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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!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The weird thing is that the Pacific Ocean is so big that they could probably pump it into the depths and the radiation increase would be completely irrelevant.
Not the most responsible-sounding thing to do and I'm not advocating it, just saying that it's weird how just dumping it into the middle of the largest ocean available would probably end up hurting fewer people than any competing kind of disposal.
The solution to pollution is dilution.
That's what the miners tell me, anyway.
Wait a few weeks for the Iodine to decay, filter out the Ceasium and any inert heavy metals that might have been picked up. Pump now pure water into sea.
As for the storage barges: they're only intending to store lightly contaminated water in them (to make room in the internal tanks for more heavily irradiated water), so irradiation from decay will be minimal. A good rinse should be sufficient to clean them of any radionuclides hanging about.
IANANS (I am not a nuclear scientist), but isn't this issue largely controlled by the radioactive material's halflife? If what ever it is that is causing this issue has decayed to the point that it poses no significant risk after 10 years, would the containment vessel be any more radiated?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Is 30 years a long time? Just wondering.
Could someone put 30 years into perspective for me? How long does it take to clean up the byproducts from a coal plant, even given routine conditions where there is no earthquake or tsunami or explosion? If a coal plant was decommissioned in 1981, is it reasonable for me to assume that all its poisons are gone now?
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...)
I rather think that this is a good thing.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
1) Push the barges over Ghadaffi's "line of death".
2) spray the water along the US mexico border to create an inexpensive border wall. Not only is it unhealthy to cross, but the INS can track you down from the radioactivity.
3) dehydrate it? There's plenty of heat from those fuel rods.
4) feed it to the whales so the japanese will stop eating them.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Whats wrong with saying 9.5 million litres? Why use an obscure term like megalitres? Is it just because americans don't get the metric system?
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Consider the costs of coal. The radiological problem of the coal ash. The excess CO2. That cost, right there, is not being accounted for.
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I'm assuming that the eventual plan will involve some sort of distillation or RO process: 55,000 tons of water is not something you would want to have to safely entomb somewhere; but the actual volume of long-term nasties must be fairly small(worst case, it could not be greater than the volume of the fuel on site, and any materials that it has been in long term contact with for a sufficient time to render them radioactive, and it doesn't appear to be worst case).
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. Similarly, gross screening of a volume of treated water for radioactives should be doable with a Geiger counter, and fine screening should be within the realm of any decently equipped testing laboratory.
It isn't going to be cheap, and the end result will be a small pile of serious unpleasantness and a rather larger one of equipment that isn't worth decontaminating; but it doesn't seem like a fundamentally hard problem.
I think the easier option would probably to mix the water into concrete, then burying the radioactive concrete somewhere.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
That is one of the best LoC measurments I have ever seen! Kudos to you good sir!
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I understood that they are currently keeping the rectors cool by pumping 500 tons of water per day into the reactors. But it's not a closed loop system. The water becomes contaminated by the damaged fuel rods, and flows out through cracks in the containment chamber. So basically, the radioactive water will continue to be released. The only long term solution is to get the regular cooling system working again. However, it's probable that the cooling system was damaged from the hydrogen explosions and the salt deposits from the sea water.
Buy a barge, fill it up, float it to the middle of the Pacific and scuttle the ship. I think the international community can make an exception this time, all things considered. Other 'viable technical solutions' carry their own risk, and those risks will be continuous over the next 5 years or more, near population centers instead of out in the middle of the ocean.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
For years the British Government demanded that waste tritium be discharged as tritiated water...which is the worst possible solution. As a gas, you can collect it relatively easily. Once in water, it is very difficult.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Its got what plants crave
Seems surprisingly cheap to me for what is essentially the #1 or 2 largest nuclear disaster of all time.
It seems like the Gulf of Mexico is already pretty much back. I would expect a manmade object's mess on land to take longer than something under the huge GOM, but 30 years? Is Three Mile Island clean?
no comment
That thinks, meh dump it in the ocean. Think these people have had enough shit poured over them we can cut them some slack when it comes to the environment. This would kill a lot of fish, I know.
In the next five to ten years, they will be discovering a lot of new fish species off the coast of Japan.
OK, so freeze it and ship it to Antarctica. Because we all know there's no such thing as global warming...
Dilute the water 10,000X and sell it in "health" stores. Idiots will buy it for exorbitant prices. Profit.
So, let's talk about nuclear energy being cheap, again?
How many plants must be made safe to compensate for this hole in the budget?
TMI is clean - but cleaning up a single meltdown in an intact containment building took em close to 10 years. Here we have 4 reactors in variable states of core damage, dried out spent fuel pools with the fuel of at least one probably thrown around by an explosion, water washing out core material - yeah, I guess 30 years might be a good estimate.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
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.
The Gulf of Mexico is "pretty much back" if you ignore the layer of oil siting on the seabed right now...
Tritium doesn't have a massive enough nucleus to emit alpha particles. It transforms to Helium-3 via beta decay. It's pitiful that even on Slashdot, the thread could get to this depth (and even deeper) without someone noticing this.
You're just itchin' to see Tokyo destroyed for real aren't you?
Just mix with cola!
TEPCO has put back online units 3, 2 and 5. From their press release:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11040809-e.html
-Kashima Thermal Power Station Units 6: shutdown due to the earthquake
-Kashima Thermal Power Station: Units 2 resumed generating power at
5:45 pm April 7th.
-Kashima Thermal Power Station: Units 5 resumed generating power at
9:27 am April 8th.
Yesterday they put online unit 3, I'm impressed that they managed to put those units online in such a short time even with the ground still shaking.
Also, they put forward a plan to reinforce Kashiwazaki-Kariwa NPS, the largest in the world, in accordance with the new, upgraded regulations for the operation of NPS in Japan, in http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11040708-e.html and graphics http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110407e19.pdf
The new walls aside from protecting the buildings from tsunami waves, I think they will act as an additional barrier in case the reactor building suffer fire or explosions, like the one in unit 3 in Fukushima, that sent debris damaging several buildings around the unit, I don't know if they will provide some radiation protection to workers in case of emergency.
The amended regulations say:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu11_e/images/110408e3.pdf
Article 17-2 The organization shall draw up plan for each of the folloeing in
order to improve system for maintaining reactor facilities under circumstances where tidal waves cause loss of function to all the facilities receiving alternating-currentpower, all the reactor cooling facilities utilizing seawater and all the facilities for spent fuel pool cooling (“Station Blackout”).
(1) Allocate staff in order to maintain reactor facilities under Station Blackout.
(2) Train staff who operate to maintain reactor facilities under Station Blackout.
(3) Install power source cars, fire-fighting vehicles, fire fighting hoses and other equipments necessary for operation to maintain reactor facilities under Station Blackout.
2. The organization shall conduct activities to maintain reactor facilities under Station Blackout based on the plans mentioned above.
3. The organization shall conduct periodic evaluation on the matters mentioned in Paragraph 1. and 2. and based on such evaluation, take necessary measures.
Now, we shall be looking the start of improvement works in a pair of months in NPS around the world; that, if the nuclear industry really wants to survive this disaster.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Could lightly radioactive water be pumped into the reactor to become more heavily radiated? How much worse would that be for the workers who have to handle it?
Their they're doing there hair.
They do. Tritium. Tritium is H3, a hydrogen isotope with a 12.6 year half life. It is a beta emitter. So, in fact, since a lot of tritium gets produced in reactors under non-nominal conditions, you have a big problem with radioactive water, and no way of filtering it out. You could in theory ultracentrifuge steam to remove the tritium oxide, but in practice it's unaffordable. The traditional solution is to discharge it into water (the Irish Sea or the Colorado River) and hope it gets very diluted.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
You did remember to make a backup planet before commissioning those reactors, right ...?
No. Okay. Plan B: We dig a hole the size of Japan, and put all the contaminated stuff in there. Warning, it may prove necessary to dig the Japan-sized hole where Japan is currently located.
-kgj
It was going to take them 15-20 years to shut down the reactor sites anyway, which they would have actually started by now anyway (remember, a couple of these were just a couple weeks away from decommissioning ANYWAY.
When you build a nuclear reactor, you're making a long term commitment from the start. Once its fueled and running, it can't just be turned off and torn down over night, the teardown process is slow by its very nature as you wait for things to 'cool down' from a radiological perspective to the point that its safe enough to do something to it ... even when its a planned process.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning
Look at that list, most of these plants have planned decommissioning time frames from 30 to 50 years under normal shutdown conditions. Considering this is a 'disaster' and most of the plants on that list easily approach $1 billion to shut down anyway, $12 billion for clean up seems to be rather cheap.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
You do realize that Kashima is not Dai-Ichi right? You're talking about a different power plant coming back online, not the one that is having all the issues, an entirely different plant.
The #1 and #2 reactor at Dai-Ichi is never coming back online, #3 is extremely unlikely as well.
1 and 2 were going to be decommissioned this month anyway, and #3 in the near future.
You might want to get your facts straightened out and less confused with each other.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The last paragraph is interesing:
"... The tanks are well insulated and can store energy for up to a week. As an example of their size, tanks that provide enough thermal storage to power a 100-megawatt turbine for four hours would be about 30 feet tall and 80 feet in diameter..."
Where are they getting a week from? and why do they say a week, then then talk about 100 MW(paltry) for 4 hours?
Also, why doesn't some tell the people who are operating these plants that. Last time I talking to someone working a INT generation facility they couldn't get enough usable energy to go through the night.
That said, we we (the people,i.e. the government) should build some massive facilities to show industry the viability.
We should also create 1-2 MW facilities. I don't think they would take up much space, and you could install them for farms, datacenter, and other place near or on large tracts of land.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
no, the Gulf is not back. There is a lot under the surface.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So freezing it and blasting it into space to let it become some comet isn't an option? That's sad we are depriving another alien civilization of super heroes and zombies.
I suspect that you would run into two major problems: [...]
Three. You completely neglected the counterstrike led by super heroes from the alien civilization that did not appreciate us causing a zombie apocalypse.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
It was interesting and well written. It convincingly argues that coal plant cleanup is easier than nuke plant cleanup, which responds well to the parent.
Unfortunately for both you and the parent, Japan doesn't have any coal.
What Japan does have is abundant Geothermal energy. Decommissioning a geothermal plant is even easier, should that ever need to be done. But in over a century of geothermal energy production the need has not yet arisen.
The problem with geothermal is that it costs a bit more up front. This is offset by the fact that it needs no fuel, so ongoing costs are low.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
So, heck, yeah - it is just another means of decomissioning? That what you are saying?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
That's why I put the Conventional PS and reinforcement of NPS in the title. I re-read my post again and don't see how it can be confusion among Kashima Thermal Power Station, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa NPS and Fukushima Daiichi NPS. Is clear that I'm talking about 3 different things. Anyway, the recovery of Kashima CPS means that TEPCO will have additional, redundant energy to supply Fukushima Daiichi, if they managed to repair the old transmission lines to the site. The redundancy in external power supply is key to make any emergency manageable, we have a perfect example with Onagawa NPS, that survived with minor damage the earthquake and tsunami in March 11th, and the recent April earthquake too. It could be made almost a reference design.
Of course, Fukushima's units 1, 2 and 3 will never be online again. They have core damage and severe contamination, specially unit 2 that have damage in suppression chamber. Even if the units were ok, they have scuttled them the moment they started to use sea water to cool the core. Maybe they could try salvage unit 4, since the damage is in the exterior, and the spend fuel pool is the only point of concern there. Units 5 and 6, aside political pressure, can be put online when they make the mandatory improvements to the support infrastructure and emergency procedures.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Fear of outsiders which limits immigration and cross-breading
I don't blame them... Rye/Raisin/Sourdough? Yuck!
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Spend a year or two drip feeding it into a down-welling ocean current. Seems to me the safest way to dispose of it but the problem is there are international treaties that prevent that sort of thing.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Nope, just that its not going to take them any longer than they were already expecting to clean it up. When you build one of these things, you start out with the assumption that the area is going to be a nuclear plant location for AT LEAST 100 years. The plant will STILL be a profitable one, even going 12x over decommission costs, and the time frame doesn't matter as its the same as it was before any of this happened.
You can hate nuclear energy all you want, and point out VALID reasons to avoid it. That I can deal with. What I can't stand is when people try to turn things into something unexpected or bad when it really isn't. The cleanup time doesn't change a thing, it was going to be 30 years even if the Tsunami never happened so it shouldn't be weighed into the argument.
If you want to talk about the harm to the fishing industry in the immediate area, go ahead, thats a valid point. You can bring up any of the massive number of problems that are a direct result of what has happened, nothing wrong with that ... but bringing up the clean up time like it is something unexpected or abnormal is being deceptive and makes it clear you don't have actual facts about why this is bad and are instead just spouting off when you read sensationalizing headlines. It makes it clear you're ignorant of the subject matter you are attempting to discuss. It makes you one of those annoying fucking people who stop progress because you're too lazy and ignorant to get the fucking facts right. The kind of idiot who thinks the world is 6000 years old and evolution is a lie.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The Japanese mentioned they have special filters to clean out water before it is released back into the environment from the Taurus. Is there a way to do this?
http://saveie6.com/
You know, in my original post, I pointed out that removing the core and pressure vessel from TMI took about 10 years after a meltdown. That's the highest radiological concern you get when decomissioning a plant. Now, all of a sudden, you pull 30 years out of your arse as normal decomissioning time, just so that this doesn't look bad, and THEN insult me as a creationist? Mate, back to propaganda school. You suck at it.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
1. Dilute the contaminated water ...and more
2. Dilute it even more
3.
4. Sell it to homeopaths
5. Profit!
Didn't Soulskill or 0wait or anyone involved with this on slashdot read to the end of "Disposing of 55 thousand tons of radioactive water"" and see in bold type Los Angeles Times? For no reason I can see apart from laziness, this great piece of investigative reporting is now all over teh webz as a story from the plucky Aussies at the Sydney Morning Herald who seem to have done nothing but some light editing. Searching latimes.com for "Ralph Vartabedian" coughs up the original, two days earlier:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-water-20110407,0,873990,full.story
Credit where credit is due, show some respect, Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times, etc.
=S
I found different other discussion groups doing serious thinking while I doubt that some of those really good ideas finally make their way to TEPCO. There is an approach to bundle ideas and risk analysis in a Non-profit Open Innovation portal as contribution to end nuke crisis in Fukushima. The situation at Fukushima Daiichi is still as difficult as 4 weeks ago. Engineers struggle to stabilize the situation and progress is difficult to achieve in view of numerous issues to be solved simultaneously. To bundle technical expert knowledge - now distributed over a number of web sites - InventCap started a Non-Profit open innovation portal (http://system.aipivalue.com/fukushima ) "Help to stop nuke crisis in Fukushima". Technical proposals about health and environment protection, cooling systems, radiation protection, general plant repair issues and measurement techniques will be collected and rated. Promising proposals will be forwarded to IAEA and TEPCO.