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Fukushima Finally Reaches Cold Shutdown
mvdwege writes "The BBC reports that the reactors at Fukushima have reached cold shutdown, meaning they no longer need active cooling to stay at safe temperatures. Plans can now be made to start the cleanup of the site. Unfortunately, TEPCO has also admitted not all problems were out in the open until now; an estimated 45 cubic meters of contaminated water have leaked out of cracks in the foundation of a treatment plant."
Sky did not fall, Japan is not irradiated wasteland, Fallout is still just a game.
No, they haven't addressed the meltdown. TEPCO decided early on that they would completely ignore the meltdown while they worked on getting the bathroom facilities working again.
authorities can't be trusted??? mighty wide brush you're painting with, and I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative who is wary of anyone who runs for public office, so for me to say that is pretty substantial... what constitutes an "authority" in your mind, and why are they incapable of being trusted in a crisis? Who else would be better in this circumstance, private enterprise? /I can't believe I have to put it this way, but this is one of those times when a centralized government is absolutely needed to fix a problem
In units of volume, that is 12,000 US Gallons, or 45,000 liters.
Also, about ¾ the volume of a typical 40' shipping container.
What a relief! I wonder when they'll start moving people back into Fukushima Prefecture. I can't wait to sink my teeth into some Fukushima vegetables and I know you feel the same way.
When do you suppose that 12 mile radius exclusion zone will be lifted? This decade or next?
Now that we've decided that the maximum radiation dosage for a Japanese child is the same as an American nuclear worker, it's only a matter of time before they play in the shadow of Fukushima again!
And let's not forget how much better Tokyo is with 30% less electricity.
...an abuse of the definition of shutdown. Reality check: - 3 melt-throughs - melted cores outside pressure chambers - compromised secondary containments - nuclear fuel and fission products escaping into water and air - corium so radioactive it cannot be approached even by robots - precarious leaning of number 4 spent fuel pool - widespread plutonium, caesium etc. beyond evacuation zone - significant contamination in food - yet to come: increased malignancies and birth defects Does this sound contained to you? Seriously...
It's not possible the cracks were opened up by the, what was it, 9.0 magnitude earthquake, the 45 foot wall of water that came ashore shortly after that, and all of the 7+ magnitude aftershocks?
Meanwhile, half a million people are homeless, about twenty thousand are dead. And all everybody cares to talk about is that some nuclear reactors weren't safe enough (through neglect of safety updates during the last three decades) to withstand a tsunami. If you criticize TEPCO for neglecting tsunami protection, why don't you criticize the whole Japanese government for neglecting tsunami protection along all of the coast?
hope some people can finally take a breather, it's only been... 9 months...
When there's a car wreck, what's left often isn't what you'd call a "vehicle" any more, but it's still entirely valid and prudent to say things like "the car finally stopped burning" to make it clear what you were referring to.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
This whole event proves that authorities cannot be trusted during a crisis.
If there is something that this mess shows is that private entities should not be allowed to control nuclear power plants.
No, I disagree. My take is that "withstand an earthquake" merely means that it would shutdown without drama, not that cracks wouldn't form. In fact, I think it wholly unrealistic to expect any sort of design of a large mass of concrete not to have cracks after a huge earthquake like that.
Don't forget the massive hydrogen explosions that blew the walls off the buildings. I'm sure that overpressure can't cause any significant cracking in concrete either.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
What exactly do you think the difference between "fission" and "decay" is?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
How about the fact that they lied for months (if they aren't still lying) about the severity of the meltdown, and allowed/forced people to live in areas that are irradiated? How about the fact that rather than address radiation making its way into food and water, they merely raised the allowable amount of radiation in food and water?
One involves the splitting of the nucleus into two roughly equally sized (I said *roughly*, pedants), and the other involves the emissions of much smaller particles such as alphas or betas. Fission in a nuclear power sense usually refers to that induced by neutron capture in a chain reaction, though there is a small amount of spontaneous fission for certain isotopes. The energy released by fission is much larger than from a typical decay.
For the pile of molten crap that the cores now consist of, almost all of the heat production is through decay, not fission.
How about the fact that they lied for months (if they aren't still lying) about the severity of the meltdown
Don't you need evidence for such assertions? I see evidence that both TEPCO and the Japanese government made statements that later turned out to be false, but no evidence of lying, a deliberate falsehood.
and allowed/forced people to live in areas that are irradiated?
So what? Nobody was required to live anywhere irradiated.
How about the fact that rather than address radiation making its way into food and water, they merely raised the allowable amount of radiation in food and water?
Sounds like a reasonable solution to a tough disaster situation, especially given that radiation thresholds are intentional set too low anyway. They can change it back to the normal threshold when the disaster goes away.
They had to redefine "cold shutdown" to get there. Normally, cold shutdown of a reactor means temperature is below boiling and pressure is at 1 atmosphere. It's then possible to take the lid off the reactor and replace fuel rods.
Humans still can't enter the containment, and probably won't be able to do so for decades, if not centuries. So cleanup is going to have to be a robot job. Some kind of machinery is going to have to go in there and take the core apart, transferring each bit into a separate storage container.
Strangely, Japan seems to be behind the US in mobile robots for doing heavy work. They had to send to the US for iRobot units just to look around inside the containment, and for remote-controlled concrete pumping trucks to pour in water.
I think you misunderstand my position (or, rather, I haven't explained it clearly enough...) I'm not saying that in general the competition generated from an appropriately regulated free market is bad - quite the opposite - I'm addressing the generalization by the post I was replying to that says "authority" can't be trusted in a crisis, whatever that's supposed to mean. "The authority" could be government, owners of the company, contractors slated to do the cleanup, volunteers, or those wild monkeys they let loose to track radiation with - I have no idea what the coward meant. Yeah, people generally are incompetent in anything they have no training in. That's why we call the trained ones "authorities" in their fields.
To be fair, the British government managed to mess up quite spectacularly too...
How about the fact that rather than address radiation making its way into food and water, they merely raised the allowable amount of radiation in food and water?
This might blow your mind... but often policy makers have to juggle multiple and conflicting priorities at the same time.
In the case of the Japanese Crisis you had a country devastated by an enormous disaster with people freezing in makeshift shelters with inadequate food and water.
Now you could say "sorry everyone you don't get to eat today." Or you can say "Here is some food that's irradiated above what in a normal situation we would expect but over a short period of time is a better alternative than hunger and malnutrition."
BMOC: Containment has almost nothing to do with cold shutdown.
According to TEPCO, it does:
TEPCO: Definition of "Cold Shutdown Condition": ... Release of radioactive materials from PCV is under control and public radiation exposure by additional release is being significantly held down.
(Roadmap towards Restoration from the Accident at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, 17 Nov 2011, Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters, Government-TEPCO Integrated Response Office)
TEPCO *is* changing the standard definition of "cold shutdown" somewhat. Now, they have *added* a containment requirement, so they're not really loosening any standards. Of course, normally "cold shutdown" doesn't include a containment requirement because normally the reactor vessel isn't breached.
zeigerpuppy has a point in that "cold shutdown" normally implies a state of normal control. Cold shutdown typically means the reactor is stopped, doesn't need active cooling, and can be safely opened for maintenance. Fuku is still an active disaster site.
I'm not advocating panic (what's the sense in that?), but fair criticism of TEPCO is, I think, well-deserved.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
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