The Nuclear Reactor of Mexico City

Doesn't exist, actually.

<sigh> After the recent hysteria over the accidents at Fukushima, which are indeed serious but only about a millionth times as bad as they're made out to be, you wouldn't belive how eager some people are for fresh hysteria. Recently rumors are circulating that there's a secret nuclear reactor right here in Mex City, which isn't even sued to produce power, and which is vulnerable to earthquakes.

Here's what's real. The national Institute for Nuclear Research (ININ in Spanish) owns and operates a small, high neutron flow reactor since 1980. It's not in Mexico City, but about 20 miles away, around the mid-point of the Mex-Toluca highway. I've been there a few times, too, when we tried to get the contract for commisary services (we didn't get it). I've never seent he reactor itself as access to it is restricted.

So what do they do with it? They use it to produce artificial radioactive materials, such as those used for radiation therapy to treat cancer and others used as diagnostic medical tools. The horror! In fact theya re the major producer of such amterials in Mexico. The nerve! So I wonder, how many people would the hysterics kill of cancer and undiagnosed diseases to ease their paranoia? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands?

BTW the area the Institute is in is perfectly stable seismically speaking. It's in the same geologic region as my home, which came through without a scratch from the 1985 earthquake that leveled large areas of Mexico City. Water is abundant there, too, as they're located 1) on the last leg of the main water supply line for Mex city and 2) a few miles from a small lake.

The area and the place are quite pleasant. It's a mountainous, forested area. There are lots of trees, and on the roads inside you often see deer not too far away. Around the dining area there are plenty of squirrels nearby (we had some concerns thay might get into the food storage areas). The architecture is late 70s futuristic, somewhat reminescent of movies like Logan's Run, and a style I very much like. Many of the buildings are set up on levels and half levels, with wide staircases connecting them. Also lots of very large windows that let in sunlight. I like visiting there.

Radiophobia is a retarded reaction, an animal fear of the unknown.

How many people have died from radiation from Fukushima?

But for some reason no one is worried about the tens of thousands that have actually died from the disaster itself, everyone is scared of the evil invisible rays.

Also, FWIW, these reactors are Chernobyl contemporaries, designed without modern safety features in mind.

In fact, by far the largest portion of death toll from Fukushima is going to come from the setbacks in nuclear power development it will cause and consequent damage from burning more fossil fuels, which are very much proven to release not only carbon dioxide, but poisonous substances as well.

Quote: Nareed

Doesn't exist, actually.

<sigh> After the recent hysteria over the accidents at Fukushima, which are indeed serious but only about a millionth times as bad as they're made out to be, you wouldn't belive how eager some people are for fresh hysteria. Recently rumors are circulating that there's a secret nuclear reactor right here in Mex City, which isn't even sued to produce power, and which is vulnerable to earthquakes.

Most people have lives that are so secure they need something to be "scared" of to sort-of balance out their brains. I don't know enough about Mexican Culture and irrational-fears, but here in the USA we are eventually going to scare ourselves out of any new technologies and eventually fall behind other nations. If gasoline were only discovered now the popular culture would not allow it as a motor fuel. Aspirn would never get FDA Approval. The list goes on and on.

Quote: P90

How many people have died from radiation from Fukushima?

But for some reason no one is worried about the tens of thousands that have actually died from the disaster itself, everyone is scared of the evil invisible rays.

Not relevant. more poeple die every day from trffic accidents around the world than were ever killed in nuclear-related accidents. As you said, it's not rational.

Quote:

Also, FWIW, these reactors are Chernobyl contemporaries, designed without modern safety features in mind.

Not quite. What I understand is that some safety systems, like the gas-powered electric generators, were dammaged by the tsunami as well. So without reliable power, or any power at al, they lost control of the reactor(s)

Quote:

In fact, by far the largest portion of death toll from Fukushima is going to come from the setbacks in nuclear power development it will cause and consequent damage from burning more fossil fuels, which are very much proven to release not only carbon dioxide, but poisonous substances as well.

How much carbon 14 is contained in regular coal? Not much, I expect, but some. All of that becomes CO2 when burned for power, and when plants, animals and people incorporate it, it winds up as part of your cells and even part of your genes. It's not much of a risk, but it's a great deal mroe worrysome than Fukushima for the 99.999% of the world's population who do not live near the dammaged reactor.

Quote: Nareed

Not quite. What I understand is that some safety systems, like the gas-powered electric generators, were dammaged by the tsunami as well. So without reliable power, or any power at al, they lost control of the reactor(s)

Yes. These are 1970s reactors, before the Chernobyl incident, so they rely on active safety. Modern reactor designs are fully passively safe, i.e. they don't need generators and external power to safely shut down and cool below the danger level. Designs in between, i.e. newer build but not current design reactors, tend to incorporate partial (but most critical) passive safety features.

For one, most new designs are pressurized water, not boiling water reactors. Fukushima and Chernobyl both were boiling water type. Strictly speaking, both are safe, when properly designed and operated, but safety for BWR is substantially harder to maintain and relies on more active systems. Broadzilla's post here describes some hands-on experience with either. It's brief, but plain.

More technically, PWR tend to have much more of their systems in closed cycle than BWR. This does not affect primary safety (which has not been breached in Fukushima), but a BWR has substantially more radioactives outside its primary and secondary containment. Tertiary containment, which strictly speaking isn't considered containment, but still exists in a distributed form, is much easier to breach, and what happened at Fukushima is complete loss of tertiary with partial breach of secondary containment. Most of the issues come from spent fuel rods in the coolant pools.

There's an article that discusses it in some more detail. Outside of detail, though, it's interesting to note the accident statistics. Of course, the source here is not exactly neutral, so the article should be taken with a bit of thought, but nonetheless it's important to keep in mind that events that don't make international news still affect the situation.

Quote: P90

Radiophobia is a retarded reaction, an animal fear of the unknown.
How many people have died from radiation from Fukushima?

Well, Hollywood made all those Atomic Scare movies ... so the animals have been educated.

I've not followed the news reports much, but what struck me is they seemed to have no equipment in place to deal with the danger effectively. LOCA are likely to happen. When they do, you need more water available to pour in and hope it doesn't all run out but when things went wrong, seriously wrong... they had no pumps rigged. They had fire engines but there was too much radiation to get fire trucks close and hoses rigged. They tried aerial water drops but even the news commentators laughed. They didn't seem to have any great big lumbering lead-shielded fire truck. Why not? Didn't they think it might be needed some day? A garden hose would have helped them in the early stages but they couldn't get one close enough.

It was an Atomic Accident that became a disaster due to lack of equipment and lack of planning and lack of prompt action.

Well, it didn't really rise to disaster level. Radiation exposure even at its worst didn't come close to Chernobyl's effect on general populace, or damage done by the tsunami, even locally.
Radiation levels
General public
A large percentage increase of a trivial amount is still a trivial amount.

As to why there weren't preparations and specialized equipment, it's because nuclear power isn't treated IRL the way it is in movies. For actual nuclear workers, the main danger is banging their head on an overhead pipe or tripping over a valve. It's really just a factory making power, with none of the drama.
"Don't fix what works" is as such still the prevailing mentality. When designing reactors today, engineers think of safety first, and they think through anything and everything. In the 1960s... well, people thought Ford Nucleon would be a great idea. Fukushima was far from the forefront of safety even its day (far enough that one of the engineers even resigned in protest), and it hasn't been substantially upgraded since then. It hasn't been fixed, it still worked until it got messed up by a tsunami.

The harm could have been reduced, although it didn't do a lot of harm anyway. It will take a lot of willpower to see this event for what it really was: an old nuclear power plant that got hit by a worst-case natural disaster it wasn't even designed for, and still didn't fail catastrophically, only resulted in modest consequences. Fukushima is not proof that nuclear accidents happen; it's proof that even in some of the worst-case scenarios (that don't involve insane experiments as in Chernobyl), the damage is still very localized.

Accidents happen in every industry, they have happened and more will happen. But both directly and indirectly, nuclear has the lowest cost in human lives per terawatt-year. One terawatt-year of nuclear power has cost 48 lives in accidents, including the whole energy chain. Each terawatt-year of coal power costs about 600 lives in accidents. Hydroelectric is even worse. For wind, accident statistics are lacking, but for about 0.1 terawatt-year ever produced, there are at least 50 recorded fatalities. For solar, we have almost no power generated so far, but there already have been deaths. Of course, fatalities from solar power are as trivial as falling off a ladder (and it takes an insane number of panels to produce a meaningful amount of energy) and don't make the news, while nuclear and hydro incidents happen rarely and make the news.

That's just accidents. When pollution is taken into account, the figures in the loss of life-years for coal and oil are completely insane, running in up to millions yearly. It's like having a Chernobyl every two weeks and a Fukushima every hour. Everything that can get us off the coal should be developed, and nuclear power (eventually including fusion) is the only solution that can be relied upon to work in the long term. The main monetary complaint about nuclear power and the source of its higher cost is that it requires highly trained and expensive engineers and technicians, rather than miners and mechanics, but at this point we have to ask ourselves, a nation of which we would rather be.

Future infrastructure will require a lot of energy. We've seen hybrids and first hydrogen cars, and they aren't really all that economical. We'll need a lot of power, in the form of electricity and hydrogen (than can be efficiently produced by high-temperature reactors without electrolysis), to sustain them. And then we can increase the speed limit to 100mph without becoming less safe or worrying about additional carbon emissions. The answer to the energy crisis is not climbing back on the trees, it's more power from abundant sources. In some places thermal solar and wind can make a good contribution, but nuclear is the best option for most everywhere else. The lesson taken should be to implement and keep developing more advanced and safer designs, not to go back.