nuclear power, it's bizzaro world where they're the ones who are pro-science and not spreading senseless fear filled buzzwords.

There is no possibility of a "Chernobyl-level nuclear accident" in a modern reactor. Can there be a horrible disaster? Sure. Yet it is scientifically impossible for that disaster it ever happen again in any modern reactor. The reactor set up in Chernobyl was miserably old and poorly designed. The people running it were incompetent and did many many things wrong. The Japanese reactor is far newer and it was hit with one of the worst possible scenarios, a 9.0. If this is the worst that happened in the worst hit area among all the nuclear plants in Japan, then that shows how good nuclear power is.

The back up generators were off by less of meter. They were designed for an insane 6.3 meter tidal surge, but got hit by the even more insane seven meters of water. So guess what? Any new plants or even any older plants after this disaster will be even safer after what we've learned from this one. It's called scientific progress and making the world a better place. I'm sick of baseless paranoia by a bunch of uneducated morons stopping it.

I don't care if it's a manga author or CBS News. This anti-nuclear paranoia and yellow journalism is absolute crap. If people are really this paranoid about radiation, then they should toss out their micro waves and televisions. Never mind don't go outside and line your house with lead in case of random radiological surges. People are exposed to much more radiation in everyday life than they think. And let's not even get into chemical carcinogens. Nuclear plants are among the least of your concerns when it comes to getting cancer or even just dying.
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Mohawk52



Joined: 16 Oct 2003
Posts: 8202
Location: England, UK
PostPosted: Fri Mar 18, 2011 12:07 pm Reply with quote
edzieba wrote:
Mohawk52 wrote:
And then there's " Oh BTW reactor 3 is really a plutonium reactor
No. That is so utterly incorrect, I can't even imagine how the mistake could be made. MOX fuel has a different concentration of oxides to 'fresh' fuel, but both contained Uranium oxide and Plutonium oxide. A Plutonium fuelled fast reactor is something completely different.
Are you sure about that? Plutonium is no less deadly no manter how it's created anyway. BTW you don't live in Southern California do you?
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edzieba



Joined: 13 Dec 2006
Posts: 704
PostPosted: Fri Mar 18, 2011 7:02 pm Reply with quote
Mohawk52 wrote:
Yes. Besides, Sky News isn't exactly a bastion of anything resembling accuracy.
"Experimental fuel, known as MOX"
Not experimental, pretty common form of reprocessing.
"Which, essentially, are fueled with Plutonium rather than Uranium"
Which, essentially, is totally wrong. The 'mixed' in 'mixed' oxide comes from the fact that both uranium and plutonium oxides are used as neutron sources, with the majority constituent being Uranium.
Even the little mini-article below the video is filled with nonsense, like the bit about 'cadmium rods'. The only cadmium rods in a reactor are AgInCd control rods, the same rods that were fully inserted into the reactor as soon as the quake hit. The Fukushima plants use Boron Carbine control rods anyway, and have already had Boric acid injected into the cores as part of standard procedure.
Quote:
BTW you don't live in Southern California do you?

1) No.
2) AHAHAHAHA. I'll take my news from the IAEA rather than an unnamed anonymous nobody without a single shred of evidence. Never mind that according to the CTBTO website the only SoCal-based monitoring stations are seismic and infrasound, not radionuclide.
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