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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.
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?
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.
Plutonium is the most toxic substance known - even one atom will be harmful, even if not readily apparent.
Except that the facts don't agree with you.
Plutonium is a lot less toxic than something like dimethyl mercury.
It's definitely not something you should eat or inhale the dust but it's no more toxic than a lot of other substances, many of which are contact poisons.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
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."
Megalitres is an obscure term? I suppose if you're american. Pretty much every other country that uses SI or a form of SI along side imperial(Canada), uses it for large fluid volumes.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
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.
So how much is that in acre-feet?
Or footballfield-inches?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Plutonium is the most toxic substance known - even one atom will be harmful, even if not readily apparent.
Even though I'm not anywhere near an expert when it comes to nuclear physics, elemental decay, etc, that still seems like BS to me. It emits a single alpha particle and now it is no longer Plutonium. I just can't see how that can be so dangerous. But, I was willing to concede that, due to my lack of expertise, there may be something here I don't fully understand. So I went to look it up:
Plutonium is more dangerous when inhaled than when ingested. The risk of lung cancer increases once the total dose equivalent of inhaled radiation exceeds 400 mSv.[91] The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the lifetime cancer risk for inhaling 5,000 plutonium particles, each about 3 microns wide, to be 1% over the background U.S. average.[92] Ingestion or inhalation of large amounts may cause acute radiation poisoning and death; no human is known to have died because of inhaling or ingesting plutonium, and many people have measurable amounts of plutonium in their bodies.[77]
I'm not sure how many atoms of plutonium it takes to make a 3 micron wide particle. A quick search looks like Pu is approx 175 pm. So if those were lined up in a straight line, it would take over 5000 atoms to be 3 microns wide. I'm assuming when they say 3 micron particle, they mean something like a 3 micron sphere, but lets just go with the straight line anyway. That means that 1 atom of Pu is 1 / 25,000,000 of the dosage necessary for a 1% increase in cancer.
Plutonium is still irrelevant when discussing the most poisonous substance known. Chemical toxicity is smaller than the worst poisons, and when it comes to radiotoxicity it has a huge half-life compared to really unstable nuclei which have a half-life on the order of 10^-22 seconds. And even those should be nowhere close to anti-matter in toxicity.
If you think this is an absurd comparison since no one will ever encounter these substances then I think that's fair enough. In that case we can continue to Polonium which is much worse news than Plutonium and is inhaled daily by smokers and anyone within their smoke range meaning it is both more dangerous and more likely to ever contaminate the average person. Plutonium is bad but there is no rational reason to suggest it is the worst substance.
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.
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