Nuclear Risk Expert: Fukushima Fuel May Be Leaking 500
An anonymous reader writes "Three weeks after the nuclear crisis began at Japan's Fukushima Dai-1 power plant, there's still a real danger of melted nuclear fuel escaping the reactor buildings and releasing a large dose of radiation. So says Theo Theofanous, an engineer who spent 15 years studying the risks of nuclear reactors. Theofanous believes that melted nuclear fuel has already leaked through the reactor vessels and accumulated at the bottoms of the primary containment structures. All attempts to keep the reactor buildings cool may not be enough to prevent the overheated fuel from eating through the concrete floors, he says."
APRIL FOOOOOLLLSS! (Score:3, Funny)
Close... It is actually hype-reel fools. (Score:4, Informative)
From TFA:
But the drywell's concrete floor is probably 5 to 10 meters thick, so Theofanous says there's not an immediate risk of a release of radioactive materials via this route. "A lot of melting has to take place before you get through 5 meters of concrete," he says.
And:
"We don't really know where the fuel is," he says
.
Also:
Theofanous found that as long as there was a typical amount of water in the drywell--about half a meter--and that water was continuously cycled through to prevent it from heating up and boiling away, the nuclear fuel would not immediately make its way out into the environment. "We showed that if there's a severe accident, you must make sure there's water in the drywell," says Theofanous.
So, yeah... Article is hype but the summary is outright lying.
See... these are the moments when I wish that I was religious.
So that I could find some modicum of relief believing that there is a special hell for people who are hyping up these stories just so they'd get more fucking clicks and page-views.
You know... Trying their best to make a cent or two from their fellowman's suffering. Cunts.
Re:Close... It is actually hype-reel fools. (Score:5, Funny)
Exactly. The reactor is failing through the modes it was designed for. First melting through the inner steel containment, then the outer containment shell, then sinking through a few meters of concrete, there to be dispersed harmlessly through the water table.
Pfft! And some people thought the people who engineered the thing had no plan for graceful degradation!
Re: (Score:3)
Some actual facts: (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Good link. I was rather curious on why this particular researcher was relevant as all of his thoughts seem to be nothing more than conjecture.
Facts are stubborn things (Score:3, Informative)
"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." - John Adams [quotationspage.com]
Nuclear power has one thing going for it:
Nuclear power also has several strikes:
Re:Facts are stubborn things (Score:4, Interesting)
Nuclear power also has several strikes: * * High maintenance - everything has to work all the time so that your plant doesn't explode and make hundreds of square miles uninhabitable
* * High initial cost
* * High shutdown costs
* * stuck with billion-dollar boiling water reactors and pressurized water reactors
As the Fukushima accident showed, everything doesn't have to work right. The high cost thing is a real problem. And you're just repeating yourself with the last point.
The best argument in favor of nuclear power is that "it may have problems, but it's all we've got". Nuclear advocates rightly point out that, compared to coal, oil, natural gas, and even hydropower (complicated), perhaps nuclear isn't so bad. Coal is abundant but dirty, oil is expensive and dirty, natural gas is cleaner but still poisons the ocean with CO2, and hydropower has it's own challenges.
I hate to say it, but the economic argument for nuclear power is the weakest link. It's all heavily subsidized with liability protection that no other industry (well to my knowledge, which isn't so hot) has.
GRC's site talked about applying the technology to tar sands, to coal mining, breaking down hundreds of millions of used tires piled everywhere... How would the energy equation change if harvesting coal and tar sands didn't require massive amounts of energy?
The problem is that these do require significant amounts of energy either to harvest or to turn into a viable vehicle fuel. If the energy is cheap enough, then you can do things like the above to produce vehicle fuel.
That leads to the fundamental problem in your calculation. Vehicle fuel is not just any form of energy, but a rather costly one. If you're going to make it using exotic methods like the above, you will need a cheap source somewhere, perhaps nuclear power (if they ever get the issues sorted out).
What if Raphial Morgado's MYT (Mighty) pump really is as good as he says it is? Suppose you could get 25% more water pumped for the same amount of electricity, or generate 25% more electricity with the same amount of steam?
That's not much of a saving. And it probably is not petroleum powered.
If supply exceeds demand by a significant percentage, we'd be back to $1/gallon gas in a heartbeat.
Supply never exceeds demand for very long in an oil market. Where would the oil be stored?
Re:Some actual facts: (Score:4, Insightful)
Radiation (Score:2)
8 hour backup (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:8 hour backup (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh pooh. Any electrician working at an industrial facility knows exactly how to fix this and with an emergency of this nature the parts would come in via very special delivery very very quickly.
The problems were a LOT more serious - switchgear wiped out, pumps destroyed, no water supply, no instrumentation working, and a lot more.
Re:8 hour backup (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of roadblocks go up in a sudden poof of smoke when you say "or would you rather deal with a nuclear meltdown?". Helicopters and fuel aren't going to be an issue when your need is at pretty much the very top of the pecking order.
Re: (Score:3)
These are big industrial diesels
My office building has one. I'll be that there are plenty of them around there.
I've participated in data center disaster planning.
The primary reason for a battery backup is those few seconds between power outage and the generators coming up to full power. The only reason to have 8 hours of power in batteries is to give you time to replace the generators if they fail. If they didn't have a plan to send in generators, they might as well have saved a bunch of money and bought a smaller battery array.
If they could indeed have found the proper generators, then they would have had to find a helicopter or two to carry them over there, then rig it up, then fuel it up
Yea,
Re:8 hour backup (Score:5, Informative)
The information I have is that they did bring mobile generators to the site.
* Fukushima Dai-ichi units 1, 2 & 3 successfully shut down when the plant lost off-site power during the earthquake. Units 4, 5 & 6 were already offline for maintenance.
* On-site diesel backups successfully engaged to continue the cooling process, but the diesels were knocked offline when seawater from the tsunami flooded the fuel tanks. They got about an hour of cooling before these diesels were ruined.
* At that point, an backup battery supply engaged, and ran for about 8 hours before it was depleted. This is 2x the average capacity of the battery backup system at an American nuclear power plant.
* Meanwhile, they did get mobile diesels brought in, but the were only able to generate enough power to stabilize units 2 & 3. Unit 1 lost cooling water, and in 4 hours they were forced to vent the built up hydrogen gas.
* I found some discussion that the coolant pumps require 5 MW to power, which a generator at 100,000 lbs is above what even a US chopper could airlift. This is why the helicopters were focusing on transporting coolant (seawater).
* The issue then was they were physically leaking coolant water, and the rods were exposed at units 1 & 4. The exposed rods resulted in hydrogen explosions (which is what all the videos show).
* The transco's goal was to get off-site power restored, which was basically rebuilding the transmission line to a neighboring plant. It took 6 days to get it restrung.
Yes, it was that cut off.
This appears to be a very informative article. I did not know that the batteries were actually the 4th backup system:
http://www.backsidesmack.com/2011/03/explaining-the-fukushima-1-incident/ [backsidesmack.com]
8 hour backup power misconception (Score:5, Informative)
The battery backup in commmercial nuclear plants does NOT run the large scale cooling equipment, that is what the multiple independent channels of diesel backup power (which failed along with offsite power) are for.
The battery backup is for instrumentation and control only, including computer monitoring systems, process control computers, some valves, etc. At a typical GE BWR (like fukushima, I was an operator at a newer GE BWR myself) the entire basement of the control/auxialiary building is filled with lead acid batteries (multiple THOUSANDS of car battery sized cells) and large UPS's (27 of them at the plant I worked at) for backup power to intrumentation and control only.
The RHR (recirc heat removal pumps, used for both emergency and normal shutdown cooling) are huge beasts, batteries could not possibly keep them running. They are 4160v multiple 1000 horsepower motors (can't remember exact size), no way lead acid batteries can do that (let alone the UPS's), simply no way. One easy way to vouch for this fact is that the UPS's only produced 270VAC power!
There is the HPCI and RCIC systems driven by decay heat steam from the reactor itself (via small to mid sized steam turbines), and in the fukushima situation these likely functioned until control power was lost (assuming piping to these stayed intact). After control power is lost, these systems shutdown or break, or overspeed, can't remember, probably varies with the individual plant. Either way, no control power, no HPCI or RCIC
The spent fuel pool is another matter entirely. It has a separate electric motor driven pumped cooling system, but once again, batteries do do not drive these, these pumps are something like multiple 100Hp 480v pumps, once again outside the range of what even a ton of lead acid batteries can manage for any significant length of time. (see paragraph about heat sink below too)
The loss of offsite power, followed by the loss of the diesel backup power is really the root failure, and you need BIG diesels (or gas turbines even) to manage this load. At the plant I worked at, there were 4-4+ MW diesels onsite for a single reactor. 2 at a minumum were needed to keep things cool if offsite power was lost (assuming no other failures). We had fuel for approximately 2 weeks of run time of each diesel within the control building (about 200000 gallons, with another million available in a non safety rated tank outside the buidling). 4Mw locomotive or marine sized diesels cannot be simply trucked or helicoptered in, these are BIG machines, not to mention replacement fuel (they're thirsty!). In my plant's case, each diesel was a 5000Hp, 16 cylinder twin turbocharged monster that was originally designed for use in diesel electric cargo ships!
Perhaps if they parked an aircraft carrier right on the coast and somehow ran cables that could have made up for the loss of power, or maybe a dozen or so diesel electric locomotives, a few large diesel electric container ships, etc. but nothing smaller than that could have handled this load (original design Nimitz class aircraft carriers have about 20Mw electrical generating capacity INCLUDING their 4 emergency diesel generators at 4160v 60Hz, and remember they need some of that to keep their own engine room and other ship functions operating in this sort of scenario). But even then you would need some hellish power cables and functioning switchgear and control power in the plant itself BEFORE you could consider turning on a big cooling pump
Oh yeah, you would also need a functioning "service water" system (part of the normal seawater cooling system for the plant, not the emergency seawater cooling that is being used, provides cooling water and makeup water to cooling towers at some plants), those pumps (assuming control power AND intact piping again), needs another megwatt or so to operate. If you don't have service water, you don't have a heat sink even if you get the cooling systems inside the plant building operating.
Most people have no idea of the scope of the pow
Re: (Score:3)
The "multiple 1000 horsepower motors" part hinted at the power levels required.
Even ignoring the losses in the step-up transformers, trying to run thousands of HP worth of medium voltage motors from a low voltage UPS would require UPS output currents in the "completely ridiculous" range.
The problem becomes even worse when you consider that he starting current draw for a motor can be 6 or more times the fully loaded running current.
Re: (Score:3)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Power_Grid_of_Japan.PNG [wikipedia.org]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/world/japan-power-grid/ [washingtonpost.com]
Take the above 2 links into account and you have a pretty serious picture. South half of Japan uses different a different frequency than the northern half. Post-tsunami the northern half had severe power failures.
Additionally, you don't just plug in a motor to a transmission line. You need transformers and switches for that. You'd also need to drop power to wherever you connected
Re: (Score:3)
Mine it. (Score:2, Interesting)
In Uranium mining, there is a technique called in-situ leeching.
In summary, it involves drilling a hole, pouring an acid or alkaline into the hole to dissolve the resource, and pumping it back out.
Once it's out, in the case of uranium, there are a couple of steps involved in turning it into yellowcake.
Given the probability that it is now leaking onto concrete, an alkaline solution would be more ideal.
What would be needed is something like an oil drain pan that resists the chosen alkaline.
The solution would
Re:Mine it. (Score:5, Informative)
After fission, there's a whole lot more in there than uranium in there, and uranium is the least of the concerns from a radioactivity point of view.
The stuff will be a molten mix of uranium, zirconium, ceramic, steel and all sorts of other stuff, mostly the materials with high boiling temperatures. The molten core material would have the gross composition of a mix of metal and silicate rock. It's very dense and very difficult to cut up, if the melted products in the bottom of Three Mile Island are any indication. For leaching to be effective it would have to be crushed up (in order to increase the surface area and let the water percolate through) and you'd have to use a leaching solution that removes all the elements of interest. I'm not sure such a chemical solution exists. Furthermore, you have to do it at high temperatures without the introduced solution reacting with the concrete. Given how chemically reactive concrete is compared to typical metal or silicate rock, I can't think of a solution that would promptly dissolve the latter two without probably dissolving the former. Even if you were successful at selectively removing the dangerous stuff into solution, then you've got a solution full of the dangerous stuff -- a solution that can leak and escape lot easier. Worse, if it is boiling off it might even end up concentrating the radioactive solids as it evaporates and eventually could increase the nuclear reaction where the solids are concentrated.
This is not the same rock that they mine uranium from. It's a different material. This is a bad idea even if there was any chance of it actually working, which seems doubtful.
Re:Mine it. (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem, I think, is all the crap that's not Uranium anymore. Uranium in the ground hasn't been enriched and then allowed to chain react for a while. As a result, it likely won't have all the daughter products around, certainly not in the quantities you'll find them in the reactor. That reactor is hot, both thermally and radioactively, at a level that I don't think one would see at a working mine.
I appreciate the creative thinking, but to treat this thing in that manner would require letting the shorter-lived daughters decay so that it more resembles what you'd see naturally occurring in the earth (relatively, at least). And that time scale is a luxury I don't think they have.
Also, mining it would require completely breaching the core, which is most certainly what they don't want right now (see above).
In the end - years down the line - what you describe would be potentially a good idea, assuming they don't go with the concrete casket route as in Chernobyl.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://mitnse.com/2011/03/16/what-is-decay-heat/ [mitnse.com]
There is no more uranium fission, that was stopped within seconds of the earthquake hitting. The problem is the decay products of the reaction, which are unstable and thus radioactive. The power given off by the reactor at this point is just a percent or so of its original power, and all of that is coming from unstable isotopes splitting on their own. There is no real point to separating the fuel, the byproducts will continue to fission without any neutrons
Re: (Score:3)
We need some miners to step up and advise of the fastest method to dissolve uranium in a steel container and pump it out.
Seems easy enough.
1. Add highly toxic mining acid by the boatfuls to leaky glowing reactor core, spraying toxic acid all over mining engineer #1-500 in the process..
2. Get mining engineers #500-1000 to pump glowing toxic corrosive dissolved uranium goo, which radiates fast enough to kill you in an hour just by standing next to it, into storage tank
3. Continue until you run out of cake.
4. Science!
could this cause (Score:3)
an 'america syndrome' ?
Re: (Score:3)
More like a Brazilian Syndrome.
Radiation level beyond Chernobyl relocation limits (Score:4, Interesting)
The IAEA is reporting that measured soil concentrations of Cs-137 as far away as Iitate Village, 40 kilometers northwest of Fukushima-Dai-Ichi, correspond to deposition levels of up to 3.7 megabecquerels per square meter (MBq/sq. m).
Compare this with the deposition level that triggered compulsory relocation in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident: the level set in 1990 by the Soviet Union was 1.48 MBq/sq. m.
From http://www.japan.org
Re:Radiation level beyond Chernobyl relocation lim (Score:5, Informative)
Oh japan.org? ... fake rads map ... fear mongering anti-nuke crap ... Good call.
Instead of a brain-dead attack on the messenger, why not try finding out the truth for yourself? It takes all of 10 seconds to go to the IAEA site here [iaea.org] and see the numbers quoted by the OP are correct:
The average total deposition determined at these locations for iodine-131 range from 0.2 to 25 Megabecquerel per square metre and for cesium-137 from 0.02-3.7 Megabecquerel per square metre. The highest values were found in a relatively small area in the Northwest from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. First assessment indicates that one of the IAEA operational criteria for evacuation is exceeded in Iitate village. We advised the counterpart to carefully assess the situation.
This is absurd (Score:3, Interesting)
The first problem is that TEPCO isn't telling anyone what they know (to save face and because they're freaking out)
The second problem is that whatever they are telling, they're telling to the Japanese government and no-one else (even their own workers, who they convinced to wade through radioactive water without boots, go into radioactive buildings without radiation badges or suitable gear, etc).
The third problem is that the experts are working with minimal data - and what they do have is suspect
The fourth problem is that TEPCO has been trying to salvage the reactors at the same time as spraying them with seawater (which would be corrosive) and after the outer shell had exploded on three of them (causing untold damage to electronics, shock-proofing, etc)
On top of all that, TEPCO allowed the hydrogen build-up in the first place. They could have burned it off with a controlled burn. This would have prevented the explosions, reduced the spillage and possibly prevented the fuel leak. (Reducing pressure may have reduced water temperature and may have conserved some of the cooling pools.)
As for building the reactors ALONG the fault-line, despite advice not to by their own chief scientists, and building a tsunami wall far lower than the historic tsunami wave-heights....
This accident was stoppable at so many points in so many ways. The problem wasn't so much the reactor alone as the mindset together with the reactor.
Re:This is absurd (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is absurd (Score:5, Funny)
There is a good deal of information out there if you speak Japanese. Otherwise, you have to wait for someone to translate it which doesn't always happen. If you don't speak Japanese then you are in no position to comment on the amount of information that is or is not coming out.
Nonsense, there is a one-size-fits-all narrative to describe anything in nuclear power. The management is corrupt, incompetent, and greedy. Nuclear power itself is like a coiled serpent, ready to strike at any moment, laying waste to hundreds of square miles of land.
Re:This is absurd (Score:4, Interesting)
I take it that is sarcasm. Not very good at it, are you?
Nuclear power is perfectly safe, if done properly. So is coal mining. Both become extremely dangerous when not done properly - nuclear power due to the risk of reactions getting too hot (decay causes heat, accelerated decay through neutron emissions causes a lot more heat), which can lead to a failure of the structural integrity of the system or - worse - uncontrolled chemical reactions resulting in a chemical explosion (essentially a "dirty bomb"), coal mining due to the risk of coal gas (methane) igniting, resulting in an explosion and/or an uncontrolled fire within the coal seam itself, beyond the confines of the mine.
In both cases, the problem is not so much the initial event (although nobody likes fatalities - unless they're newsreaders or Fox TV presenters), the problem is that event zero can lead to the problem spreading in a way that cannot be controlled or stopped.
In both cases, competent design and competent management can make the probability of event zero happening at all virtually zero. The number of nuclear reactors worldwide is extremely high, but other than the Windscale core fire, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and the Fukushima complex, there really hasn't been any major accident in the industry in 50 years. That's not bad, given that our knowledge of the physics is the same age.
(The Windscale core fire was an interesting piece of history. A graphite nuclear reactor core was allowed to burn for 3 days before anyone even thought to check why the temperature gagues were showing excessive readings. This was not corruption or greed, and even calling it incompetence is a stretch as maintenance was due over that time.)
The fact of the matter is this: in ALL of these accidents, there was a VERY long chain of events from the the initial point that turned towards disaster and the disaster actually happening. ANY person along that chain COULD have broken that chain at ANY time. They failed to do so.
Typically in disasters, this is because the difference between what they should have done and what they did do was so small that the person disregarded the difference. A very large sum of very small deltas will eventually add up.
(Even the Titanic's sinking was not due to a single person's failure or a single event, but a laundry list of very tiny deltas from the time the iron was first processed to the time the helmsman mistook what sterring order the helm was set to. R101, likewise, failed because of an incredibly large number of people making incredibly tiny errors.)
Yours is a common, and pitiful, belief that criticism of a sequence means criticism of the entire world in which that sequence lives. I've noticed such a mindset most amongst the right-wing and the libertarians. There is, sadly, no known cure and they are doomed to live in a world that really doesn't exist outside of their own interpretation.
Re: (Score:3)
Actually, I did read something the other day about the the issue of the historical wave-heights. The reactors *were* built to that standard, however (a) the exact heights of historical tsunamis are estimates, which were subsequently revised upward and (b) seismic models suggested (correctly) that a much larger tsunami than any historically recorded was a serious possibility. (Prays to Google for a reference.... Ah here we are: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11087/1135345-82.stm [post-gazette.com] ).
So, *yes* it is absolutel
Give me a break. (Score:3)
You're not asking, but I'll tell you.
I lived through the Kobe earthquake. I was out on the edge, and I had to work, no time to go in to try to help clean up. I know how long the cleanup took, I know about the traffic getting in and out, I know about railroads that had to be cleaned up and inspected, I know about whole city blocks that were flattened, if not by the quake, then by the fires that came later. My wife and I were going to meet in Sannomiya that morning, and by the time we had planned to meet, the
Real news should not be run on April 1st. (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
by thisisauniqueid (825395) writes: Alter Relationship on 2011-04-02 12:44 (#35691800)
Transparency, Cooperation & Risk Management (Score:3)
From what I read Tepco, their regulators and the general government in Japan has ignored all 3 items in my subject.
For doing that they will pay the huge price of a 10-20 year cleanup with enormous damage to their economy and the respect the people have for their institutions.
It is not only the Middle East that may see governmental changes in the near future.
Re: (Score:3)
They had a multi-stage backup system which was working till it was flattened by a mega-tsuanmi.
You mean like when you have backups of your computer which you haven't tested? Or maybe when you make backups on magnetic media to weather a solar storm? Building walls to hold the ocean back from an island is a sad joke guaranteed to have a painful punchline.
Re: (Score:3)
I know - we could test this stuff by deliberately disabling all the safety systems and then force the reactors into an unsafe condition to see if it recovers
Reactor #2 is already leaking (Score:5, Interesting)
The authorities don't know how the water is leaking out and don't know the upper bound on the total amount of radioactivity released. The lower bound is already rather staggering. In addition, radioactive materials have already leaked into the ocean and the ground water. TEPCO said the level they measured in the ground water was the similar to the high levels found in the turbine buildings and the tunnels outside the plants. The Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said those readings were way too high so they asked TEPCO to measure again more carefully.
The only specific theory I've heard of how the thousands of tons of highly radioactive water got out of the containment vessel is that it got out via graphite seals in the bottom of the vessel. There are holes there for control rods and the holes are blocked with graphite seals. The seals will fail at high temperatures and melted fuel rods falling to the bottom of the vessel would provide more than enough heat to cause the seals to fail. If it is any solace, reactors that don't contain melted fuel rods probably don't have leaks all over the bottom of the containment vessel.
The radioactivity released at Chernobyl escaped upward into the air. This made it easier to get a handle on the magnitude of the total amount of radioactivity released. The release at the light water reactors at Fukushima is for the most part traveling downward, to basements, tunnels, ground water, and the ocean. This makes it extremely difficult to get a handle on the total amount of radioactivity that has been released. They really don't know of the bulk of it is in the thousands of tons they have already discovered or if that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Re:Reactor #2 is already leaking (Score:5, Informative)
Often glazed over in reporting is the amount of heat that was in there in the residual heat. The core was producing residual heat of about 7% of the power level it was running before shutdown.
If a unit was running at 700 Megawatts, the core would then be running at 49 Megawatts, but with no output outside the shell. When the cooling quit for a couple of days, it did not take long to boil the kettle dry.
In the US a partial meltdown of a small sodium reactor happened before 3 Mile Island. Google it. They could not add cooling water due to the flammable Sodium.
All the experts that have covered reporting current situation has not said a word about flammable Zirconium. Zirconium is highly flammable in water just like Sodium. The only difference is one is flammable at room temperature and the other catches fire at much higher temperature. When the core was exposed and overheated one of the experts said the cladding oxidized.
If you heat a chunk of Zirconium with a torch and get it dull red, it will catch fire. If you then throw it in water, it will burn using Oxygen from decomposing water and leaving Hydrogen as a byproduct, just like burning Sodium the reaction is exothermic. Zirconium melts at 1852 C. It catches fire at a lower pressure than it melts. To simply say it melted is false.
When they had fluctuating core pressure and a large Hydrogen release, I knew a large amount of Zirconium burned. This includes reactors 1-3 and fuel rod pool in #4, and possibly the fuel ponds in 1-3. This Hydrogen confined in the outer containment combined with air went boom. The boom most likely happened when the rods in the cooling ponds boiled dry and got hot enough to be an ignition source.
When the experts say they don't expect any more hydrogen explosions, it is because there is no Zirconium left.
The high radiation levels in the water is because the Uranium Oxide was subjected to both the residual heat and the cladding fire.
Speaking of cladding fire, remember a couple of rod storage areas with some fires?
Overheated graphic seals is no surprise if the cladding burnt off and the ceramic uranium oxide overheated.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Reactor #2 is already leaking (Score:5, Informative)
The level of radioactivity at the surface of the water near reactor #2 is over one sievert per hour. This will give a worker their lifetime dose in 10 to 15 minutes. It will kill anyone who is next to the water for 8 hours. All work on reactor #2 was halted when the highly radioactive water was discovered about a week ago and it hasn't started up again. The analysis TEPCO did on some of the less highly contaminated water showed a significant fraction of the radiation coming from Cesium-137 which has a half-life of 30 years. Sure, all radioactive materials have a half-life, and the shorter lived materials emit more radiation per unit time. But that doesn't mean that all levels of radiation are benign, nor does it mean that all highly radioactive substances will soon become safe. Perhaps it is a judgment call but AFAIAC, water that is radioactive enough to hamstring efforts to fix the leaking reactor for a week and is radioactive enough to kill anyone who is near it for 8 hours is some pretty damned highly radioactive water.
My point was that containment at Fukushima has been seriously breached and the full extent of the breach is unknown. Fukushima made headlines in the US before it was known the containment was breached releasing significant amounts of radiation into the environment. Now that the breach has been discovered, the US press isn't covering the situation nearly so much. I believe this has led people here on Slashdot to make completely erroneous claims that the containment has not been breached and the situation is evolving according to plan. These posts were modded +5 informative. I'm trying to correct the record with information coming directly from Japanese officials as reported on NKH World.
Here is a typical news report from Japan (Score:3)
The government has been reported that HIGHLY RADIOACTIVE WATER detected at the No. 2 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is due to a PARTIAL MELTDOWN OF FUEL RODS there, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Monday.
Emphasis added. Please don't panic. If you feel the highlighted words are over sensationalizing the situation then I suggest you address your concerns directly to the Japanese news media and the Japanese government.
Re: (Score:3)
Suppose you have a neighbor who has a brush fire on their land. You can see the flames, you can see the smoke, you can measure ash in the air and on the ground. With that information you can make a reasonable estimate of how much ash was released. I'm not saying you will be able to make an incredibly accurate estimate but it should be pretty easy to get within an order of magnitude.
Now suppose you have another neighbor who is trying to make
Re: (Score:3)
I'm not in a panic. I'm reporting what is being broadcast by the Japanese government and TEPCO on Japanese television.
I have a feeling the problem is that you don't like the news I'm reporting so you're attacking the messenger.
Re:You seem to be very careful where you get news. (Score:4, Insightful)
Haha, yeah, and please put the most positive spin you can think of on whatever you read. If you read "It's a disaster" you must consider that the translation might be defective.
Sorry, but it just doesn't work that way
What I think you are saying is, well, maybe it is a disaster, but they had a hell of an excuse!
That (i suspect willfully) misses the points completely. The reactor was not supposed to fail. Yet it did, and the results are impressive, to say the least. That a catastrophe that manages to make a reactor fail also severely hinders you ability to deal with the situation is a new thing we have learned. And that in fact nobody has a good plan for a situation like this is also suddenly in plain sight, although is nothing that wasn't known before.
He has no info on the Fukushima, just guesses (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would someone with no insight into the current status at Fukushima throw wild guesses around. This sounds more like an religious agenda then science.
He teaches chemistry at UC Santa Barbara.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
World's largest concrete pump heading to Japan (Score:5, Informative)
The world's largest concrete pump, deployed at the construction site of the U.S. government's $4.86 billion mixed oxide fuel plant at Savannah River Site, is being moved to Japan in a series of emergency measures to help stabilize the Fukushima reactors.
"Our understanding is, they are preparing to go to next phase and it will require a lot of concrete," Ashmore said, noting that the 70-meter pump can move 210 cubic yards of concrete per hour.
Putzmeister equipment was also used in the 1980s, when massive amounts of concrete were used to entomb the melted core of the reactor at Chernobyl.
"It will be too hot to come back," Ashmore said.
Re:World's largest concrete pump heading to Japan (Score:4, Informative)
Nuclear power needs gone. (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of nuclear reactors are dotted around the world. And this planet is a moving one - there are always constant earthquakes :
http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index2.php [hisz.rsoe.hu]
See. Its like a gamble. So far, we are alright because one of those quakes didnt chance up on a critical installation. This japan quake could have been much closer, and all of those 6 reactors could have been already totally shattered and we would be sucking iodine tablets right now.
Germany did right. At a time when the planet was showing rather increased activity, they shut down all of their 10+ reactors, around 30% or so of their power. They are going to replace nuclear power.
Indeed. It is the biggest folly of this civilization to rely on VERY dangerous, catastrophic things, because they are cheaper than alternatives. No - these are really dangerous - because ONE failure, may be enough to wreck our civilization and decimate populations. You go figure how the rest will come down with domino effect - it will come down, but the question is, how much it will. All depends on the level of the disaster happening on the next reactor. It may even be this one.
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Germany did right. At a time when the planet was showing rather increased activity, they shut down all of their 10+ reactors, around 30% or so of their power. They are going to replace nuclear power.
Germany has been getting rid of nuclear power for some time now, but guess what? They don't have anything to replace it, and so they buy it instead from France - which generates it using *drumroll* nuclear power plants. Talk about NIMBY.
No - these are really dangerous - because ONE failure, may be enough to wreck our civilization and decimate populations.
You seem to be severely overestimating the scale of even the worst possible nuclear disaster. It won't "wreck civilization" nor will it "decimate population". It may cause several hundred immediate deaths, and perhaps several hundred thousand later on from cancer from raise
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Germany has been getting rid of nuclear power for some time now, but guess what? They don't have anything to replace it, and so they buy it instead from France - which generates it using *drumroll* nuclear power plants. Talk about NIMBY.
Germany is an electricity exporter. We generate 35% more power than we consume.
http://rwecom.online-report.eu/factbook/en/marketdata/electricity/grid/germanyimportandexportofelectricity.html [online-report.eu]
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As posted in the last story, stories in this site are posted on tomorrow's business after Midnight GMT which was 8pm EDT. We're done with the jokes, now back to serious business.
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"Eat" pretty much is the right word... we've got rods so radioactive and hot they're melting concrete all the way to vapor. Damn that's powerful when it works right, but damn that's trouble when it's not under control.
Re:Seal it and shut it down... (Score:4, Interesting)
Another hopeless optimist. Japan is a high-tech country. Japan is not hampered by an anti-nuclear movement. Japan builds new reactors. Japan's reactors are highly regulated for safety. None of that has prevented them from having aging reactors, operated by a corrupt company. If this can happen in Japan, it can happen anywhere.
Now it's not just a matter of "sealing it and shutting it down": If the core melts through the floor, how are you going to seal that up? The crux with nuclear power is that even undamaged reactors are high maintenance for decades after they've been shut down at the very least. So far nobody has figured out what to do with the "spent" fuel and other radioactive waste. Attempts to bury it have repeatedly resulted in unforeseen accidents with the result that even more radioactive waste needs to be dug up and stored above ground, essentially forever. This stuff isn't just radioactive, it's also extremely toxic and chemically aggressive.
No nuclear facility is insured to an amount that would cover all damages which an accident could cause: No insurer is willing to take the risk. The risk is entirely on the shoulders of the public, who cannot reject it, thanks to representative democracy and bought politicians. The exception to the rule is Austria: In a fluke of common sense, they held a referendum before Austria's first nuclear power plant (completed and ready) was going to be activated: The Austrian people rejected nuclear power and they have not reneged so far.
Re:Seal it and shut it down... (Score:5, Insightful)
And we have to realize that the disaster at the Fukushima plant isn't normal. Rather, this was the fifth largest earthquake to be recorded in modern history. Not only that but it had a huge tsunami to go along with it. Could TEPCO have handled this better? Yes. Could the Japanese government have handled this better? Yes. Should TEPCO have built this reactor to withstand larger earthquakes? Yes. But is nuclear power more dangerous than coal, oil, and every other power source that can be used in large quantities? No.
Re:Seal it and shut it down... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Seal it and shut it down... (Score:5, Informative)
The energy content in one ton of uranium using 1960s reactors is roughly equivalent to 16,000 tons of coal. Using newer reactors that consume U-238 as well as U-235, a ton of uranium will produce more energy than a million tons of coal.
Assuming coal mining kills 5000 people a year and uranium mining kills as many people per ton, to produce the same amount of electricity you're looking at less than one mining death every 3 years for 1960s plants and one death every 200 years with newer plants.
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I'm not sure how material the distinction is. The difference in energy content is still measured in orders of magnitude.
Also, the mining thing is a bit of a red herring anyway. We have tons and tons of U-238 sitting in cooling pools next to older reactors and plutonium from decommissioned bombs that we need to get rid of. We can build new reactors that run on the waste from older reactors without having to dig anything new out of the ground.
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Also, the stuff we have sitting in cooling poo
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Assuming coal mining kills 5000 people a year and uranium mining kills as many people per ton
You're neglecting one small issue: both uranium ore and metallic uranium are incredibly toxic to humans and animals. Now, most of the uranium mining happens in third-world countries so we don't know the death rate, and the companies running the mines don't want anyone to find out, but it's generally reckoned to be fairly high.
Re:Seal it and shut it down... (Score:4, Informative)
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In the metric of deaths per TWh for which nuclear has 0.04 and coal has 161.
Coal doesn't have a tendency to poison huge territories for millennia. Mining is dangerous, but the baby on the surface, above the mine, is not in any danger. We also have a good idea how to make mining safer (by using robots, for example, once we learn how to make them good enough.) A lot of coal is mined in open pits; this method is efficient and not very dangerous.
With nuclear energy you are one accident away from losing you
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Mining is dangerous, but the baby on the surface, above the mine, is not in any danger.
Except for all the emissions from coal plants (not just CO2, but cancirogens as well, including radioactive ones).
The difference between coal and nuclear is just as you say - in nuclear, it is largely contained in the plant. Every now and then accidents like this happen, and then everyone panics - but don't forget that a crapload of nasty stuff is dumped into atmosphere and spread around from coal plants in the normal course of operation. No-one freaks out about it because it doesn't happen all at once, but
Re:Seal it and shut it down... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a lot of negative things to be said about nuclear power, but in terms of human death coal is orders of magnitude worse regardless of how you neysayers try to skew the statistics.
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Uranium mining isn't exactly an environmentally-friendly activity. It's been especially tough on native americans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Rock_uranium_mill_spill [wikipedia.org], for example.
But is nuclear power more dangerous than coal, oil, and every other currently-available power source that can be used in large quantities? No.
There, fixed that for you.
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On the other hand, we've had about 63 deaths occurring directly from nuclear incidents since nuclear power started. Now, while others have obviously had larger cancer risks and such resulting in death, but it is nearly impossible to be 100% certain about how many of those have occurred.
As you obviously know from the caveats you include after this statistic, the deaths from Chernobyl are in the thousands, and possibly tens of thousands, which you discount because 'it's impossible to be 100% certain'. So why do you repeat this misleading figure of 63? Like the climate change debate, debate on nuclear power has been poisoned by both sides attempting to distort the statistics. You're not going to persuade anyone by producing obviously cooked statistics or attacking straw men - no one is sugge
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On the other hand, we've had about 63 deaths occurring directly from nuclear incidents since nuclear power started. Now, while others have obviously had larger cancer risks and such resulting in death, but it is nearly impossible to be 100% certain about how many of those have occurred.
As you obviously know from the caveats you include after this statistic, the deaths from Chernobyl are in the thousands, and possibly tens of thousands, which you discount because 'it's impossible to be 100% certain'. So why do you repeat this misleading figure of 63? Like the climate change debate, debate on nuclear power has been poisoned by both sides attempting to distort the statistics. You're not going to persuade anyone by producing obviously cooked statistics or attacking straw men - no one is sugge
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I would like you to back up that statement. They don't even KNOW if any radioactive material has escaped the concrete containment, so I find it damned difficult to believe anyone could know anything about how much ground is contaminated.
Besides that, 200 miles is a fucking ridiculous claim. Chernobyl literally BLEW UP and spewed chunks of uranium and it only has an exclusion zone that covers about 225 sq miles. What happened there =/= whats happening here.
Re:Seal it and shut it down... (Score:4, Insightful)
Their anti-nuclear movement blocked several plants back in the 90s.
Yep, old reactors like this were to be shut down and replaced by newer, safer designs. All the activists did was keep old reactors going.
It's not just Japan, but the rest of the world. Old reactors are still running in America and Europe because the movements forced governments to not build any new reactors.
Re:Seal it and shut it down... (Score:4, Interesting)
Insightful my fat arse.
Here in Germany the power companies basically had a choice: either they shut down all their reactors by a set date or they transfer operational time between reactors so newer and safer ones can run longer, and older could be shut down sooner.
What did the power companies do? They transfered the operational times from new reactors to old ones since they were cheaper to operate, already written off decades ago and thus generated pure profits of about one million euros every operating day.
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The plant operators seem to have followed procedure by shutting the plant down right after the quake, but I wonder if things would have turned out better if they had not done that.
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I don't think they really had a choice. The diesels were apparently in the same area as the generating plant itself so it looks to me that the main generators would have been knocked out by the tsunami as well.
Getting the power back on should have been a national priority. I don't understand why TEPCO wasn't on the phone with the SDF right away asking them to bring in generators by helicopter.
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Argh, this rumor needs to be put to rest! The generators arrived, but the fuel got contaminated by sea water from the Tsunami, which only allowed the generators to run for a few hours before they were eaten up by the saltwater.
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Precisely. The problem all along has been that power was lost and no backups were working to provide power to run the cooling systems.
If the reactors kept running, they would have had no trouble keeping themselves cool just as they were before the Quake. In other words, business would have continued as normal.
Hopefully this incident will cause a reevaluation to the auto-scram-on-earthquake rule currently in place. (And of course, for more reliable backups to be in place too.)
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Hopefully this incident will cause a reevaluation to the auto-scram-on-earthquake rule currently in place. (And of course, for more reliable backups to be in place too.)
Sure, there should be a reevaluation of backup power. But there's nothing wrong and plenty right with the auto-scram feature. If your reactors are in a situation where you don't have backup power, because the earthquake or its consequences eliminated the backup power, then the reactors should be scrammed. Fukushima is a controllable situation because they scrammed the reactors. It might not be, if they didn't!
Re:Seal it and shut it down... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not how a reactor works.. Sure, you "shut it down" by inserting the control rods, but it's not an off switch. It needs days to cool down, all the while still able to heat water and spin turbines.
I don't know what was providing systems power and how that was lost.
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dude, they had it all considered, they even had barriers to prevent tsunamis from doing what they did. What nobody thought was the possibility that such an earthquake could sink Japan coastline 3+ feet rendering their tsunami barriers useless.
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It isn't operating. It was shutdown automatically during the earthquake 3 weeks ago.
How is it under that rock?
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Re:Seal it and shut it down... (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess buying a modern, safe nuclear reactor wasn't really on the top of his to do list, and mothballing the Fukushima reactors before the quake would have been unthinkable, they provided about 20% of the total power used in northern Honshu.
The first reactor was scheduled to be shut down on march 26th 2011. [icjt.org], the others over the next decade. You can't do it all at once because you need time to build new plants to replace the capacity.
Which, incidentally, is the main reason that so many old reactors are still running. Nobody will let them build new ones, so how can you shut down the old ones?
Re:Seal it and shut it down... (Score:4, Informative)
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Why would they operate a reactor at lower capacity just because it's going to be shut down soon? You shut it down when it comes time to shut it down. It's not like they were decommissioning it because it could no longer generate at design capacity.
Moreover, the extensions are exactly what I'm talking about -- you have to replace the generating capacity before you can shut down old plants. If more newer plants were being built then the extensions would be unnecessary.
Re:Seal it and shut it down... (Score:5, Informative)
I am sick of the idiots saying "seal it". What the fuck do you think that means? The core material has most likely melted through the inner steel vessels and probably in places through the concrete containment (at least that seems likely) - as a result, highly radioactive water is leeching out into the drainage tunnels and out to the Pacific Ocean.
How exactly can you "seal" that? Furthermore, even if you could, what makes you think that sealing it before you've cooled down the corium material is a good idea? I mean, if it's been hot and radioactive enough to melt through concrete, how exactly do you "seal" it?
The whole point is it needs to be cooled down enough and stabilized so that it's not melting through anything on an ongoing basis, and only then do the existing leaks need to be sealed up as best as possible, or at least mitigated so that whatever has escaped stays relatively localized.
As for "shut it down", it was shut down within seconds of the original earthquake. It's just that it needs ongoing cooling even after shutdown for quite some time - and once the fuel rods have melted down, it needs even more cooling.
Re:Seal it and shut it down... (Score:4, Informative)
No one at Fukushima has received a radiation dose that require treatment for radiation sickness let alone received a fatal dose. Two workers received a dose that exceeded their yearly dose limit and were removed from the site. Perhaps you are getting this situation confused with Chernobyl.
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Oh look, another volunteer. Since they're not dying on the spot, what's holding you back? If a little cancer is not worth mentioning in a discussion, it certainly isn't a reason not to help out, is it? People like you disgust me. The workers couldn't even do their job there under the normal limits. The limit has been increased to a quarter of a sievert. The workers incur the limit dose after just 15 minutes of working in some of the areas. Just one hour in the same area: Radiation sickness and 10% dead with
Re:Seal it and shut it down... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Seal it and shut it down... (Score:4, Insightful)
Russia and the Ukraine were both part of the USSR but the place was effectively run by Russia anyway.
Re:Seal it and shut it down... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oops. You are right.
Re:Seal it and shut it down... (Score:4, Informative)
That's correct Russia did not exist when Chernobyl happened. The U.S.S.R. existed.
Not the point, Chernobyl is in Ukraine. You wouldn't say that something that happened in London while it was part of the Roman empire happened in Italy, would you? They're not even originally a part of Russia, Ukraine was one of the states in the Soviet Union.
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There's a real simple shutdown plan.... trigger the explosives that release helium from containers that were designed to be broken in a case like this into the reactor zone, and you've got a tight seal that radiation can't pass through.
Downside to that plan is if you do it, that reactor is offline for good. Power supply in Japan would go down, and that's an economic impact.
What are you talking about!? Helium? What is that supposed to do? How does helium make a seal?
TEPCO has no hope that these reactors can ever be brought back online - they lost all such hope back in the beginning when they pumped seawater into them. Releasing helium won't make it any worse or better.
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Re:Straight Dope - Nuclear Power is Safe (Score:5, Insightful)
The lesson is we (humanity) should learn, it that we have only this one nest.
If we don't solve that problem, we deserve whatever happens to us.
We can't afford to foul it up (that is, any more than we have already.)
So you'll be turning off your computer and lights in 5, 4, 3... Oh, yeah, I forgot. Solar, wind, and geothermal will give all six billion of us all the electricity we need, so I guess you can leave that stuff powered up.