Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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?
Could someone put 30 years into perspective for me?
No problem, I can put it into units that most Slashdot readers are familiar with.
The Library of Congress is 211 years old, so 30 years is around .14 Library of Congresses.
In comparison, a 2TB hard drive is around .2 Library of Congresses (printed material only).
So, in conclusion, Fukushima's cleanup is less than one 2 TB hard drive.
The major difference is containment. Hazmat equipment for dealing with chemical spills is much more effective than the gear for dealing with radiation. It does depend which type of particles you're dealing with, but some of them are pretty nasty and can penetrate thick concrete walls.
Nuclear clean up can take a really long time, just because the exposure is harder to manage and the steps involve more complicated. The world famous Hanford Site was last shut down in the late 80s, and we're still barely into the process of getting the site cleaned up. Granted it was established in the 40s for the purposes of creating nuclear weapons, but the site itself is still a mess and it's likely to still be a mess in 30 years at the rate things are going.
Hanford clean up
Consider the costs of coal. The radiological problem of the coal ash. The excess CO2. That cost, right there, is not being accounted for.
Best Slashdot Co
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.
I have a small property in a city in a small, ex-communist country that had a large (4 boilers, 4 turbines) coal plant in operation until about 1992. Since I go there from time to time, I can tell you pretty well how things went year by year.
When operation stopped (for various reasons, mostly lack of money and lack of cheap fuel after the collapse of COMECON), the plant was left to the elements. Until about 2002, the plant became a scrap iron mine -- the gypsies from the neighboring villages would come in, break shit up, cut out the metal and move it away. When iron became scarcer, they started to break up the buildings, piece by piece, extract window frames, nails, etc. Around 2002, the only thing that remained was a pile of rubble, mostly broken bricks, and a smokestack.
Surprisingly, the rubble started to disappear about 2003. I have no idea what has happened to it, but the mountain of broken bricks has halved by 2004, and almost gone by 2005. In 2006, the smokestack was pronounced a hazard, and a demolition grant was obtained from the government to destroy it. It became a small brick peak where the mountain used to be, but in another year those bricks were gone too.
In the end, the city government got an EU grant for "eco tourism area", spent a small amount of money (in the one to two million euros range) on removing the few remaining concrete blocks and , had some Dutch organization test the soil. Since they got a certification that allowed them to cultivate organic vegetables on part of the territory, I assume it wasn't very polluted.
So, in less than 20 years, the plant was gone completely.
Is this what you wanted to hear?
just to do the math :4.4 kilowatt-hours of electricity to split one litre of water with electrolysis.
so for 55000 tons of water it would take about
242000 MW hours of electricity to split it all.
Not a show stopper but quite a lot.pretty much the full output of a large power plant for a few weeks.
just thinking a bit outside the box: how reasonable would just adding some kind of gelling agent to it so you end up with a tank full of 55000 tons of strawberry flavoured radioactive jelly?
far less risk of a leak and a hundred or so years down the line it's pretty much safe again.
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.
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!