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Chain Reactions Reignited At Fukushima
mdsolar writes "Radioactive byproducts indicate that nuclear chain reactions must have been burning at the damaged nuclear reactors long after the disaster unfolded. Tetsuo Matsui at the University of Tokyo, says the limited data from Fukushima indicates that nuclear chain reactions must have reignited at Fuksuhima up to 12 days after the accident. Matsui says the evidence comes from measurements of the ratio of cesium-137 and iodine-131 at several points around the facility and in the seawater nearby."
That is all.
Sensational!
If you melt the fuel, you can get localized criticalities.
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http://www.energyfromthorium.com
We have no one to blame but ourselves for any accident that happens when a safer, cleaner, more efficient, and cheaper nuclear fuel is readily available and already has most of the hard problems with its implementation worked out through several running prototypes.
Has the Gas Effect contributed to the disaster? Its one of the least understood parts of nuclear reactions, fussion/fission and radiation, we need more funding for Gas Effect research.
If the reactors had been successfully scram'd completely, heat from decay of by-products would have burned out in a very few days. As became obvious, that didn't happen.
I saw that movie. Not only does it end well but its got Neo in it. Don't worry. There is no spoon.
Seriously though... that's scary. It might not be Chernobyl but this has got to be the worst nuclear disaster of its type. Although since they're in Japan wouldn't it be called the South America Syndrome? (polar opposite of Fukushima is Chile)
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
How, without a moderator?
My understanding is that LEU (low-enriched uranium) cannot achieve criticality without a moderator to slow down the neutrons?
Can anyone with a nuclear physics/engineering background give any explanation of how you can get a chain reaction without moderator?
Ok, they were cooling the reactor with water, and water is a moderator, but the water was also boronated, which should cancel the moderation property of water, shouldn't it?
More and more I see the attempt to design and operate Nuke plant as a very dangerous game of Whack-a-mole. Operator error, Wham, Design error, Wham, Maintenance failure, Wham. Earthquakes. Wham. Tsunamis, Wham. Terrorism, Wham,
and, what do we do with the waste for the next 20,000 years? Wham, Wham, Wham, Wham........
Miss one time, game over.
Kurt
And operating a coal plant is akin to all the moles poked out of their holes and looking at you while you shrug and say "working as intended."
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I've looked through the paper this report is based on http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1105/1105.0242v1.pdf and I don't see much discussion of the amount of power generated by the proposed post-shutdown criticality. It seems to me that standard operating power is assumed but I don't see how that could work without other signs such as a glowing reactor building.
There are reactor designs that currently exist that are more resilient to meltdowns. Most notably, thorium molten salt reactors, but there are only a handful of experimental reactors in existence. There is also the CANDU reactor primarily used and designed in Canada which is a uranium heavy water reactor.
I will agree with you that the ancient nuclear technology most reactors use today is not that safe, but more modern reactors have solved that issue. The only problem has been rolling out thorium and CANDU reactors.
And WRT your comment on terrorism, there's a video on Youtube I've seen that debunks the whole "flying a plane into a reactor" myth. Nuclear plants have concrete walls that are like 10 feet thick and the plane collapses on it self and does nothing to the wall.
You can get rid of the waste whenever we are smart enough to switch to thorium fueled fluoride salt reactors which are inherently safer, much more efficient using only a fraction of a much more plentiful fuel to produce the same energy. The small amount of unusuable nuclear byproducts of a thorium reactor have much more manageable half-life of around 330 years. The useful byproducts include many things that are otherwise difficult to produce like the isotope of plutonium used to power deep space probes, bismuth-213 which is used in cancer treatments and has a 45-minute half life.
But to your point the best thing is the inherent safety, LFTRs (liquid fluoride thorium reactors) can be easily designed to passively shutdown rather than requiring active cooling inside the operating core which is the problem with all water cooled reactors which is all we have today. The funny thing is we have tested and proven this technology, we know it works, but the unsafe technology that produces weaponizable nuclear components and huge amounts of dangerous waste is so lucrative and entrenched that current nuclear players have no financial incentives to make the shift.
And the fact that a LFTR can reduce the waste we have produced from current nuclear technologies and turn it into more energy and more manageable waste.
Join the World Community Grid/Harvard Clean Energy Project.
And don't say you don't have a computer.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
The fictional reactor they developed in the movie "Chain Reaction" as an cavitational sonofusion device. If you can't tell the difference between fission and fusion, please refrain from muddying the waters. And no matter what, never, under any circumstances remove the sands.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Terrorists can still take over 'planes? I thought they fixed the cabin doors...
(All that other TSA strip-search stuff is a waste of time...)
No sig today...
As opposed to coal/oil/gas plants, where the game is Russian Roulette. They're going to kill people eventually from all the shit they pump out - the game is just hoping it isn't you.
Hydroelectric is a game of Jenga - lots of fun, but eventually something'll make the dam break, which is actually the most massively devastating type of power plant failure. The Johnstown Flood (caused by a dam failure) remains the deadliest disaster in US history. Estimates for a failure of the Three Gorges dam usually have 6-7 digit body counts.
Solar/Wind/Tidal/Geothermal/Fusion are all games of "how the hell can we make this actually work?". AFAIK, nobody has ever run an entire full-sized country, or even a significant fraction of a country, off any of those. It would be nice if we could, but so far, they are either not cost-effective, not able to produce enough to meet demand, or not even fully functional.
I've been watching the nuclear industry for a long long time, since they publicly announced come watch the test in Nevada next Monday, come to the viewing area at........ back in the 1950's in fact. They always have had newer better safer technology to replace the old dangerous crud.
Child of innocence wake up!
As well as that there has been some speculation that the explosion in unit 3 was more than just a hydrogen explosion. If you compare the unit 1 and unit 3 explosions, you see the unit 3 was far larger in magintude, plus there is a flash right where the spent fuel pool is located. Also pieces of nuclear fuel rods were found 2 km from the site. Arnie Gundersen speculates that this was caused by a "prompt criticality" in the fuel pool, triggered by the hydrogen explosion. http://fairewinds.com/updates
Miss one time, game over.
Hardly, chernobyl and fukushima were about as miss as you are going to get, reactors dont blow up in the same way that a fusion bomb does.
Granted, chernobyl has a 30 KM exclusion zone, and fukushima will likely need a permanent exclusion zone as well, but it's hardly game over for the human race. It would be a good idea to build these things far away from large cities (having tokyo inside the exclusion zone would suck), but in the grand scheme of things, these kind of events are rather survivable
No disrespect to the victims of chernobyl or fukushima by the way, i dont mean to trivialise their plight, just saying that on a world scale, this isnt that big of a deal
People, what a bunch of bastards
I agree, but it is my understanding that there is a way for nuclear waste to be "burned" in the reactor greatly reducing it's half life. Is this correct?
The thousands of people coal plants kill every year due to air pollution and mining accidents? Must admit I'm struggling to find an absolute number, but this'll have to do:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
Solar/Wind/Tidal/Geothermal/Fusion are all games of "how the hell can we make this actually work?". AFAIK, nobody has ever run an entire full-sized country, or even a significant fraction of a country, off any of those.
Iceland does - 66% geothermal.
But I agree that this is a very special case. Wind and (eventually) solar would be able to cover a large part of the energy needs of many countries - was it not for the tiny little problem of storage when it is winter, cloudy, and windless. Or just night.
Then by your definition, explain why we have already "missed" several times, and the "game" is far from over?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
One big issue I see is that the assumption is 7 to 9 months of fuel usage. In block 4, the fuel in the pond was probably significantly older.
Even with the Exclusion zone in Chernobyl, they still operated the plant into 2000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dN5T9eAVFg
This seems like a stronger argument than the current paper.
"The decay heat, which is 7% of 1000 MW"
IIRC, the reactors were 1000MW *electrical* output. Because of thermal efficiencies of steam generators of around 35%, I believe that means the thermal output of each reactor would have been about 1000/.35 ~= 2800 MW thermal energy.
So, instead of 7% of 1000MW = 70MW, I think you're looking at 7% of 2800 = 196MW.
That's a LOT of heat to get rid of, even if it is a small percentage of the 2800MW full output.
There are reactor designs that currently exist that are more resilient to meltdowns.
False dichotomy much. And obviously intentionally too.
Both fossil fuels and nuclear fuels will end soon. And even if they wouldn't it's still just plain retarded backwards redneck shit technology.
We're in the motherfucking 21st century! Where's the geek in you?? We should only be using straight unprocessed energy from our fucking awesome giant fusion reactor in the sky by now!
We should be full circle in environment neutrality through balancing of all natural cycles that resulted from our actions by now!
Because that's how awesome I expect a humanity to be, that I consider worthy of existing!
Interestingly, nature agrees. And she always wins. She doesn't care if we wipe out the planet and pollute it to death. Something will survive and prosper. :P
But with all you idiots, it sure as hell won't be your version of humanity!
I don't know about reducing the half life, but there are reactors out there that you put the waste into and can burn up and get energy from, so you have less waste when it's done.
It's still quite radioactive because there's still *lots* of energy in it - current reactors only extract a couple of % of the energy. At some stage in the future technology advance and the economics of uranium availability will make it viable to re-use this waste as fuel.
I.e. it's not waste, it's fuel we're going to use again in the future.
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i have to say that the article is interesting, but as far as i understand the fuel in the different reactors is different and has undergone a quite different history.
The data and evaluation seems a little weak to me in that respect.
I see that you were modded down, but please know if I had 5 I'd give them to you.
If that's true, then there should be some evidence for this assertion other than merely that the unit 3 explosion was bigger than the unit 1 explosion.
Those walls appeared to be missing at Fukushima though. The reactor outer building seemed to be a relatively normal girder+concrete building. The reactor may have been in a reasonably thick, steel containment vessel, however the spent fuel pool wasn't protected by much. It was several stories up, near the top of a not particularly strongly reinforced, standardish building, and the top of the reactor - to minimise handling after unloading).
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Yes, but it requires a different type of reactor. CANDU reactors can do it.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Boeing designed the 787 without isolation between the network running the in-flight entertainment system (some of which allow PAX to plug in USB storage devices) and the network on which flight systems sit. So conceivably a passenger could have hijacked the plane without ever leaving their seat, e.g. with a crafted media file to exploit, say, ID3 parser bugs.
I presume Boeing have been forced to fix this, but I havn't checked...
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Not too much wrong with coal, and if something does go wrong the effects are temporary and localized.
What, localized to planet Earth?
The waste? I think you meant the fuel for the next 20,000 years worth of reactors. It's not waste, it's a re-usable by-product.
But you already knew that, right?
And operating a coal plant is akin to all the moles poked out of their holes and looking at you while you shrug and say "working as intended."
And of course boiling water with nuclear and fossil fuels are the only two possible ways to produce electricity.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Wow, FUD much? Solar and Wind, killing people near you!
Wait... What? Terrorism or no, that would be a breathtakingly stupid move on their part; outside of bad movies, I can't imagine any design where someone would be able to hack an entertainment system and make the plane do a loop-the-loop... Have any reference to this?
[citation needed]
and, what do we do with the waste for the next 20,000 years?
The part that is truly dangerous over that time span can be recycled. Just do that instead.
Know what? If we could use wind/solar/whatever during the day, and leave coal/oil/nuclear for just the night (and cloudy/windless days), that would still be a good 50% (give or take) reduction in dependence...
You obviously haven't looked at the design of the plant. There are 3 layers:
- The outer cosmetic steel box, to keep the weather out
- The inner concrete containment chamber
- The inner steel pressure vessel that houses the actual reaction
The concrete containment chamber is present in virtually every modern reactor, and every Western reactor for the precise reasons we see described today. Lack of a containment chamber is one of the reasons Chernobyl was infinitely worse than anything else, since when the steel pressure vessel exploded it was instantly exposed to the atmosphere.
Here you go: http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2008/01/dreamliner_security
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Doubtful. The lack of a core explosion means that the vast majority of long term radiological hazards and dangerous isotopes are still contained. The primary hazards in Chernobyl are high quantities of enriched uranium, plutonium, and strontium in the areas surrounding the plant.
We'll know more once the plant stops leaking material and the Iodine has had time to decay, but I suspect that the radiation will drop dramatically and that a minor cleanup effort will be needed in the areas surrounding the plant. Permanent evacuation? Unlikely.
We have one plant failure with core meltdown and significant radiation release every ten years, from a total that has been hovering around 400. That's not good by any count and it certainly puts a kink in the "too cheap to meter" meme. If nothing else, NPP failures are expensive on a scale that, indeed, only dams can replicate. Yet with a flood, you can come back a week later and start doing agriculture. Not so with the NPP. On a global scale (say, if we were trying to get 50% of all our electricity from nuclear), we cannot afford that.
So in other words, nuclear energy is like almost everything else we've tried up to now.
Fossil fuels: oops, the CO2 got out into someone else's atmosphere, whether by operator error or even design.
Hydroelectric: this damn is working great, but the hippies and fishermen are protesting outside the gate.
Direct solar: no downside? Whaddya bet there's some horrible catch during the manufacturing, and some day hippies will be protesting outside the factory.
A 50% reduction in dependence is not necessarily a 50% reduction in risk. A power plant is quite often still dangerous, even when off. Particularly nuclear - the most dangerous thing you can do to a nuclear reactor is try to shut it down. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and even part of Fukushima (while the earthquake and tsunami did plenty of damage on their own, it was only when the power went out that the meltdown occured) were caused by attempts to shut down the reactors.
Ok, sorry, yes, the reactor in Fukushima is inside a concrete shell. However, the storage pool is not. Further, the Fukushima concrete shell was not designed for explosive or impact containment, because it seems it was broken apart by the hydrogen explosion in at least one of the reactor buildings (which I gather was outside of the concrete containment). Pictures taken from the air of the damaged buildings appear to show the top of the actual reactor pressure vessel (which was itself inside a steel containment vessel) exposed in at least reactor 4:
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp8/daiichi-photos8.htm
I.e. the Fukushima design does NOT appear to have had any high-strength concrete containment, other than one designed for general structural support and low-pressure vapour/liquid containment.
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Sorry, You did not address waste issue. Wham. Wham
What waste issue, you do realize you're surrounded by radiation now right? Granite counter tops, bananas, air line travel [boom headshot]. Btw some thing will kill you, be it cold, or starvation b/c you don't live next to the food you eat, or perhaps bacteria growing in the natural environment that decided you were a good place to set up shop. But hey, you keep trying to make everybody confirm to your nanny-state, gaia fueled fantasy and let me know how that works out.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
It's called a failure of the imagination. Yes, the world IS a scarier, more chaotic place than you have come to expect. That's true for all of us first-worlders' expectations, so don't feel too bad about it.
Stuxnet, for instance, sounds like something out of a bad movie, but it's very real.
OK, Iceland is an exception. Mostly because they're in a rather peculiar geological situation, which is perfectly suited to geothermal.
Further, I do not believe ground-based solar will ever be effective, except in certain geological situations - mainly deserts. Any power source that completely fails during the night is just ludicrous. At least wind functions equally well (or equally poorly) throughout the day.
Now, something like satellite-based solar might work. And tidal is always an option, if you're on a coast (unless you expect the Moon to go away within the lifetime of your plant). And in n+50 years when fusion starts working, we can all switch to that.
So what you're saying is:
It was the worst natural disaster in Japan's history, one that was the perfect storm of conditions, all affecting an ancient design of plant which was NOT designed to handle such disasters, and yet despite this- still to this very day- has not had a substantial meltdown (some radiation leakage is not crowd on the beach in Melbourne)... and you're *complaining*?
Inevitable car analogy is as follows. If I own a regular Toyota Prius, there's a reasonable expectation that if I get into a fender bender I won't die. It's engineered to tolerate that. The car may be a write off, but I'm fairly safe.
But if a TANK shoots my Prius? Well, then I'm fucked. I'll die and it's *not Toyota's fault*, much less the fault of the automotive industry at a whole. You accept that, right? You accept that anything built by anyone, ever, is built to a limited amount of tolerance, and beyond that failure is not the fault of the manufacturer, let alone the whole industry?
In this metaphore, a tank shot my Prius in the engine block... and to the astonishment of most the Prius fucking TOOK IT. That armour-piercing tank shell bounced off like a motherfucker, leaving a huge dent, and shaking the car so I wacked my head, but hey. I'm alive and whole. I walked away after the worst imaginable thing happened, far beyond the design specifications of the vehicle. Yeah, there was a little blood-slash-radiation leakage from my head, but it's not that bad. I could have a concussion. I should probably get checked out, but it could have been MUCH worse. Furthermore, I am astounded on how this Prius is eating tank shells. That's some serious engineering work right there. Damn, dog... ... and yet, people are still like, "Oh, but I'm bruised a little bit, it didn't protect me completely. Priuses are so unreliable!"
Seriously.
Tank.
Prius.
Tepco might be incompetent lying morons, but the reason why the old plant was still around was in no small part because of anti-nuclear fear-mongering ("Not in MY backyard!"). That's the reason that newer, far more safter, reactors are not everywhere. Because constructing new nuke reactors is verboten, like we're still in the 70's or some shit.
If we treated nuclear power with the respect it deserves, keeping the technology up to date and learning from our mistakes... then we can progress.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
He says they should be able to tell for sure by analysing the smoke from the explosion. However, that data has never been made public.
Boeing designed the 787 without isolation between the network running the in-flight entertainment system (some of which allow PAX to plug in USB storage devices) and the network on which flight systems sit.
Not exactly. They (Boeing and Airbus, the only two major civilian transport aircraft mfgrs left) were spanked by the FAA half a decade ago to very specifically not even think of doing that.
So conceivably a passenger could have hijacked the plane without ever leaving their seat, e.g. with a crafted media file to exploit, say, ID3 parser bugs.
I presume Boeing have been forced to fix this, but I havn't checked...
Well conceivably, a pig could fly given a high enough thrust to weight ratio via a ID3 parser bug.
Check out
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=2008_register&docid=fr02ja08-5
aka "FAA Docket No. NM364 Special Conditions No. 25-356-SC"
More or less the FAA telling Boeing and Airbus they will absolutely not be allowed to fly a transport plane without guaranteeing they are not completely separate.
This was all fought out and resolved like half a decade ago but the meme that passengers can hack into the FCS just simply will not die. 20 years from now we'll still be hearing about how someone heard someone quote someone else as having heard that its done all the time by the mysterious someone or something.
Now magically proclaiming "it shall be done" does not mean it actually will be done. Also an argument based on "theoretically I could be an axe murder, because I do have two strong arms and own an axe" and claiming there may or may not be a law against specifically being an axe murder vs a regular old murderer murderer, does not say anything really useful about the venn diagram of me and axe murderers.
I'd worry a lot more about someone jamming GPS, or sabotaging the production facilities, or shooting at the planes from the ground. Basically, the traditional attacks work so much better, and are so much cheaper...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Nuclear plants have concrete walls that are like 10 feet thick and the plane collapses on it self and does nothing to the wall.
What about a massive fire from burning plane fuel? What does that do to concrete and steel?
The Admin and the Engineer
Depends if it is concentrated and whipped up into an inferno, out of reach of fire control equipment.
Unless you know of a reactor that's several hundred feet up in the air...
The "containment" chamber for the spent rods was the water in the pool. The concrete containment was below the pool.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
That link is precisely the case I was referring to (and also linked to by the Wired article I linked above). So which part of "Boeing designed the 787" (note the *past tense*, and note this was after 9/11 and locked cabin doors, and, especially, note my last sentence stating I presumed this had already been fixed) was incorrect? I'm all for nitpicking, but...
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Sure. The bone I'm picking is with the ancestor comment that claims all the dangerous stuff is safely under plane-impact proof, 10ft thick concrete.
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Coal plants don't render 1200 square kilometers of (sub)urban land uninhabitable for 50+ years when they go belly up.
The tsunami has turned large areas of Japan's eastern seaboard into a wasteland of debris, detritus and dead bodies. But the waters receded; people can rebuild.
Fukushima Daiishi has render the area around it uninhabitable for far, far longer. People cannot rebuild, even if they want to. Plant workers are going to start dropping like flies from chronic radiation poisoning, if they're not doing so already. Radiation is leaking into the surrounding waters, in a country with a large diet of fish and important local fishing industry. The country is now facing rolling blackouts for several years due to its reliance on a plant that cannot be replaced or repaired in good time when things go wrong.
Against this, coal plants do --what exactly? Pollute? Cause respiratory problems? Cost a lot in fuel? Hell, given that choice, I say fire up those old smokers!! It beats the alternative--and I'm an environmentalist.
May the Maths Be with you!
"And WRT your comment on terrorism, there's a video on Youtube I've seen that debunks the whole "flying a plane into a reactor" myth. Nuclear plants have concrete walls that are like 10 feet thick and the plane collapses on it self and does nothing to the wall."
Oh, so all the government officials and nuclear plant operators that actually said on TV that the nuclear reactors are not resistant against collisions by anything slightly larger than a Cessna are lying? And they are lying in the *wrong direction*? And you simply dismiss those things because of an unnamed YouTube video?
That's just plane trolling what you did there...
Err, the water is a moderator, not a reactor. Mental hiccup.
The reactor itself may be well-protected but is all the plumbing that works the cooling system equally so? I'm sure there are plenty of bits of nuclear plant that would indirectly cause radiation leaks due to overheating if you hit them with a plane. IANANE but we've been told before that nuclear power is safe and I never believed it then either.
Korma: Good
ah well shit, it sounds dangerous. we all need to give up and go back to living like the amish.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Horse shit. Pure horse shit. Radiation levels at the moment are still extremely minor. Plant workers are still not exceeding their yearly allotment, they're being pulled out before hand. The yearly allotment is below the level that shows even a minor increase in cancer rates. The government has stopped fishing mostly for trust reasons - it's unlikely that anyone would've been made sick, but they want people to feel safe buying the fish when they do open it up.
This is a big problem, and it shouldn't have happened. But this event has made a few people sick (like a sunburn) for a few days because they didn't follow proper protocol. Meanwhile, the triggering event has killed, what, 20,000? Versus a couple people with minor injuries.
If you have evidence to refute the above points, I'd love to see your citations. I've been following this pretty closely, so I'd be very interested to see if I've been wrong.
But it seems like you're just making stuff up. There are plenty of facts in this debate. Don't go inventing nonsense just because the facts don't fit your opinion.
I'm not a nuclear fanboy, by any means. As an engineer, current plants make me nervous because they rely on active safety. But I'm more annoyed that NIMBYs aren't allowing research and production of the intrinsically-safe plants, than I am about the operators of the plant. Nuclear plants "feel" unsafe? Well they have just about the best safety record of all industrial facilities. This particular plant had multiple failures after design specifications were well exceeded, and even then the problems they've had have been extremely minor in relative and absolute terms.
In short, you're being irrational.
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Such reprocessing is already possible but not legal to perform.
this is my sig
Boiling water by releasing some sort of potential energy is the most efficient way of producing electricity.
Wind and solar are not reliable enough for baseload generation as they depend on the wind to be blowing or the sun to be shining at a given time, which is not a guarantee. Geothermal and hydro depend on very specific geography/geology, which does not exist everywhere and in enough quantity for our baseload needs.
The only reliable and economical sources of energy for general baseload power generation not tied to a specific and limited locale will be transportable materials containing potential energy that can be made to release that energy at will. Currently, that means combustible materials or fissile materials.
Compared to the reactor pressure vessel, the spent fuel rods are a waste of effort. A plane could crash into the building and compromise the spent fuel rod pool, but even if cooling was compromised (unlikely), there'd be loads of time to deal with it. Fukushima was different because they lost external power, which wasn't "supposed" to happen (the grid, generators, and battery backups).
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I feel bad for it, but I can't help but wish—just a little bit—that we'll get Godzilla out of this.
You didn't know? The whole earthquake and nuclear reactor incident is just a cover story for Gojira's fight with Destroyah and his subsequent meltdown...
Bow-ties are cool.
Prompt criticality would be suspiciously like an atomic bomb, because that's how they work. But it seems like there was only very minor fallout, of short-term fission products (iodine, etc), which indicates that it just released existing product.
Perhaps the explosion was larger because there was more hydrogen? Also, don't underestimate the power of explosions like that - Chernobyl's steam explosion threw (much heavier) graphite moderator blocks a tremendous distance.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Seeing as there are no commercial thorium molten salt reactors in existance, neither the safety, nor the design has been proven. It'll take huge amounts of public money to make it viable. But still no nuclear design will ever be 100% safe, or make the waste problem go away.
On the other side, we have solar, wind and geothermal, none of which have waste problems, all 100% safe. And the technical problems to solve to make them more economical are far easier to solve. If solar energy had even a fraction of the public funds pumped into nuclear research over they years, we would already have cheap solar power today.
ah well shit, it sounds dangerous. we all need to give up and go back to living like the amish.
Even the Amish don't do that...
Bow-ties are cool.
Depends if it is concentrated and whipped up into an inferno, out of reach of fire control equipment.
Unless you know of a reactor that's several hundred feet up in the air...
Good point. I can't think of any reason why firefighters couldn't put a fire out at a burning reactor building. Oh... wait a second... there was a fire at Windscale... and Chernobyl... and Fukushima for the most part is still too hot to get near, even without a jet fuel fueled fire... but yeah, except for the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, you're completely right.
The Admin and the Engineer
Coal plants don't render 1200 square kilometers of (sub)urban land uninhabitable for 50+ years when they go belly up.
Indeed, they don't when they go belly-up; they do it in normal operation. Ask the Maledives. Or the Netherlands, Banglasdesh or other low-lying countries.
You spelled "fuel" wrong. It doesn't start with a 'w'.
The "flying a plane into a reactor" myth needs to be re-opened - the "debunking" was all focused on the containment vessel being strong enough to resist the impact - sure it's nice that it's strong enough, but the cooling system is mostly outside that containment vessel, and as we saw with Fukushima if you damage that you can cause a meltdown.
The only reliable and economical sources of energy for general baseload power generation not tied to a specific and limited locale will be transportable materials containing potential energy that can be made to release that energy at will. Currently, that means combustible materials or fissile materials.
Not clear at all that fissile materials are an economical source of energy. I've read that the cost of dealing with this fissile disaster (so far) is about 300 billion dollars. That's some -huge- liability...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Low-Enriched-Uranium doesn't go boom. Period.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
When did the word "alarmist" start carrying a negative connotation? I'm no etymologist but I'm pretty sure "alarmist" meant "the guy that rings the alarm" at first.
Imagine that you were hired as the Chief Alarmist in a nuclear plant back in the 60's. Back then everyone would thank you for manning the alarm and keep them safe. But 50 years later, everyone thinks you're total nut-case and it's become the worst job in the world.
"However, that data has never been made public."
Does that "data" even exist? Did anyone sample the smoke, or take some sort of optical spectrometry measurements or some other methods of data collection?
Perhaps it was, but I wouldn't necessarily assume that in the midst of a crisis, that when an unexpected explosion happens, that anyone has the equipment on hand or the time/opportunity to take such measurements?
Don't be such a pussy, it's not as bad as you think. While Chernobyl is not a healthy place to live there are people who work there day by day, year by year and are still alive. "Only" half of the emergency fire brigade, who were tasked of putting down the fire, died. And they got the worst of it while working above open reactor that's still critical.
Hydro-plant is much worse - a dam break at large hydro-plant has potential to kill millions of people. If a nuclear reactor melts down it kills few and people have time to evacuate. Some more people will have health problems but it's still far better than being dead.
I very much doubt this, since the both the steel and concrete containment of block 3 are still intact. I think the difference may have been due to the difference of the outer shell, which was not made out of reinforced concrete in the case of block 1. Also, the power of block 3 was around double the one of block 1, so it is possible that more hydrogen was produced. On top of that, the hydrogen accumulated for two days longer in block 3 than in block 1.
Ah, just saw that a criticality in the spent fuel pool is claimed. This is also most unlikely. First, if this would have happened anywhere, it would have been in the spent fuel pond of block 4, which had much more fuel stored. Secondly, this was far too big an explosion for a criticality - the energy generated by a chain reaction would immediately boil the moderator and stop very quickly again. Thirdly, a massive amount of neutron radiation would have been measured in that moment - but it wasn't. I think very minor criticality events may have happened from time to time, which might explain the results of the article. It would also explain the dozen or so detections of neutron radiation at very low intensity.
In the grand scheme of the accident, I don't think it played a role.
Yadayadayada. You still did not address the waste issue. Are you saying that the nuclear waste in in the same league as a granite counter top? Who the fuck moderates this shit up?
The explosion wasn't unexpected, it happened after the unit 1 explosion. It's quite ridiculous to suggest they wouldn't be monitoring a serious event like Fukushima.
Yet there is no proof that the current state of affairs is the only way things can be. NIMBY politics have prevented development of safer plant technologies. Yes, the liability of continuing to run 70s era reactors is huge, but so is the amount of energy that can be generated by them. If nuclear in general wasn't economical, all the nuke plants would have been shut down and replaced by coal years ago. Nobody is forcing them to stay open and operational.
That was the cost of dealing with the whole Tsunami. Stop trolling.
...is why the fuck don't they have several large, sturdy-built, earthquake-resistant water towers at these nuclear plants so that even if they can't get their backup generators running to pump in cooling water after an emergency shutdown, that they could simply open some valves and allow some gravity-fed water from the towers flow down into the reactor to finish cooling it off after the scram shutdown?
I guess thinking of a water tower is just too damn complicated and incomprehensible of a solution for those sophisticated nuclear plant engineers to think of, eh?
Simple solution that has been rejected in the US is to reprocess spent fuel. The fuel rods are about 97% intact and can be reprocessed pretty easily, but doing so produces plutonium. So it has been viewed as much better to let the fuel rods accumulate so nobody can syphon off the plutonium and make a bomb.
Second-best solution is (of course) to simply turn off the nuclear power industry. And the coal plants as well. There is nothing like necessity to spur some innovation in the area of electric generation. Get rid of all the problems at once and force some real innovation. We might find out that Mankind existed for tens of thousands of years without electricity and it isn't as critical as we might think.
Probably somewhere around dead-last solution is to keep things limping along without building any new power plants at all - except for natural gas "peaker" plants - and hope that somehow we can figure out a way to make dispersed solar and wind integrate with the power grid. Without building any new transmission lines, because everyone that reads the Weekly World News knows that they are dangerous and cause cancer, impotence and autism. Or is it the National Enquirer?
Time to consider LFTR Molten Salt Reactors
http://energyfromthorium.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
The day/night problem with solar doesn't matter, it is all the economic cost and EROI. If those are low enough, people will just install big lead acid battery arrays and thermal mass.
Sure, the length of day feeds right into the EROI and economics of solar, but if I can satisfy both of those with my air conditioning in July, guess what?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The "rising sea level" is a fantasy that has pretty much been completely debunked. The sea level isn't rising and isn't going to rise any appreciable amount in the near future. OK, it is really, really difficult to predict climate and sea level changes on the time scale of multiple centuries, so I guess you could say nobody really knows. But the idea that the Maldives are going to be underwater in 40 years just isn't happening.
However, if you want to see what coal plants do you need to look at the northeast US and Canada. The lakes and forests destroyed through acidification. A good deal of this has stopped with better scrubbers, but it certainly has not stopped completely.
Anything that can come in with enough force and heat to damage the containment building, spent fuel storage, water pumps, electrical feeds may not actually cause a meltdown initially, but leads to events that do. What happened at Fukushima pretty much showed that trying to cool a reactor after a forced shutdown in all that mess isn't really possible. Not too long after the cooling stops, the temperature rises, hydrogen builds up, explosions start and the problem becomes even harder to address. The whole fission reaction thing seems primitive, like the evolution of the gasoline engine. We lock-into a technology too early, over-capitalize on it, then are stuck making linear improvements over time, hoping to replace previous versions that weren't as good. Replacing existing systems is unlikely to happen, because the energy market isn't driven by safety issues, or worse-case scenarios, but by profit and best-case scenarios. We should have put the brakes on early capitalization of nuclear power, and invested more in the science. If we spent more time and money developing a workable fusion reactor, we would have had something to show for it by now which would be much safer than fission.
Compared to the reactor pressure vessel, the spent fuel rods are a waste of effort. A plane could crash into the building and compromise the spent fuel rod pool, but even if cooling was compromised (unlikely), there'd be loads of time to deal with it. Fukushima was different because they lost external power, which wasn't "supposed" to happen (the grid, generators, and battery backups).
It's Quite a bit more complex than that. TL;DR - while the executive summary of the PDF I cite states that spent fuel storage accidents are 'unlikely', it freely admits that this is critically dependent on a number of assumptions that, as we've seen at Fukishima, can be shown to be very, very wrong. Further, the article doesn't seem to discuss the tendency to stack fuel in tighter concentrations that originally planned (as happened at Fukishima) but I didn't read the whole thing.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Japan is in the process of commissioning a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at the moment. When up to full capacity it will be able to handle about 800 tonnes of spent fuel rods each year, recycling the uranium and plutonium into new fuel rods and preparing the remaining high-level waste for vitrification and long-term storage.
I was under the impression that the sea level is rising a few mm every year. Seems also quite logical with global warming both increasing the volume of the water and melting ice.
Waste? Burn and transmute it in an LFTR or energy amplifier. Then keep that LFTR or energy amplifier running to produce a lot less waste than with Uranium reactors.
Also pieces of nuclear fuel rods were found 2 km from the site
No credible sources have corroborated that claim. The NYT wrote a story that claims a 'confidential assessment' by the NRC 'suggests' that 'fuel fragments or particals' 'may' have been blown up to one mile from the site.
No fuel fragments have been found at two miles, two kilometers or any other large distances from the site. This is NRC speculation, as selectively interpreted by the NYT and exaggerated by various pundits, including Arnie Gundersen, who has since become the most cited source of this 'fuel rods found at 2 km' claim, and the 'prompt criticality explosion' theory, which has no support elsewhere either.
Arnie is a useful source of insight into Fukushima. Not everything Arnie says is gospel. When there is any room for doubt Arnie always adopts the worst case in his speculation. That is his job; he is a professional advocate for anti-nuclear interests.
The inevitable retort is that fuel was shot out for miles and TEPCO, the Japanese government, Bush and everyone else is covering it up. At that point you're a conspiracy theorist that has abandoned credible information.
Look, we're still far, far from just getting solar to be cost-comparable to anything else. And that's without factoring in all the stuff that we'd need to make solar work for a significant amount of power. Unless we can somehow wire the globe with superconducting lines (so we can just draw power from wherever the sun is shining), or install a monumental amount of power storage, solar can only supplement, not replace, other methods.
I read somewhere that the reactors were equipped with steam injectors which use the pressure of the steam in the reactor to inject cooling water into them, do we know why they were not used?
He is trying to determine the reactor stop time to within 12 days, when the uncertainty on the fuel lifetime (which is necessary to determine the expected I/Cs ratio) was 5 months?? Crazy. How about doing some basic error analysis and putting some error bars on those wretched data points?
Also, any explanations of why there are so many outliers in the data? Something with the analysis method -- or the basic underlying assumptions therein -- is inaccurate.
Interesting that he is measuring the isotopes at reactor 2 and spent fuel pool 4 and suggesting that this didn't happen elsewhere.
NB. Reactor 2's containment system has been breached - Reactor 1 and 3's haven't been.
And Spent fuel pool 4 is the heavily loaded one - the most likely one to have boiled dry, had fuel damage, and thus had small pockets of criticality.
Reactor 1's level of fuel damage is considered to be highest:
http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/tsunamiupdate01.html
In all likelihood, there have been pockets of criticality throughout all four problem reactors (the 3 operating reactors + the spent fuel pool at #4). As pointed out elsewhere, this is not very surprising.
The main risk, e.g. that there would be sufficient fuel damage and water loss that the fuel would melt and form a puddle in the bottom of the reactor or fuel pool, and then have a critical explosion, did not occur, hence while this is still a serious nuclear event, it is nowhere near as severe as Chernobyl.
Good analysis. The real problem is that a lot of the rampant speculation around what has happened/is happening revolves around how closely Tepco has held information about what is going on at Fukushima. These days, a vacuum tends to create conspiracy theories.
You obviously haven't looked at the design of the plant. There are 3 layers:
- The outer cosmetic steel box, to keep the weather out
- The inner concrete containment chamber
- The inner steel pressure vessel that houses the actual reaction
Unit 1 reactor vessel was leaking into containment before the Tsunami hit and backup power and cooling were lost.
Unit 2, some part of containment, probably the suppression pool, ruptured and is leaking.
Unit 2, although there's still a roof, that concrete building isn't containing the leaking water. I thought the whole idea of a cooling system that used a heat exchanger and ran seawater through a secondary loop, was to have ALL contaminated water kept within the building.
One could argue that the newer buildings are much better, but the Unit 2 building is apparently intact and didn't contain the water? What's up with that? The heat exchanger and hot side pump is in the building, so that shouldn't leak outside. The turbine pipes are from the reactor vessel, not containment, so those should be a separate issue. So why is all that water getting out of the building?
Among the other oversights, it seems no one planned for explosions. What's up with that? Why were those unexpected?
It seems the first explosion occurred when they went to vent. There's something seriously wrong with the design. With nothing but the fuel pond loaded, unit 4 still blew up. More than one explosive failure mode?
What possible excuse is there for that? A billion dollar plus unit blown up because of stored fuel? Maybe it is time to re-examine fuel storage.
No doubt the U.S. will see some added breast and cancer cases in 10 or 20 years from people. mostly women, who drank the milk from the cows that ate the grass, when moderate rain brought down the Iodine 131. Some high levels in rainfall were seen. Most places weren't even checking for it. The spots that got hit probably had it happen just on one day or so, and otherwise saw "No levels harmful to human health". Oh boy. Most of the cancer in Sweden from Chernobyl is believed to be from rainfall on one day. Sometimes that's how it works.
The impact won't be huge, but it isn't zero either.
(info on Sweden and other places in this Chernobyl pdf)
http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov%20Chernobyl%20book.pdf
http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov%20Chernobyl%20book.pdf
Nah, just a few square kilometers and the banks of a couple of rivers. But hey, what's a bit of thallium and arsenic and poisoned fish between friends?
I'm sure the people of Japan will be pleased to know that you believe this is not significant.
It's certainly a relief to me!
TVA coal ash disaster covered an estimated 1.2 square kilometeres...
The Martin County coal sludge spill polluted 500km of the Tug Fork River...
okay it wasn't 1200 square kilometers, but it wasn't nothing and it doesn't include any buffer regions...
Or at least Raymond Burr in a Speedo.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The scientific method in general terms consists of observation, then hypothesis, then designing an experiment to prove the hypothesis. You are arguing "shouldn't it" and closing your mind to the understanding of the observed results - it doesn't matter what it "should" and "shouldn't" do under current models - what is important is what it actually did. Which means that either a) there were conditions that we don't know about that enabled the reaction or b) there are additional underlying scientific principles that we don't fully understand yet.
You know, in actual practice, scientists don't abandon their theories just because a single experiment contradicts them. Galileo didn't give up heliocentrism when confronted with the stellar parallax problem; in fact, he took up heliocentrism in spite of it. Einstein didn't give up on the theory of relativity because of Kaufman's 1905 experiments; he held on to it despite the experimental contradiction.
Are you adequate?
Glad to be of service and put your mind at ease.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25vlt7swhCM
Take it for what you will.
actually, LEU can still go boom, it just requires a far larger critical mass than is practical for making bombs. A reactor however has plenty of mass for such an event. Even more so since as the reactor operates, it enriches the fuel... Granted the yield / yield % effective will be really low, but one doesn't need a very high efficiency with 100 tons of fuel to make a pretty big boom. Even the equivalent of couple of tons of TNT is a pretty nasty explosion, never mind 10 kilotons... Anyone who wants to know what 1 ton of TNT does, watch the myth-buster episode where they take on a cement truck.
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Prompt criticality would be suspiciously like an atomic bomb, because that's how they work. But it seems like there was only very minor fallout, of short-term fission products (iodine, etc), which indicates that it just released existing product.
Perhaps the explosion was larger because there was more hydrogen? Also, don't underestimate the power of explosions like that - Chernobyl's steam explosion threw (much heavier) graphite moderator blocks a tremendous distance.
The size of the explosion was only part of the issue. Two other issues also contradict a hydrogen-only hypothesis. The first is the bright orange flash at reactor building 3. Hydrogen burns/explodes translucent. This can be seen with the explosion at building 1: No fireball, but massive and highly visible shock-wave. That had all the hallmarks of a hydrogen explosion. Issue two was the shaped nature of the second explosion. Both the primary (probably hydrogen) blast, and the anomalous orange flash had a distinct upward vector, indicating that some factor was tamping these explosions upward. These two observations together suggest the spent fuel pool, or the primary containment. As there are lots of reasons to believe the primary containment is still intact, this leaves the spent fuel pool as the next most likely candidate.
-=geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Sea level rose about 10 inches in the 20th century and current projections are for at least 1 meter (40 inches) by 2100. It's not going to rush in and flood people out in a few years but that's enough to cause issues with a lot of infrastructure we've built along the coasts.
Can you give me a reference for sea level rise being debunked (other than some well know global warming denier site)?
The UK has a nuclear reprocessing plant. For some reason, the owners have nasty habits like leaking large quantities of radioactive substances into the surrounding area and then lying about it. Reprocessing can be more dangerous than nuclear power...
Good lord, man - don't you know how radiocative the Amish are? Wham! Wham! [1]
[1] I have no idea what George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley have to do with radiation, but all the cool posters seem keep mentioning them, so I'll just play along.
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
Actually, when you 'see' a propagating shock wave from an explosion, you are seeing the change in index of refraction of the air as it is compressed and rarefied. It is similar to the mirage over a hot road. At that point, there is no fuel involved.
Mostly, with massive explosions, the debris and smoke is scattered closely enough behind the shock wave that you cant see the optical effects of the wave. With a translucent explosion, however...
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Here is a video that may help. Perhaps the shock is igniting fugitive hydrogen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlS6535HBNk
You've drunken the cool aid? There's been close to 0 public money in nuclear since `86 and massive amounts into solar. You should be forced to get energy from just solar and wind and see how well you'll handle.
It's worth noting that other parts of the world were sampling as soon as it became evident that there was a problem with Japanese reactors. If a "prompt criticality" event happened, it would be seen by a number of parties, including some NGOs and academics, even if Japanese weren't monitoring or revealing the results of their monitoring.
I agree with your points here, but would like to add that, concerning geothermal, the only thing restricting wide-scale geothermal power production is the current limitations of drilling deep wells. Once it's practical to drill deep enough to get substantial heat (and you can drill anywhere to do this) it becomes a simple matter of pouring in salt water and capturing the steam for energy production. There has been at least one MIT study suggesting these renewable power plants could serve our energy needs for the next few thousand years.