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30 Years To Clean Up Fukushima Dai-Ichi
0WaitState writes "Damaged reactors at the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant may take three decades to decommission and cost operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. more than 1 trillion yen ($12 billion), engineers and analysts said. Relatedly, Japanese officials and power plant operators are now working on the problems involved with disposing of 55,000 tons of radioactive water. '... international law forbids Japan from dumping contaminated water into the ocean if there are viable technical solutions available later. So the plant operator is considering bringing in barges and tanks, including a so-called megafloat that can hold about 9.5 megalitres. Yet even using barges and tanks to handle the water temporarily creates a future problem of how to dispose of the contaminated vessels.'"
Yesterday's 7.1 aftershock caused brief power losses at three other nuclear facilities, and small volumes of contaminated water spilled, but no significant radiation leakage occurred before the problems were resolved.
Have they considered putting it in cans and selling it at gas stations with a big glowing F on it?
Fukushima - For Radiant Health! It'll make a Monster out of you!
marketing has an answer for everything!
This has been tried before...
I suspect that you would run into two major problems:
1. That volume of water is massive and lifting mass out of our gravity well is damn pricy. You could probably give it a funeral sarcophagus shielded with several centimeters of gold for corrosion-resistant radiation absorption for the same money.
2. Heavy launch is not an entirely safe procedure. From time to time, something breaks and the cargo ends up burning up in the atmosphere. If the cargo is deliciously radioactive, that would be an issue. (and, if it isn't, a teakettle is a much cheaper way of dispersing it into the atmosphere...)
tritium emissions can't even get through a sheet of paper
Those are the dangerous emissions. They don't get through paper because they loose all their energy damaging it, which does not much for paper since it is already dead. Its the reason why the protective gear used near nuclear accidents is so thin, its enough to keep the alpha radiation from reaching your body, once ingested however there is nothing between it and your vulnerable cells.
Alpha particles can be breathed and actually is the most ionizing of all the ionizing radiation.
Alpha particles are extremely dangerous but are not penetrating.
The worst vector is to have an alpha emitter embedded in living tissue.
You must understand radiation exposure is not the same thing as exposure to hot particles or hot particles embedded in vivo.
There is a terrible misunderstanding going on. Sure, you could eat dinner next to a solid block of plutonium if its not critical its just a metal brock that emits some radiation. There used to be uranium paints and glazes used on cookware. Atomized and superheated fission products or fission products in salts and compounds embedded in vivo is a bloody mess. Its porrly understood and you can't use "x-rays, cosmic rays, plane flights" and trash like that to compare. The rays aren't that dangerous. The hot particles are very very dangerous because they can become part of your own biology and emit, even at low levels, inside your body.
So much for your sheet of paper. If that was the cause, Radon wouldn't be remediated and people would just enjoy sniffing alpha particles.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
yes, the GP is probably what people are talking about when they accuse the pro-nuclear side of being cavalier about radiation.
Plutonium with it's 20K half life is mainly dangerous as a heavy metal, iodine-131 with it's (if I'm remembering this correctly ) 8 day half life is at least gone after a few months.
but that 12 year half life is a pretty bad one, too long to expect it to be gone in a reasonable time but short enough to be a really nasty source of radiation.
Storing it shouldn't be too much of a problem at least, it's not a source of neutron radiation so it shouldn't leave it's container radioactive and since it's an alpha emitter a plain old water tank is good enough to shield people outside from the radiation but it's a bad one when it escapes into the environment and gets drunk by people.
While not terribly cheap, the technology for separating dissolved compounds from water(to fairly extreme degrees of purity, in the case of water for lab/analytic use) is very much off-the-shelf.
Right. That was done at Three Mile Island. Bear in mind that you can't make water itself radioactive; hydrogen and oxygen don't have any radioactive isotopes with long half-lives. (The longest, 15O has a half-life of 122 seconds, so it's gone within an hour.) All the radioactivity is in dissolved solids. So the process looks a lot like desalinization - the water is forced through membranes that catch all the solids. Eventually, you have dry salts, which you put in casks and bury in some desert or hard-rock cave.
That's the easy part of the problem, though. Remember that the reactor buildings are wrecked from the hydrogen explosions. All the fuel rods in the spent fuel pools have to be carefully moved to some other location, probably newly built spent fuel pools nearby. In 3-5 years, they'll have decayed enough for dry storage, and they'll be put into casks. They can then be moved off site.
This leaves the reactors themselves. Units 1,2, and 3 still haven't reached cold shutdown. Until that's achieved, cleanup can't even start. The situation isn't even close to safe until all three reactors are in cold shutdown, not leaking, and have redundant cooling. Look at the status reports at the Japan Industrial Atomic Forum. Until all the red squares turn yellow, there's a sizable risk of things getting worse.
Decommissioning the damaged reactors will be really tough. They're too damaged to de-fuel, and they need constant cooling, so they can't just be encased in steel and concrete. I don't know what will be done.
This is much, much worse than Three Mile Island. At TMI, the control room was up and running through the whole episode, they reached cold shutdown in a few days, they never had an explosion, and radioactivity was confined to the containment vessel.
base load power
please read : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_power_source#European_super_grid
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?