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Fukushima To Become Nuclear Dump?
mdsolar writes "Japan's atomic energy specialists are discussing a plan to make the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant a storage site for radioactive waste from the crippled station run by Tokyo Electric Power Co."
Words are fun.
"Dump" vs "Storage Site" or "Spent Fuel Storage" or "Waste Storage".
You can tell when someone is trying to sensationalize a story by the words they choose.
Yes, make a nuclear waste dump on a site known to be hit by magnitude 9.0 earthquakes and Tsunamis. Great idea that shows how safety conscious the nuclear industry is.
Japan is a signatory to the London Dumping Convention which prohibits disposing of nuclear waste at sea (as is the US). Putting a dump site close to the ocean (like at Humboldt Bay Nuclear) means that the site will have to be moved, likely at great expense, owing to seal level rise.
The comments here once again show that people only look for the duration of their own lifespans (or perhaps a little more) regarding the storage of nuclear waste.
Nuclear storage must be done in a place which is inherently safe. Which is safe without human intervention in the next decades/centuries/millenia.
You can't dump it somewhere and make a plan to "build a dike if need be". Who will guarantee that a dike will be built if need be in 250 years from now? Or 2500 years from now?
(read quickly because this comment will deleted soon by those in power)
Since Nuclear power is statisticstically safe, and the power plants would have shutdown in the earthquake it is very unlikely that such a disaster really happened there. All that we can see is that real news is censored, everybody in a wide area was moved away, A No fly zone was erected , even as radiation at high altitudes is completely neglect able,and independand research are kept a great distance.
All that surely must point to something more serious and it can only lead to the conclusion that the tjunamis was caused aliens landing and that they came to land close to fukushima, or that the hatching eggs of godzilla caused the tsunami and now they are researching Godzilla at that location, or whatever, this region was filled with old folklore that either came to life or is now lost for the next decades.
By making a storage there it is a sure thing that they can keep the peopla away for some more decades, while they at the same time have a good excuse to build some huge buildings that can hide the cover-up. And since no more people live there, there is no-one who can protest.
This has been repeated many times here on slashdot. The reaction stopped, but the core is still VERY hot and has to be cooled for a while. This is what failed. When the core gets hot enough, the fuel melts the containment and falls to the bottom, and might start reacting again.
I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I wonder if we could come up with some sort of design that would allow the fuel rods to mechanically fall in different directions to spread out the heat.. ideally without any extra power needed.
I have Fukushima in my pants.
Ah, I understand: You weren't able to keep your containment closed, and now your pants are contaminated. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Be careful. The safest thing is to not create nuclear waste in the first place. That is only common sense.
then you want breeder reactors, which leave 1/10th the amount of waste, generate 10x more power, and have less harmful radioactive waste byproducts with halflives of a century rather than 10,000 years
problem is, breeder reactors make plutonium. nobody wants anyone making plutonium
nuclear power is over, it's a historical, ostracized energy source as of march 11, 2011. all serious nations are moving away from nuclear. nuclear is a wonderful power source in all regards except for the waste nightmare and the fact that althought hings rarely go wrong, when they do, they REALLY go wrong
if you deny nuclear power is an endangered species, you indeed are living in denial, and you just remind me of baghdad bob:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The splitting of atoms stops the moment you drop in the control rods ( i.e in a second or two ), but the waste products are still intensely radioactive, generating megawatts of heat. This is still a lot better than having the reactor running, because the heat generation from the waste is very predictable and stable, and it is also less than 10% of the full reactor power, dropping to less than 1% within a day or two.
The reason passive cooling is believed to be safer is pretty much that it does not rely on any machinery, electric power or moving parts. In this particular situation the problem was that all the water from the tsunami short-circuited the electronics of the plant, so the cooling pumps ceased to work. It is possible to build a nuclear plant in such a way that pumps are not needed at all. As an example in the ESBWR design by Hitachi the reactor is tall and positioned further down than the turbines and heat exchangers. Thus the hot steam rises upwards while the colder water flows down, with no need for pumps.
You are correct that if the water itself is lost then a meltdown is very likely to occur unless it can be replaced quickly. However if the reactor's containment structure is solid enough then most of the radioactive fallout would still be contained without contaminating the environment. One of the problems with the Fukushima Daiichi power plant was that its containment is of a poor design and was unable to withstand the pressure. Contrast this with the three mile island plant where the containment dome kept almost all of the radioactive gases inside.
Another issue is that many reactors have teh nuclear fuel in zirconium tubes. This is good in one way because zirconium does not absorb very many neutrons so you don't need to enrich the uranium so much. However, if the zirconium overheats then it can react with the cooling water to form explosive hydrogen gas. This need not cause a problem if the containment is strong enough to contain a hydrogen explosion, or if the plant has the ability to safely vent the hydrogen to the atmosphere. Neither of this was the case at Fukushima, and it is strongly suspected that hydrogen explosions were involved in damaging the containment.
Plutonium fast breeders were shown to be an expensive waste of time way back in the 1970s - the exception is if you are just starting out on atomic bomb production. That's probably before you and the weird cargo cult nuclear fanboys here were born. Everything in nuclear has moved on apart from the fanboys and the lobbyists that just want fleece the taxpayer by getting governments to buy old nuclear technology.
I agree with the above, but want to point out that the ultimate failure of the nuclear power industry has nothing to do with a lack of foresight by engineering or science.
The underlying problem is one of an inadequate accounting system. The nuclear power industry is the first time anyone has tried to do cost benefit analysis on processes where the overwhelmingly greatest costs are in managing the waste stream: post-production costs. Early accounting systems were developed to manage costs of feedstocks, production, and moving product to market. Waste was not accounted for, which led to the incredible pollution problems of the last century. Handling the accounting of waste management or post-production costs continues to be a kind of correction tacked on to the basic bookkeeping systems in current use, rather than an integral part of any accounting system.
If it had been otherwise, it is doubtful that any business would have ventured into nuclear power generation. It would have been obvious that the total cost, including handling the waste stream, is too great to justify any reasonable investment.
Will